IV

THE ELECTORAL HOUSE OF HANOVER
(HANOVER AND HERRENHAUSEN, 1688-1701)

None of the varied experiences through which Sophia had passed during a life of nearly sixty years, had either made her forget her English descent, or led her to regard English interests as alien to her own. During the reign of Charles II her personal recollections of his years of vagrancy could not but render her discreetly indisposed to keep up by letter any direct intercourse with her royal cousin; but she was not the less desirous of remaining in touch with the progress of events in her mother’s first and final home. After her brother Rupert had at last settled down in England, she expressed a wish that he should be made a peer, and thus be enabled to attend in Parliament and keep her informed of the course of public business. She was naturally much interested in the marriage, in 1677, of William Prince of Orange to the Duke of York’s elder daughter, the Princess Mary; and, in 1680, she had the satisfaction of welcoming to Hanover the Prince who had thus become closely connected with the English royal family, and of receiving his assurances of his anxiety to render some substantial service to her husband’s House. It has already been incidentally noted how, in 1681, her eldest son, George Lewis, had paid a visit to England, where he might, it was hoped, secure the hand of Mary’s younger sister, the Princess Anne. This scheme was favoured by the Prince of Orange, whose own marriage had remained childless, and who could not ignore the fact that the design for excluding his Roman Catholic father-in-law from the English Succession had already assumed definite shape. In 1685, after King Charles II had passed away, ‘unconcerned as became a good Christian’—or, in other words, after having received the last consolations of the Catholic faith—William expressed his conviction that Sophia would share both his sorrow for the late King’s death, and his joy at hearing of the unhindered accession of ‘celluy d’apresent.’ And King James II himself could assure her that he would always ‘continue the same good correspondence which she had with the late King his brother.’[90] James II, to judge from an extant series of letters to Sophia from his hand, proved as good as his word, and she answered him in the same spirit. A constant communication seems, moreover, to have been kept up between her and the English royal family, through the personal agency of the faithful Lord Craven, of whom in 1683 she writes as ‘at present my sole correspondent in England.’ James II had appointed him Lieutenant-General of the Forces, and he would have been quite ready, had it rested with him, to act a decisive part with his Coldstreams on the King’s behalf in the closing hours of his reign. Thus, when, in July, 1688, on the occasion of what ought to have been the happiest event of that reign—the birth of an heir to the throne—Sophia gave expression to her pleasure, the King wrote in return that he could have expected nothing less from her; ‘for beside our being so near related, you have always upon all occasion expresst a concerne for me of which you shall always find me very sensible.’ And, with the straightforwardness of character which was not less distinctive of her than was her intellectual finesse, she never, either by word or by deed, belied her goodwill to the unfortunate King, or allowed herself to be impressed by the consensus between blatant prejudice and more or less wilful blindness that ‘doubted’ the genuineness of the Prince of Wales. She transmitted to the Emperor Leopold a letter in which King James had reproduced, for her benefit, the substance of the refutation of these calumnious doubts laid by him before his Privy Council; and, so late as 1704, she is found reproaching Leibniz for the courtier-like insinuations which he seems to have hazarded as to the Prince’s birth. Accordingly, at the time when the expedition of William of Orange was preparing, King James wrote to Sophia in a perfectly trustful tone; he had heard that, with the exception of her husband, all her Protestant neighbours had contributed to the armament; but, if the wind continued, he hoped nevertheless to be able to give a good account of it. As a matter of fact, Ernest Augustus maintained a neutral attitude so long as he could; and, so late as 1691, James II is again found applauding Sophia’s husband for declining to support the ‘vemper’ (William of Orange). Early in the next year, he continues to harp on the same string to her, while avowing his confidence in the continuance of her good wishes and requesting her to use no ceremony in writing to him. In 1693, Lord Dartmouth, whom Sophia received at Hanover with much distinction because of the kindness shown by his grandfather to her brothers Rupert and Maurice, was informed by her that she maintained a constant correspondence both with King James and with his daughter Queen Mary. On the death of Ernest Augustus, both King James and Queen Mary Beatrice warmly condoled with the widow, the former avowing his gratitude for all the marks of esteem and kindness which she had so frequently shown to him. It is interesting, too, to observe how Sophia, in conjunction with her second self, the Duchess of Orleans, used her best endeavours to make peace between King James and his eldest daughter, whose conduct towards him he pardonably misjudged, but in whose sincerity of soul a sure instinct led Sophia to place full trust. The two kinswomen had never met, when, in June, 1689, Queen Mary wrote to Sophia to complain of the harsh terms in which the Electress Sophia Charlotte of Brandenburg was reported to have spoken of her, and took occasion, with her usual candour, to dwell upon the conflict of feelings through which it was her duty to guide her conduct. An active correspondence ensued between the two women, who were truly worthy of one another, and who had, moreover, some experiences of wedlock in common; and from this it is clear that Queen Mary had, to her deep satisfaction, found in Sophia a friend ready to credit her with real filial affection for her father. In return she writes to the Duchess with a frankness declared by her to be indigenous to Holland, where she had herself so long lived and where Sophia had been born—each of them, as she says, having to bear her cross as best she could.

But, though Sophia was never willing to let political considerations warp her natural affections or suppress her natural sense of justice, she would hardly, like Mary, have gone so far as to say of herself that she was unfitted for politics. The interests of her family and of the Hanoverian dynasty were steadily kept in view by her, and it was these, rather than any personal motives or wishes of her own, which determined her conduct at the critical epoch of the Revolution. The events that cost James II his throne, as speedily became clear to her, opened a new political future for herself and her descendants. Before the sailing of William’s expedition, when engagements in his favour were being entered into by the new Elector (Frederick William) of Brandenburg, the Landgrave (Charles) of Hesse-Cassel and the Duke of Celle, Burnet, as he tells us, sent, from the Hague, a messenger to the Duchess Sophia at Hanover. This messenger, a French refugee named de Boncour, was instructed to inform her of the design of the Prince of Orange, and of the certainty that, should the expedition prove successful, it would result in the perpetual exclusion of Papists from the English throne. If she could persuade her husband Ernest Augustus to sever his interests definitively from those of France, there was little doubt but that, after the two daughters of King James and the Prince of Orange, from none of whom any issue was surviving, the Succession would be lodged in her person and posterity. Burnet, who asserts that, in making this communication, he acted entirely on his own responsibility, though his action afterwards gained him William’s approval, adds that the message was warmly entertained by the Duchess Sophia, but that her husband let it pass by him. Ernest Augustus, not unnaturally, looked on the whole question with a self-control facilitated by the fact that, in any case, he could only benefit from the English Succession through his wife. Whatever may be the measure of truth in this story (which, curiously enough, is not to be found in Burnet’s Original Memoirs), it is extremely improbable that the Duchess Sophia should have allowed Burnet’s agent to ascertain her personal views concerning his suggestions. When the expedition was actually on its way, she wrote a letter to Leibniz from which nothing can be concluded as to her feelings in the matter, except that, as was but natural, she was very anxious to know what would come of it all, especially, as she writes in her customary half-ironical vein, ‘inasmuch as the words “for religion and liberty” are to be read on all the banners of the Prince of Orange.’ After the expedition had been carried to a successful issue, we find her addressing the same correspondent in much the same tone; and, though her letter of congratulation to William III is perfectly cordial and contains a remarkably à propos reference to the Blatant Beast, she shows true dignity as a descendant of the Stewarts in avowing her sympathy for William’s dethroned predecessor. But with the new King’s reply, written from Hampton Court less than a fortnight after the Coronation, the relations of Sophia to himself, and to the throne occupied by him and his Queen, entered into a new stage, which may be called the business stage.

In this letter, King William, without any circumlocution, expresses his hope of finding good allies in the whole House of Lüneburg—that is to say, in Sophia’s husband, as well as in her brother-in-law, on whom he could already securely count. On the other hand, he points out that Sophia has a very real interest in the welfare of his three kingdoms, inasmuch as, to all appearance, one of her sons would some day reign over them. Although Sophia still wrote to Leibniz (then at Modena) in her habitual half-jesting tone as to the chances now opening to her, there can be no doubt that she is correctly stated to have at once taken action on King William’s hint, and to have requested several English politicians known to her to support the project of naming her in the Succession. The attempt made in this year (1689) to carry the project in question through Parliament proves that the appeal had not been made in vain.

On May 8th, 1689, the Bill of Rights and Succession came up for its third reading in the House of Commons of the Convention Parliament. While otherwise conforming to the Declaration accepted by William and Mary earlier in the year, and containing a clause excluding Papists, it made no provision for the event of the death without issue of Queen Mary, the Princess Anne, and King William, upon whose issue the Succession was, in the above order of sequence, settled. Such an event was at the time far from improbable; should it actually occur, there was considerable obscurity as to where the Crown would devolve. Would, for instance, an infant child of Popish parents be excluded;[91] and—a far more momentous question—would the exclusion extend to a Popish prince who might have been converted to Protestantism in time to succeed? Godolphin, a statesman not unnaturally suspected, at this season, of facing both ways, but perhaps more benignantly towards the régime under which he had risen so high than towards that in which his own place was still doubtful, proposed a rider guarding the rights of ‘any Protestant prince or princess’ as to his or her future hereditary succession to the Crown. The proviso, in which, to the mover’s virtuous indignation, more than one member suspected the influence of a foreign Power, was rejected; but it is notable that, in the course of the debate, Colonel Herbert stated that he had ‘seen a letter of a sister of Prince Rupert’s, wherein she was complaining of great hardship done to her children, that they were not regarded in the entail of the crown;’ he therefore moved that they should be mentioned in the Bill. The proposal, which may confidently be ascribed to the action of Sophia adverted to above, fell to the ground, the judicious opinion of Paul Foley prevailing, that it was inexpedient suddenly to introduce any further limitation of the Succession; but it had not been made wholly in vain. When the Bill of Rights and Succession reached the House of Lords, after, on the motion of the Bishop of Salisbury (Burnet), a clause had been added extending the exclusion of Papists from the Succession to princes or princesses married to Papists, the same useful henchman, in accordance with the directions of the King, proposed, as a further addition to the Bill, the naming, in the Succession, of the Duchess of Hanover and her posterity. This amendment having been adopted by the Lords without debate (which could hardly have been the case had the ground not been prepared there) was carried down to the Commons, who, in a debate held on June 19th, treated it in a very different spirit. One member (Sir John Lowther) dwelt on the inexpediency of attempting to settle the Succession a long time beforehand, instead of following the example of Queen Elizabeth, who ‘was a wise Princess’; ‘this Princess of Hanover,’ he pointed out, might turn Catholic before the time for her succession had arrived. In the end, the amendment was rejected without a division, and, a conference between the two Houses having proved fruitless, the Bill was lost for the Session. The birth, on July 27th, of Princess Anne’s son (afterwards Duke of Gloucester) took away from the proposed addition its immediate significance; but, whatever may have been the cause of the failure to give effect to the King’s wish, the fault certainly did not lie with the Duchess Sophia. There were ‘heats’ enough in the politics of the day, and in the relations between Lords and Commons in particular, to explain the incident; nor is it surprising that, when Parliament reassembled in the autumn, the Bill of Rights and Succession which was now passed contained no mention of the Duchess of Hanover or her descendants. Burnet, ubiquitously assisting at every stage of every transaction with which, as narrated by himself, he had any connexion at all, says that by King William’s wish he wrote to Sophia an account of the entire affair. We know, however, that Lord Craven was sent to Hanover to explain it or to soften any unpleasantness in the effect which it might produce; and, in a letter to Sophia, dated December 10th, 1689, William himself explained to her that, though she had not been designated in the Bill, she might rest satisfied with things as they stood. She was Heiress Presumptive, in the event of claims beyond those named in the Bill coming into consideration; and the suggestion of Burnet was quite superfluous, that ‘if any in the line before her should pretend to change, as it was not very likely to happen, so it would not be easily believed.’ Sophia’s answer to King William, in which she cordially thanks him for his exertions on her behalf, closes the entire episode. She trusts that the expectation of heirs implied in the Bill may prove correct; as for herself, her life will be at an end before the matter is decided. She was, at the time, close upon the sixtieth year of her life; and a son had just been born to Princess Anne, who very possibly might yet have other children that would survive her.

After this negative, but in no sense final, result had been reached, the Succession question remained in abeyance for something like eleven years. It accords neither with the circumstances of the situation nor with the character of Sophia, to represent her as during this long interval sleeplessly intent upon an issue so remote, so precarious, and so unlikely to prove, in the strictest sense, personal to herself. But, on the one hand, her and her family’s interest in the Succession question had once for all been brought directly home to her; and, on the other, she had had reason to appreciate the bona fides and the genuine goodwill towards her own contingent claim exhibited by King William III. Already in 1689, primarily with a view to the restoration of amity between Denmark and Holstein-Gottorp, Sir William Dutton Colt was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Brunswick-Lüneburg Courts, being also accredited to Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and Hesse-Cassel; and in 1692 he was further formally instructed to treat for the entry of the Dukes of Celle and Hanover into the Grand Alliance.[92] He appears to have contrived to gain the good graces of the ducal families both at Hanover and at Celle, and in 1693 he reports that the Platens were jealous of his favour with the ‘Electrisse’;[93] for Sophia and Eleonora were godmothers to his daughter, and bestowed upon her their united names. The personal relations between Sophia and the King and Queen of England at the same time grew more and more cordial. William, though not as a rule inclined to sentiment, early in 1691 condoled with Sophia on the death, at the close of the previous year, of her son Frederick Augustus, for whom he had cherished ‘une amitié toute particulière’; and early in the following year Queen Mary delicately expressed her regret at Sophia’s fresh family troubles (the death of her son Charles Philip, and perhaps the catastrophe of his brother Maximilian). These kindly feelings combined with political motives to induce King William to contribute his good offices for bringing to a successful end, in the same year (1692), the endeavours to which, as we shall see immediately, the main political energy of the House of Hanover had long been devoted—for the attainment of the Electoral dignity. He had his reward when, as part of the bargain between Ernest Augustus and the Emperor Leopold, the House of Hanover definitively threw in its lot with the interests of the Empire and the cause of the Grand Alliance. On Sir William Colt’s death in the following year (1693), a new English Minister Plenipotentiary to the Courts of Celle and Hanover was appointed in the person of James Cressett,[94] who, though at first he represents the Courts to which he was accredited as having ‘gaped upon him like roaring lions’ (not feeling quite certain about the British Parliament’s earnestness in the War), soon contrived to place himself on a footing of intimacy there. Leibniz speedily fell into a correspondence with him about the lead produce of the Harz as compared with that of the English mines. But less academic matters also occupied the attention of the new envoy; for, in 1692, two treaties had been concluded between the Ducal Government and those of England and the United Provinces, according to which Hanover was to furnish a force of 7,000 men, and the two maritime Powers were to pay respectively 20,000 and 10,000 dollars a month for their support, besides defraying two-thirds of the cost of their rations and forage. In December, 1693, these subsidy treaties were discussed in the House of Commons, and though the ‘Duke of Hanover’ was praised as a loyal ally, objection was taken to the payment for bread and forage, on the ground that he might well pay a larger proportion, ‘now that he is Ninth Elector.’ In return, it was pointed out that, on the one hand, the Elector had to pay his quota to the Empire, and that, on the other, if these troops were not paid by England, they must be by France—a comment not altogether unwarranted by the changes of Hanoverian policy. Cressett remained the diplomatic representative of Great Britain at the Lüneburg Courts till 1703.[95]

A time of trouble was imminent for the domestic peace of the House of Hanover, and Sophia, as was noted above, had not long before suffered a severe shock in both mind and body by the death of her son Charles Philip, soon followed by that of his brother Frederick Augustus. In the spring of 1694 she was again seriously ill. Cressett, while noting that ‘her credit is not good in affairs,’ says that he ‘should be heartily sorry to lose her, for she loves England.’ She recovered her strength at Wiesbaden, and we find the good Queen Mary returning fervent thanks for her cousin’s restoration to her usual health. She needed all her strength to carry her through the painful experiences awaiting the Electoral family—the tragedy of Sophia Dorothea, and, after this, the long illness and death of the Elector Ernest Augustus. Amidst such anxieties we may rest assured that, even had intrigue and manœuvring suited her disposition, she would have had little leisure for engaging in them. Her attitude during this period towards the Succession question, which few events on the great political theatre were of a nature to affect (for even Queen Mary’s death in 1696 made no material change in the situation), was one of quietude—no doubt a vigilant quietude. In 1694, Lord Lexington, a diplomatist whom William III had good reason for trusting, and who, together with a Dutch plenipotentiary, had mediated in the quarrel between Denmark and the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes concerning the Lauenburg Succession, passed through Hanover on his way to his post at Vienna. And, in the following year, we find Leibniz discussing with George Stepney, the brilliant English diplomatist who, in 1693, was suddenly summoned into prominent activity in several of the German Courts, the applicability of the exclusion clause in the Bill of Rights to children, whether Protestants or Papists, born of papistical parents. William III has been said to have formed the plan of placing in the Succession the Prince expected to be born to Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, by his Duchess Anna Maria, and of educating him for the purpose in England as a Protestant. The Duchess Anna Maria was a daughter of the Duchess Henrietta of Orleans, and thus a grand-daughter of King Charles I; so that on the ground of descent pure and simple she would have a claim to the English Succession before the children of the Queen of Bohemia. But there is no proof of any such design, or of any response to any suggestion of the kind on the part of the Duke of Savoy; and, at the most, the idea was quite transitory. If any hopes had been raised as to William’s intentions, Victor Amadeus effectively extinguished them by abandoning the Grand Alliance in 1696.[96] Of course, it by no means follows from the fact that Leibniz was, throughout, Sophia’s chief counsellor with regard to the Succession, either that she uniformly took his advice, or that she was always desirous of being privy to the efforts in furtherance of the claims of herself and her descendants, which, at times with trop de zèle, came from his indefatigable publicistic pen. But it remains at all events a curious coincidence that, soon after the House of Savoy had, as it were, fallen out of the running, William III’s interest in the House of Hanover—and perhaps in its claims concerning the Succession—should appear to have revived. We shall return to this date a little later; for the moment we must make some reference to matters which seemed of far more importance to the House of Hanover than the remote chances of the English Succession.

The House of Hanover, apart from the interest which it had shown in the military system of the Empire,[97] had a very direct share in causing the declaration of war against that Empire, by which, in September, 1688, at the very time when he was promising assistance to James II against the expedition of William of Orange, Louis XIV laid bare his own designs against the peace of Europe. According to the manifesto of the King of France, the successes of the Imperial arms in the east had obliged him to protect his western frontier by crossing it; and, a little before or after this declaration, his armies had entered the Netherlands, and had invaded the Palatinate to enforce the claims shamelessly put forward by him in the name of the innocent Duchess of Orleans. In the Imperial advance in Hungary, and in the simultaneous reconquest of the Morea on behalf of the Venetian Republic, Hanoverian troops had borne a most distinguished part. It was therefore not unfitting that the counter-manifesto, in which the glove hurled down by Louis XIV was taken up, should have been composed by Leibniz, whose publicistic pen was at the disposal of the House of Hanover. And among the German princes who, in the October of this eventful year, at the instigation of the new Elector of Brandenburg, Ernest Augustus of Hanover’s son-in-law, and through the exertions of his minister, Paul von Fuchs, met at Magdeburg to agree upon joint action against the assailant of the Empire, none was more prompt, either in promise or in action, than Ernest Augustus himself. While the Brandenburg troops covered the Lower Rhine, the Hanoverian, Saxon, and Hessian secured the line of the Main, by the occupation of Frankfort (November, 1688). In May, 1689, the Grand Alliance was concluded, and though the Palatinate could not be preserved from devastation, Frankfort was once more saved, being occupied by a Hanoverian force of 8,000 men under Duke Ernest Augustus and his eldest son, George Lewis. Under the command of their Hereditary Prince, of whom there remains at least one letter written, in the course of the campaign, with an afflatus of humour proving that his heart was in active warfare, the Hanoverians forced Marshal Boufleurs to relinquish the investment of Coblenz, and materially contributed to the recovery of Mainz (September 1st, 1689). They were then transferred to the Low Countries, where a series of campaigns was to ensue, contemporaneous with the continuance of the conflict with the Turks. We have seen how the sacrifices made by the House of Hanover within a twelvemonth (January, 1690, to January, 1691) included the heroic death of Prince Charles Philip in Albania, and that of his brother Frederick Augustus, hardly more than a boy in years, in Transylvania. It neither was, nor could be expected to be, the intention of Ernest Augustus, that his House, which had served the Empire so well in both west and east, should have so served it without reward. And the recompense desired by him—one which, while conferring upon himself, as the head of the House of Hanover, the highest dignity to which, as an Estate of the Empire, he could, within its boundaries, lay claim, would at the same time reflect lustre upon the Brunswick-Lüneburg line, whose future he had come to regard as absorbed in that of its Hanoverian branch—could be no other than the creation of a Ninth, that is to say Hanoverian, Electorate.

The desire or demand for this dignity was neither a sudden nor even a new one. It had been in the mind both of Duke John Frederick and of his librarian, Leibniz, though the latter, while giving utterance to it in his Cæsarinus Fürstenerius (1677), had at the same time delivered himself of an elaborate protest against the preeminence in rights and dignity claimed by the Electors over the other Princes of the Empire. Such a protest was of course quite compatible with lending a willing ear to any suggestion of conferring the Electoral dignity upon a representative branch of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line itself. And suggestions of the kind were inevitable, if only from the obvious point of view that the Peace of Westphalia had left the number of Protestant Electors in a disproportion of three to five, as against their Catholic colleagues. The Great Elector of Brandenburg, in the varying combinations of whose policy a single-minded care for the Protestant interest was perhaps the most constant factor, had already during the peace negotiations at Nimeguen expressed his willingness to assist in bringing about the admission into the Electoral College of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg—probably at that time in the person of George William of Celle, as Ernest Augustus was still merely Bishop of Osnabrück. But the argument from the Protestant point of view became a much stronger one, when, in 1685, the death of the last Elector Palatine of the Simmern line (Sophia’s nephew Charles) transferred the Eighth Electorate to the Catholic (Neuburg) line. Nor should it be forgotten that, although the political jealousy between the Houses of Brandenburg and Brunswick-Lüneburg had never ceased to exist and to operate, and although the advantage of balancing the growing power and influence of the former, by adding to the prestige of the latter, was very distinctly perceived at Vienna, the two Houses were since 1684 closely linked together by intermarriage. Sophia Charlotte, the new Electoral Princess (from 1688 Electress) of Brandenburg, was never mistress of the situation at Berlin, and, unlike her mother, gave to matters political only just so much attention as seemed absolutely necessary. On the other hand, Hanoverian interests could not but benefit from the presence at the Brandenburg Court of a princess whose personality was not one to be ignored, and who had in her mother a monitress to whom the constant affection between them always made her ready to listen. And the friend whom both mother and daughter trusted above all others as an adviser, had in 1685 begun to devote his powers of argument to the cause which, to the head of the House of Hanover, had become of paramount importance.

But a long siege was needed before the Hofburg could be expected to yield. The services and sacrifices which the Empire owed to the House of Hanover were indisputable, and the solidity of its dynastic future must have seemed beyond cavil, after the Duke of Celle had confirmed his renunciation of any transmission of his dominions to a possible son of his own, and had married his only daughter to the Hereditary Prince of Hanover, where the law of primogeniture had been established. The meeting (1689-90) of a Diet at Augsburg for the election of a Roman King in the person of the future Emperor Joseph I, seemed a suitable opportunity for bringing forward the Hanoverian proposal of a Ninth Electorate through Ernest Augustus’ plenipotentiary, Count Platen. Yet, although it could not but be of great importance to the Emperor to make sure of the adherence of Hanover to the alliance against France, of which at this very Diet he impressed the necessity upon the Electors, the request of Ernest Augustus met with no acceptance either at Augsburg or in the course of the ensuing negotiations at Vienna. So soon as the Emperor appeared to favour Hanover’s desire for an Electoral hat, Bamberg, Salzburg, Würzburg, Hesse-Cassel, and Pfalz-Sulzbach were immediately on the alert to try for the Ninth Electorate on their own account; and this general eagerness conveniently supplied the Imperial Government with a new bait for gaining votes in the Council of Princes.[98] Moreover, the high-handed action of the Brunswick-Lüneburg brothers in the matter of the Lauenburg Succession (September, 1689) had exercised a retarding influence, by which so friendly a court as that of Brandenburg had been for a time affected. Even certain overtures made through his emissary by Ernest Augustus—we may venture to surmise without the privity of his wife—that, if such a concession would solve the difficulty, he might be found disposed to listen to suggestions as to his conversion to the Church of Rome, and his enumeration of the services which his House had rendered to that Church, proved in vain. Hanoverian diplomacy hereupon tried a different tack, and occupied itself with a scheme for bringing about a combination between Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover, which would put the requisite pressure upon the Emperor by standing neutral between him and France. The device, for which more than one historical precedent could have been found, produced its effect on this occasion also, after Saxony had been induced to fall in with it. According to the current account, the eminent Hanoverian minister, Count Otto von Grote (who like Leibniz had been introduced by Duke John Frederick into the Hanoverian service, in which he spent twenty-eight years, doing his duty to the State in the very spirit of Frederick the Great), forced the hand of the Emperor by exhibiting to him at Vienna the compact with Saxony which realised the menace of a Third Party in the European conflict. Even if this story is apocryphal, there can be no doubt that the neutrality project furnished a very powerful lever in the negotiations carried on at the Imperial Court by Grote in conjunction with the resident Hanoverian minister, President von Limbach. Their arguments were supported by representations on the part of Great Britain, the United Provinces, and Brandenburg; but they were still more effectively reinforced by the Emperor Leopold’s pressing requirements for his next campaign against the Turks. Thus, then, early in 1692, was concluded the Electoral Compact (Kurtractat), in which the Dukes of Hanover and Celle undertook to provide, in addition to subsidies, a force of 6,000 men in their own pay, to be employed in the first instance against the Turks, and afterwards against France, while a supplementary agreement bound both sides to perpetual amity and military assistance, and assured to the House of Austria the support of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg in future Imperial elections as well as in the matter of the coming Spanish Succession. Hereupon, on March 19th, 1692, the Imperial rescript conferring an Electoral hat upon the Duke of Hanover was placed in the hands of his representative at Vienna.

But, before this act of authority on the part of the Emperor could command the assent of the Estates of the Empire which he required in order to proceed to the investiture, much remained to be done at Vienna, where Grote was active in person during the latter half of the year; at Dresden, where Jobst von Ilten, another specially trusted servant of the Hanoverian dynasty, successfully exerted himself; and elsewhere. In the midst of these difficulties, the Duchess of Orleans wrote to her aunt that she was convinced as to the source of opposition being German Princes rather than France. As a matter of fact, not only the political but the religious interests were agitated with which the House of Hanover had been, or might hereafter be, in conflict; and Grote was informed that both the King of Denmark (Christian V) and the Pope (Innocent XII) were adverse to the desired investiture. The good offices of Brandenburg were, however, freely exerted in its favour, and the Elector Frederick III’s envoy at Ratisbon, von Metternich, was instructed to tranquillise the Catholic Electors by undertaking that, in the event of the dying-out of the Bavarian and Palatine lines, the establishment of a new Catholic Electorate should be promoted by Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover. Thus, by the middle of October, 1692, a majority of the Electors had been secured for the investiture, and it was possible to ignore the violent opposition of Duke Antony Ulric of Wolfenbüttel, who, as Elizabeth Charlotte had hinted, was irreconcilable on this subject, and was calling out troops as if the world were out of joint.[99] On December 10th following, the investiture took place at Vienna, and Grote received the coveted Electoral hat for his master. Ernest Augustus and Sophia were at Berlin on a visit to their daughter when the good news reached them; a series of brilliant festivities ensued as a matter of course, since Frederick III was always glad of a reason for display; and, two days before Christmas, a defensive alliance for three years was concluded between the two Electors, to be followed a month later by an ‘everlasting league.’ This alliance, to whatever other results it might or might not lead, unmistakably signified the recognition of an important success gained for the ‘Evangelical’ cause in Germany. Brandenburg, which was so soon to merge in the Prussian Kingdom, and Hanover, whose heir was not long afterwards to mount the English throne, would, if they held together, suffice to defy any religious reaction in the Empire, and likewise be able to resist any attempt in any quarter at asserting a political domination.

Neither, however, had Grote’s labours as yet come to an end—though they were a few months afterwards cut short by his death—nor were the aspirations of the House of Hanover within the Empire satisfied by the Electoral investiture of December, 1692. Brandenburg, Saxony, and most of the other German courts recognised the new Elector; but the question of his introduction into the Electoral College, which implied his admission as Elector to his due share in the administration of the affairs of the Empire—the question quo modo—had still to be settled. The progress of its solution was delayed by a persistent opposition, of which the guiding spirit was once more Duke Antony Ulric of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and which included the King of Denmark as Duke of Holstein, the Dukes of Mecklenburg, and a number of other princes, both temporal and spiritual, in the north and west of the Empire. In 1693, these formed an association which designated itself as that of the Princes ‘corresponding’ against a Ninth Electorate, thus, as was justly observed to the Emperor by the Elector of Brandenburg, who continued loyally to support the demand of his father-in-law, lowering the Imperial authority by ‘maintaining’ a resistance against a decision already announced by it. The Elector of Saxony, John George IV, had been likewise well disposed to the Hanoverian promotion; but, in 1694, he had been succeeded by his brother Frederick Augustus (Augustus the Strong, the lover of Aurora von Königsmarck), whom, as will be seen in a different connexion, private as well as public motives had estranged from the Hanoverian Court; and thus a fresh obstacle had been put in the way of the admission of Ernest Augustus into the College of Electors. The virulence of Antony Ulric’s jealous hatred, which, as we shall also see, was to find in the Königsmarck catastrophe of 1694 and its antecedents a most tempting opportunity for damaging the reputation of the Hanoverian family, suggested to him what the Hanoverian diplomatist Ilten termed a ‘projet d’alliance diabolique.’ Frederick Augustus was to be gained over to the association of ‘Corresponding’ Princes by a surrender to Saxony of the Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel claims to part of the Duchy of Lauenburg, and he was to cooperate with Denmark in dispossessing Hanover and Celle, who had occupied other parts of the duchy claimed by them. Ernest Augustus had to appeal to King William III to put a stop to manœuvres which threatened seriously to affect the general peace of Europe.

Although the machinations of Antony Ulric were thus frustrated, he succeeded in depriving his hitherto so fortunate kinsman, Ernest Augustus, of the satisfaction of attaining in person to the consummation of his chief dynastic ambition. Soon after the death of Ernest Augustus, in January, 1698, the insensate jealousy of Antony Ulric led him to make, with fresh assistance, an armed attack upon Hanover, which amounted to an act of hostility against the Empire, committed at a critical season in the affairs of Europe. The defeat of this attempt by the energetic action of the Elector George Lewis broke down the opposition of Antony Ulric in the matter of the Ninth Electorate (1702); and soon afterwards he acknowledged the Electoral dignity and the precedence of the Hanoverian Elector at the Diet (1703). Previously to these occurrences, the exertions of Frederick III of Brandenburg had succeeded in inducing the three Spiritual Electors to abandon their resistance to the new Protestant Electorate (1699); but the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession had thereupon caused further delays. Thus it was not till 1707 that the positive assent of all the Electors was secured, nor till September 7th, 1708, sixteen years after the investiture at Vienna, that the Hanoverian envoy, von Limbach, at last took his seat in the Electoral College at Ratisbon.

The marriage between Sophia Dorothea of Celle and her cousin George Lewis of Hanover, which was to end so disastrously, came as a matter of course to be represented as having been ill-omened at the outset. It is, however, impossible to trust either the account of the transactions that preceded this marriage, or that of the long train of events ending in its dissolution, to be found in a long series of versions of this pitiful story. In substance, if not in every detail, they all go back upon the parent romance compiled by Duke Antony Ulric, very probably with the aid of information furnished to him by the confidante of the unhappy heroine. An authority so signally untrustworthy is best ignored; though it would be idle to pretend that the copious stream, which has flowed through all sorts of channels from this turbid source, is likely to be wholly devoid of some admixture of truth.[100] In point of fact, we cannot tell in what frame of mind Sophia Dorothea entered on her married life, or even what was her mother’s view of the match. Eleonora, beyond all doubt, tenderly loved her daughter; but Sophia Dorothea’s nature was light and frivolous, and there had not, so far as is known, been anything in her life to incline her to resistance. The views of the Duchess Sophia on the subject of her eldest son’s marriage it may seem easy to guess. But, though she had execrated the d’Olbreuze connexion in all its earlier stages, and though she seems at no time to have pretended to anything like affection for Eleonora’s daughter, we may take it for granted that, so soon as the marriage-project had been formally adopted as a matter of court and state policy, the Duchess completely acquiesced in it. And, indeed, no doubt could exist as to the advantages of the arrangement, whether from the point of view of the political future of the dynasty, or from that of the present resources of the House. The marriage-contract gave to the Hereditary Prince the free use of his wife’s income, though it secured her fortune—which was certain to be a very large one—to herself in the event of her husband’s decease preceding her own. It was only at a later date, when a dissolution of her marriage seemed desirable to Sophia Dorothea, that she complained of the terms of this settlement. The great wealth of the bride might well be held to cover whatever minor disabilities might result to the possible issue of the marriage from the imperfection of her own descent.

Nothing, it may be added, could be more improbable than that either George Lewis or his mother should have been at the pains of considering how far Sophia Dorothea’s character and disposition were suited to his own, or whether she would find any difficulty in accommodating herself to his way of life. The Duchess Sophia had learnt by long experience to bear with the open faithlessness of her husband, and with his frank neglect of herself, without forfeiting the influence which her intelligence had long assured to her over him and his affairs. How should she, with her shrewd apprehension of the ways of the world, have supposed that the same lesson would not be learnt by her new daughter-in-law? And it may at once be stated that there is no indication of George Lewis having during the early years of his married life kept up any relation that would have been unbearable to his young wife. If there was any truth in the rumour that he had been on terms of intimacy with Countess Platen’s younger sister, Frau von dem Bussche (née Marie von Meysenbug), the relation must have been broken off before his marriage, as indeed a further circumstantial piece of scandal asserted. She appears to have been a very pretty person, with plenty of admirers; and she is said to have set the fashion of ‘drinking tobacco’ among the ladies at Hanover.[101] For the rest, although George I was at no time in his life in the habit of seeking personal praise, and in truth cannot be said to have received an overflowing measure of it either from contemporaries or from posterity, yet he was not without qualities sure to impress themselves on anyone brought into close contact with him. His unflinching courage and military capacity were generally known; and it may further be averred in his honour, that he was never found false to his word, and that he was unswervingly true to any attachment once formed by him. His manners may, in his younger days in particular, have had a smack of the camp, and they must at all times have given proof of the reserve which was part of his nature, and which bad and good fortune combined to harden into the stolidity of his later years. That he made no pretence to intellectual tastes (though he quarrelled with his illustrious historiographer’s unpunctuality in fulfilling his engagement to digest the ancient records of the House of Guelf) may have disappointed his mother, but could hardly perturb Sophia Dorothea, who came of no lettered stock. In general, she might well have been thought likely to suit her own fluid temperament to a character cast in a stronger and sterner mould. The portraits which remain of her show her to have been graceful and pleasing beyond the common, and this impression is confirmed by notices of her personality dating from the early years of her married life. Perhaps there may be perceptible in certain of her portraits (one of which reminded the ingenious Wraxall of Sterne’s Eliza) a sentimentality of the superficial kind; but nothing could be more cruelly unfair than to draw from these likenesses conclusions as to her levity of disposition. On the other hand, the Duchess Sophia may be thought a prejudiced witness, when, in 1684 and 1685, she is found expressing distrust of both the smiles and the tears of her daughter-in-law, and setting her down as an unsatisfactory example for Sophia Charlotte, the apple of her mother’s eye; in truth, however, the Duchess’ strictures cannot, in this instance, be said to be very serious. The bad maternal bringing up of Sophia Dorothea, on which the same censor’s faithful echo, the Duchess of Orleans, was afterwards fain to dwell as the original cause of the Princess’ misfortunes, has been waived aside as a mere invention of spite; yet it should not be forgotten that both Sophia and her niece were, in their girlhood, carefully and even rigidly educated, and that to this training the unfaltering rectitude that marked the conduct of both is, in no small measure, attributable. At the same time, it is equally obvious that the kindly guidance by which the most perfect system of moral discipline needs at times to be supplemented, or by which the absence of such discipline may be in part redeemed, was wanting to Sophia Dorothea at Hanover. While there can be no reason for gainsaying this, and while it must be allowed to have been natural enough that those who had hated the mother should have treated the misconduct of the daughter as what might have been expected almost as a matter of course, yet the attempt to throw upon the Electress Sophia the responsibility of the catastrophe which we are about to narrate may be at once denounced as inherently absurd. Whether or not George Lewis cruelly ill-treated his wife—and there is no trustworthy evidence to support any such supposition—the assumption is altogether unwarranted that either in his bearing towards her, or in any other important relation of his life, he allowed himself to be influenced by his mother.[102] Least of all was he likely to be amenable to her counsel at a stage of his career when he must have known her to be at heart adverse to his interest in the matter, all-important to himself, of the institution of primogeniture. And as for Sophia herself, though elaborate efforts have been made to represent her as morally guilty of her daughter-in-law’s ruin, there is not a tittle of evidence to support a conjecture in itself utterly improbable. For her frankness and sincerity are never found belying themselves; and intrigue of all kinds, as both her public and her private conduct show, was wholly foreign to her nature. Moreover, though, as will be noted, no letters from her hand referring to the crisis in Sophia Dorothea’s affairs have been allowed to survive, the general tone of her correspondence during these eventful years is one of a serenity of mind unbroken, except by her grief for her losses as a mother.

At first, things seem to have gone well with Sophia Dorothea at Hanover. The Hereditary Prince (for he was, of course, not styled the Electoral Prince till 1682) continued the military career which best corresponded both to his aspirations and to his habits—serving during a series of campaigns in the Imperial army, and taking no part in the home government till, about 1694, his father’s health began to give way. Doubtless George Lewis’ long and repeated absences must have contributed to keep him estranged from the Princess, and, as already observed, there were at Hanover no members of the ducal family or court likely to aim at endearing themselves to her. The star of Countess Platen, mistress en titre, remained steadily in the ascendant, and her villa of Monplaisir, in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, became the centre of its fashionable dissipations. Her sister, Frau von dem Bussche, was likewise still to the front (she took part in Ernest Augustus’ farewell expedition of pleasure to Italy, to be noticed immediately); but, whether or not she had formerly been a recipient of the Hereditary Prince’s favours, they do not appear to have continued to be bestowed upon her either under her present name, or when, after her husband’s death (at Landen), she bestowed her hand upon another gallant officer, General von Weyhe.[103] When the exigencies of etiquette did not require her presence at the interminable court dinners and suppers, or at the operas in the new theatre, in which the heart of Ernest Augustus delighted, Sophia Dorothea may be concluded to have led a life as solitary as it was dull in her apartments in the Leine Palace at Hanover.[104] The favourite companion of her long hours of idleness was her lady-in-waiting, Fräulein Eleonora von dem Knesebeck, who had come with her from Celle, and whose devotion, self-sacrificing though by no means blind, was to involve her in the consequences of her mistress’ aberrations.

In October, 1683, the Hereditary Princess gave birth to a son, who was named George Augustus, in honour of his father and grandfather respectively, and who was nearly half a century later to ascend the throne of Great Britain and Ireland as King George II. We may feel assured that an event so auspicious for the future of the dynasty, and so speedily fulfilling the hopes with which the marriage had been brought about, specially commended her to the favour of her father-in-law; and, that this favour continued, is shown by his consideration for her some two years afterwards. In 1684, Duke Ernest Augustus had undertaken his last journey to the beloved land of Italy, being accompanied on it by an oddly composed company consisting, among others, of Count Platen and Major-General von dem Bussche and their wives. During this visit the Duchess remained behind, professedly à son grand regret, and Prince George Lewis was, for part of the time, engaged in one of his Hungarian campaigns against the Turks. But his Princess, at the particular request of her father-in-law, joined the ducal party at Venice, arriving there just before the opening of the carnival of 1686. ‘I am delighted to hear,’ writes the Duchess Sophia from Hanover in January, ‘that my daughter-in-law and her following are in good condition.’ Sophia Dorothea then accompanied the Duke for the Holy Week to Rome, where their sojourn cost the cruel sum of twenty thousand dollars; but, though her husband had by this time finished his campaign, ceremonial difficulties (which one would have thought would have affected the father as much as the son) prevented him from coming to the papal city, and he amused himself with a trip to Florence and Naples on his own account. All these things are told without so much as a suggestion of untowardness; nor was it till long afterwards that a scandal, promptly credited by the Duchess of Orleans, declared Sophia Dorothea to have consoled herself for her husband’s absence by an amour carried on at Rome with a French marquis of the name of de Lassaye. But the story in question rests entirely on the braggadocio to which this squire of dames treated the Duchess, and on the still more doubtful evidence of certain compromising letters purporting to have been addressed by him to Sophia Dorothea when at Rome, and printed by him in his old age—as late as 1738. Thus the shame of this denunciation lies entirely with its cowardly author.

There seems, however, little doubt but that, after her return from Italy, Sophia Dorothea became further estranged from her husband. To this date would have to be assigned, were it otherwise worth noticing, the attraction said by the Duchess of Orleans to have been exercised by Sophia Dorothea upon the Raugrave Charles Lewis, one of the family of nephews and nieces ‘by the left hand’ to whom the Duchess Sophia extended so benevolent and almost maternal a protection. According to the same authority, it was to escape the wiles of the light-hearted Princess that the Raugrave took service against the Turks in the Morea, where he met with his death in 1688; but there was very probably more malice than truth in the story. In March, 1687, Sophia Dorothea gave birth to a second child, the daughter who was named after her, and who, as the wife of King Frederick William I of Prussia, was to become the mother of Frederick the Great and of his brother Augustus William, the direct ancestor of the subsequent Kings of Prussia and of the German Emperors of our own times. It cannot have been till after this event that George Lewis, who seems to have remained nearer home after his campaign in 1685, began to follow his father’s example and give publicity to his preference of other attractions to those of his wife. But much uncertainty exists as to the date at which this infidelity began, and as to the extent to which it was carried. It has been widely assumed, and is constantly repeated, that Countess Platen sought to maintain the family influence over the Hereditary Prince, after he had tired of her sister, through her daughter; but this assumption, which, because of its revolting character, was carefully kept alive and cherished by the detractors of George I and his dynasty, must be dismissed as baseless. This celebrated lady, who, like the Duchess Sophia’s own daughter, had been christened Sophia Charlotte, in 1701 became the wife of Baron von Kielmannsegg, a nobleman of honourable reputation, who had for some years been attached to the Hanoverian Court. Here the pair lived in unbroken union and enjoyed a distinguished position; their villa of Fantaisie on the avenue to Herrenhausen being regarded as a favourite resort of foreign visitors to Hanover. They afterwards followed King George I to England, where, after the resignation of the Duke of Somerset, the high household office of Master of the Horse was left vacant, in order that its duties might be performed by the Hanoverian Oberstallmeister, while his wife was created Countess of Leinster in the Irish and afterwards Countess of Darlington in the English peerage. Neither at Hanover nor in England had George I ever made any secret of the nature of the tie which he believed to exist between her and himself; he had consistently treated her as his half-sister, giving her at the Electoral Court precedence over the Raugraves and Raugravines, and, in the patent that conferred an Irish peerage upon her, causing her to be designated consanguinea nostra. So simple an explanation of the honour in which she continued to be held till her death in 1727 was of course insufficient for Jacobite spite, for anti-German prejudice, and for the love of scandal on its own account. On the other hand, the only personage whom, either before or after he mounted the English throne, George publicly recognised as mistress, was also the only lady at the Hanoverian Court who seems in the days of his married life to have exercised a strong fascination over him. Yet Melusina von der Schulenburg (afterwards Duchess of Kendal)[105] appears at this time to have refrained from thrusting herself into notice; and this agrees with the indications of refinement which it is impossible to ignore in the portrait remaining of her in the period of her youth.

Thus, then, scarcely anything is ascertainable as to the beginnings and rise of the general sense of unhappiness which is known to have come over Sophia Dorothea during her life at Hanover, and to which—some time in 1692 or later—she gave naïve expression by the avowal, afterwards, with cruel ineptness, judicially quoted against her, that she would rather be a ‘marquise in France’ than Electoral Princess of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Yet fixed antipathies of this kind are commonly of gradual growth, and it would have been difficult for a nature like Sophia Dorothea’s, craving for impulse to meet impulse, and quite incapable of renunciation, to settle down into the dull acquiescence which, with so many women, has to do duty for contentment. The restraint of a monotonous existence and the petty rules of an elaborate etiquette, imposed upon her among surroundings in which there was so much to annoy her and so little to sustain her self-respect, must in any case have made her restive and unhappy. Least of all could she have felt any inclination to take an interest in the schemes of dynastic ambition to which she knew herself to have been sacrificed—perhaps against the wish of her best friend, her mother. The anecdote that it was attempted to implicate her in the plot hatched by Prince Maximilian—Moltke, who was to pay the penalty of the discovered design, being offered his release, if he would charge her with a guilty knowledge,—may be dismissed as fictitious. And it may be observed, by the way, that, while there is no authority for connecting Countess Platen with the supposed offer, it could not possibly have been promoted by the Duchess Sophia, whose sympathies were on the side of Maximilian’s revolt against the principle of primogeniture. Sophia Dorothea was, no doubt, on pleasant terms with her high-spirited but flighty brother-in-law Maximilian, who, indeed, unmistakably oppressed her with his attentions; but it is quite clear that, in no sense of the word, can there have been anything ‘serious’ between them. We do not know how Sophia Dorothea was affected by the rise in the family dignity which procured for her the title of Electoral Princess. But, in regard to a question of still greater importance for the future of the House, we have it on excellent authority that she took a line opposite to that adopted by her husband. Sir William Dutton Colt, who, as was seen, had entered upon his duties as English Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at Hanover in 1689, while describing the Duchess Sophia as an incomparable person, full of charming wit, kindness, and civility, and speaking of the ‘Princess of Hanover’ (Sophia Dorothea), for whom and her infant son, he says, Duke Ernest Augustus showed great fondness, as beautiful, accomplished, and agreeable, notes (in 1691) that the Princess was distinctly anti-English in her sympathies. Her partiality for France might have found a sufficient explanation in her descent, and in the associations so long cherished by her mother at Celle; but Sir William Colt assigns another reason that cannot be overlooked. The eldest son (George Lewis), the envoy reported, was not in the least French in his inclinations; and the French party, discontented with this, paid all the court imaginable to the Princess—‘and I fear not without success, for she has no great fondness for the Prince.’

It is, therefore, clear that, by this time (1691), Sophia Dorothea’s feelings towards her husband had passed into a condition of more or less active antipathy. And there can no longer be any pretence of doubt that, whether or not the indifference of her husband towards herself had hardened into positive unkindness, and whether or not this unkindness (as there is absolutely nothing to prove) had shown itself in actual ill-treatment, Sophia Dorothea was already under the influence of a growing passion for another man. The story of the guilty loves of Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck need not be related at length here, since large portions of their correspondence are generally accessible, at least in a translation from the French originals, while a supplementary part is for the first time (with the exception of two letters which have appeared elsewhere) printed in an Appendix to the present book. The evidence for the genuineness of this correspondence, in so far as the greater part of it is concerned, which covers 679 pages, and is now extant in the University Library at Lund, was practically irresistible as it stood, and is confirmed beyond the last shadow of doubt by the letters in the Royal Secret Archives of State at Berlin, which cover 65 pages, and which are seen at the first glance to belong to the same correspondence. They agree in the handwritings, and in the use of the same cipher, as well as in all the distinctive features of style; they refer to numerous details mentioned in the Lund letters; and to some of these certain of the Berlin documents stand in the relation of supplements or answers. It is said—but on no stated authority—that to these letters might be added others, of contents unknown, in the possession of the present head of the House of Hanover. No part of Count Königsmarck’s correspondence with the Princess Sophia Dorothea remains in the possession of the present representative of his family. As for the Lund documents, their history can be satisfactorily traced up to the direct descendants of Countess Lewenhaupt, the elder sister of Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck. The younger sister, the famous Countess Aurora, as will be seen, actively intervened in the transactions that followed on its discovery, at a time when both the sisters were residing at Hamburg. It must be supposed that Aurora at some time transferred the letters from her custody into that of her elder sister; how they came into her own, must remain matter of conjecture, though it is a not unnatural supposition that they were entrusted to her by the recipients. On the other hand, the evidence of handwriting obtained by a comparison of these documents with others of incontestable genuineness, from the hands of Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck respectively, is entirely satisfactory—though this part of the subject is complicated by the fact (for as such it may be set down) that the Princess possessed the art of writing in two different hands, while portions of her part of the love correspondence were dictated by her to her confidante. (Königsmarck wrote his own love-letters; but his official letters at Hanover are, except the signatures, probably in the handwriting of his private secretary.) But it is the internal evidence contained in the documents themselves, in face of which the refusal to accept them, though maintained by at least one historian of high eminence to whom this period of Brunswick-Lüneburg history and this particular episode were familiar as to no other among his contemporaries, must be said to have broken down. The internal evidence in the present case consists mainly of a number of coincidences of circumstance and date, such as it is impossible to ascribe either to chance or to design, that have been proved to exist between incidental statements in these letters and in contemporary documents of unimpeachable authenticity. The most important of these are the letters and contemporary despatches of Sir William Dutton Colt, the envoy to the Courts of Hanover and Celle mentioned above, now preserved in our Record Office, and extending over the period from July, 1689, to December, 1692. (To these have, at all events, to be added passages in the correspondence of the Electress Sophia, and isolated statements as to the campaign in the Netherlands and the battle of Steenkirke in particular, in a military list cited by Havemann, and in a contemporary account of the battle in the Theatrum Europæum.) The credit of placing this investigation on lines which could not but lead up to an irrefutable issue belongs to the late Mrs. Everett Green, for whom a careful second transcript had been made of the letters of which a first, incomplete, transcript had been presented to her by the late Count Albert von der Schulenburg-Klosterrode. The second, complete, copy, carefully digested and arranged, was placed by Mrs. Green in the British Museum, after she had, for prudential reasons, abandoned the idea of embodying it in a published work. This task was accomplished by the late Mr. W. H. Wilkins, in his own way, in a book afterwards republished in a new and revised edition; but he did not live to carry out his contingent design of some day ‘translating the whole correspondence at Lund, at Berlin, and at Gmünden, and arranging it in chronological order with the aid of first-hand documentary evidence drawn from other sources.’ The corroboration of the genuineness and authenticity of the Lund documents furnished by those now printed from the originals in the Berlin Archives is, as observed, complete, and all the more convincing, inasmuch as they must have been separated from the rest at a very early date. It is stated in the Register of the Archives of State at Berlin that they were found among the papers of Frederick the Great at Sans Souci after his death; and the superscription which they bear (‘Lettres d’Amour de la Duchesse D’allen au Comte Konigsmarc’) is in the King’s own handwriting. How they came into his possession must remain a matter of conjecture, which will be more appropriately discussed elsewhere. It should perhaps be added that the whole problem of the genuineness of this correspondence is of very secondary historical significance; but, apart from the human interest of the letters themselves, their whole story shows how difficult it is to find, and perhaps also how difficult it is to kill, the truth.[106]

Nothing indicates that Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck, the ill-fated hero of the tragedy of Sophia Dorothea’s life, made his appearance at Hanover before the month of March, 1688, when his presence at a court fête is accidentally mentioned—just a twelvemonth after the birth of the second and last of George Lewis’ and Sophia Dorothea’s children. Königsmarck was a member of a Swedish family of high position and great wealth, which had derived lustre from the important services of Field-Marshal von Königsmarck in the latter part of the Thirty Years’ War, and which had, through him, acquired large estates in northern Germany. The branch of the family to which Philip Christopher belonged were citizens of the world; to set them down as adventurers argues an imperfect apprehension of the spirit of their age, and indeed of that of a great part of the following century also. Like the rest of them, Philip Christopher had seen many courts already in his youthful days; and nothing could be more probable than that he should have found his way to Celle, especially as he had a family connexion with France, such as would always have ensured him a welcome at the court of George William and Eleonora. He may thus very well have formed a boy and girl acquaintance with their daughter; but the statement said to have been afterwards made by him, that he had loved her from childhood, is insufficiently authenticated, and does not recur in any of his love-letters. He then accompanied his elder brother, Count Charles John, whose wanderings had been more widely varied than his own (and with whom he is confounded by Horace Walpole, in his careless way), on a visit to England. Here the elder brother was the principal figure in a cause célèbre, the trial of himself and others for the murder of the wealthy Thomas Thynne (‘Tom of Ten Thousand’), of which crime an elaborate representation may to this day be seen carved in relief on the victim’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.[107] Fortunately for himself, Count von Königsmarck escaped the gallows, where the careers of his accomplices ended; but England was no longer an agreeable place of sojourn for the two brothers, and their travels recommenced. The elder died in the Morea in 1686; so that it was the younger who, in 1688, inherited the wealth of their uncle, on his death after a distinguished career as a commander in the service of the Venetian Republic. Thus, when Königsmarck, after visiting France and becoming acquainted with the Saxon Prince afterwards known as Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, in this same year, 1688, arrived at Hanover, he was not only a nobleman of much knowledge and experience of the world, but a personage of great wealth, and an extremely desirable acquisition for a court such as that of Hanover, where there were excellent opportunities for spending money as well as for encouraging its expenditure. On his side, Königsmarck, as the head of his migratory family, may have wished to further the settlement of his sisters; and the elder, about this time, married the Swedish Count Axel Lewenhaupt, who two years later passed into the service of the Duke of Celle. The younger, Aurora, had not as yet found at Dresden, where her brother was probably already well known, the sphere in which her beauty and wit, after liberally diffusing their radiance in many regions, were for a time established as supreme; at Hanover, so fixed a constellation as that of the Platen family was sure to regard this brilliant meteor with much displeasure. But Countess Platen could raise no objection to Ernest Augustus’ offer of a commission to Königsmarck; and this offer was certainly made and accepted. For he is soon found commanding a Hanoverian regiment, in frontier operations and in Flanders, and afterwards holding, in the same service, a colonelcy of dragoons.

So far we stand on solid ground; but, as to the beginnings of the intimacy between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck, and as to the incidents that occurred in the period before the commencement of the extant correspondence between them, we possess no trustworthy account whatever. There is no evidence even to show the authenticity of the story, which has been used with much effect in a recent poetic drama (very different in conception from that imagined by Schiller on the same theme),[108] that Königsmarck accompanied Prince Charles Philip in the campaign in which the Duchess Sophia lost her favourite son, and that he shared the Prince’s dangers, though escaping his doom.

At the time when the correspondence between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck opens—at the beginning of July, 1691—he must at any rate have been for some time back in Hanover; for he had started at the head of a regiment of foot in the ducal service on a march towards the Elbe, undertaken for the purpose of ensuring the safety of Hamburg. A few weeks later, he was himself sent to that city on a diplomatic mission for the conclusion of a treaty of alliance with Sweden,—a balancing operation on the part of Ernest Augustus, before he had made up his mind to join the Grand Alliance against France. That this charge, for which of course his Swedish descent rendered him particularly suitable, should have been given to Königsmarck, proves him to have been at this time in full favour at the Hanoverian court.

Inasmuch as, already in the earliest of his extant letters to Sophia Dorothea, Königsmarck describes himself as in extremis, though at the same time assuring her that his respect for her is as great as his love, we find the pair already on the brink of an abyss of passion, and understand why their correspondence was a clandestine one. Such, in fact, it was, from first to last, intended to be and to remain; and all the usual devices of secrecy at the command of the writers of these letters were adopted for the purpose. Of course they were all—or nearly all—written in French, the language ordinarily used at the Hanover as well as the Celle Court. The communications from Königsmarck, which may be said to form about two-thirds of the whole series of letters or portions of letters, are, when they bear any address at all, directed to Fräulein von dem Knesebeck, either by name or by some kind of designation under which she is evidently intended. Part of the Princess’ letters are written in a hand differing so much from that which wrote the remainder, and which a comparison with her undoubtedly genuine writing seems to identify as her own, that it may be assumed to be the hand of the confidante. In the actual composition of the letters, the writers had further agreed to guard themselves by the adoption of a twofold—or perhaps one should say threefold—system of cipher, which it needs no Œdipus to unriddle, at all events sufficiently for the purposes of detection.[109] Under such flimsy safeguards, explicable in Sophia Dorothea’s case only by her youth and utter inexperience, and in Königsmarck’s by the habits of a roving life which had led him to cast himself recklessly into a whirlpool of excitement, the lovers gave full vent to their feelings of amorous and jealous passion. The voice of nature is audible in this correspondence, but it is singularly devoid of charm. Königsmarck’s tone, as could hardly but be expected, has a general tendency to coarseness, and is at times very gross, calling to mind Stepney’s description of the unfortunate man, after his catastrophe, as a loose fish whom he had long known and would always have avoided. No similar charge is to be brought against the letters of Sophia Dorothea, which are written in an easy and flowing style. But her letters, as well as Königsmarck’s, contain passages irreconcilable with any conclusion except one—that theirs was a guilty love. For the rest, there is no straining of style in the correspondence, and those who regarded it as fabricated might well describe it as a ‘clumsy’ forgery; for it omits to make certain points which a forger could hardly have missed. In the Lund letters, at all events, Königsmarck, except when calling up the image of the Electoral Prince George Lewis in his marital capacity, refers to him with good humour; and Sophia Dorothea gives quite a matter-of-fact account of a quarrel between her parents.