In the meantime, Parliament, which sat from February to June, had nearly concluded its session. The Speech from the Throne had duly recommended the further limitation of the Succession in the Protestant line; and a proposal for carrying this recommendation into effect was, without loss of time, brought forward by the Whigs in the House of Commons (March 3rd). But, though the Tory majority in the House was not as a whole unfriendly to the Hanoverian claims, the opinion prevailed that it would be well to postpone the naming of any further successor, until certain additional securities had been obtained for the rights and liberties of the subjects of the Crown. It was generally understood that the Electress Sophia should be named; but some desired to name the Elector and the Electoral Prince likewise, in the expectation that the Electress Dowager and the Elector would waive their claims. On the other hand, it was felt that such an arrangement would involve a difference between the English and the Scottish limitation, which latter had, already in 1689, been made to include Sophia’s name; and this could not have been easily set right until the anti-English feeling excited in Scotland by the Darien Settlement affair should have had time to subside.
Thus, after the eight articles had been agreed upon which were to take effect from the beginning of the new limitation to the House of Hanover, and some of which were, as a matter of fact, dictated by jealousy of the rule of a foreign line, the name of the Electress Sophia was inserted without opposition; and by the Act for the further Limitation of the Crown, and better securing the Rights and Liberties of the Subjects—called in short the Act of Settlement—the Crown of England was, in default of issue of the Princess Anne or King William III, settled upon the Electress and her posterity, being Protestants. A protest, inspired by the Duke of Berwick acting under instructions from Louis XIV was, indeed, raised by the Duchess Anna Maria of Savoy, and communicated to both Houses of Parliament by the envoy of Duke Victor Amadeus II; but no notice was taken of it.[126] On June 12th, 1701, the Act of Settlement received the royal assent, and, in his Speech from the Throne, King William, after thanking the two Houses for further securing the Protestant Succession, passed on to the subject of the Grand Alliance. The answer of the House of Commons was an Address promising to support the King in sustaining the alliances deemed necessary by him for upholding the liberty of Europe and the welfare of England, and for reducing the exorbitant power of France.
The Act of Settlement, which secured the Hanoverian Succession, accordingly at the same time imposed certain fresh restrictions of the prerogative, which had an important bearing upon the nature of the royal authority exercised by Sophia’s posterity. Furthermore, the Act, in which both the great English political parties concurred, secured the Hanoverian Succession at a time when the critical struggle was about to open between France and the renewed Grand Alliance; and thus, at the very moment when the House of Hanover acquired a Parliamentary title to the expectancy of the English throne, it was, again with the assent of both parties, identified with the adversaries of France in the great European conflict. Nor is it without significance that at this very time a Pope (Clement XI) had been seated in St. Peter’s Chair, who, in a far greater measure than his predecessor—for Innocent XII had on the whole disappointed the hopes of Louis XIV—served the interests of France. The letter addressed by Clement XI on his election in November, 1700, to James II, had, in its ‘beautiful terms of paternal tenderness,’ drawn tears ‘more from the heart than from the eyes’ of the exiled King.
Throughout these transactions, the conduct of the Electress Sophia had been uniformly judicious—observing a wise mean between the adoption, as a matter of course, of the advice readily given to her by Leibniz, and an absolute impassiveness like that maintained by her eldest son. It seems unwarranted to regard her as having energetically defended her rights up to the time when policy and the condition of affairs in England imposed upon her a certain reserve, and having at the last enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing both King and Parliament sue for her acceptance of their offer. On the other hand, her conduct is misunderstood when she is supposed to have resisted so long as possible the unwelcome necessity of securing the inheritance of a throne to which she believed her kinsman, the Prince of Wales, to have had a just claim. She had frankly accepted the situation, and done her best to promote a solution in the interests of her dynasty, without going further than would have been either seemly or judicious. Her letter written on June 22nd, 1701, to Burnet (who describes himself as in more or less continuous correspondence with her from the death of the Duke of Gloucester onwards) exactly expresses her point of view. Though sensible of his affection to her in the matter of the Succession, which excluded all Catholic heirs, ‘who had always caused so many disorders in England,’ she felt herself ‘unfortunately too old ever to be useful to the nation.’ Yet she wished that ‘those who were to come after her might render themselves worthy of the honour awaiting them.’
On August 14th, 1701, the Earl of Macclesfield arrived in Hanover, in order formally to notify to the Electress Sophia the passing of the Act of Settlement, of which, kneeling before her, he presented her with a splendidly illuminated copy, still preserved in the Hanover Archives. Macclesfield appears to have been chosen for the office at his own request, as the son of a cavalier closely associated with Prince Rupert and a visitor at the Hague in Queen Elizabeth’s days, and therefore likely to be persona gratissima to the Electress[127]—though his own antecedents rather associated him with the Mohocks. He was accompanied by three other Whig Lords, Say and Sele, Mohun (Macclesfield’s intimate, who is stated to have taken care to be on his best behaviour) and Tunbridge. In their suite was the ingenious Toland, with his enquiring eyes wide open, and in his pocket, according to Luttrell, a ‘treatise lately wrote in relation to the Succession, intituled Anglia Libera, or The Limitation and Succession of the Crown explained and asserted,’ for presentation to the Electress. With them were also ‘Mr. King the herald,’ who brought the Garter for the Elector, and Dr. Sandys, the ambassador’s chaplain, who read the common prayers of the Church of England before the Electress in her ante-chamber. ‘She made the Responses, and performed the Ceremonys as punctually as if she had been us’d to it all her life.’ These and other details may be read in Toland’s Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover, which he published after his return. He was particularly anxious to recount the honours which he had received at Hanover and Herrenhausen, including that of conversing with the Electress, who, on one occasion, had told him that ‘she was afraid the Nation had already repented their Choice of an old Woman, but that she hop’d none of her Posterity wou’d give them any Reason to grow weary of their Dominion’—much the same words as those which she had used to Burnet.
We need not dwell upon the solemnities at Hanover and Celle, whither the special embassy proceeded in due course, nor upon the lavish munificence bestowed upon the ambassador,[128] nor upon the medals distributed in honour of the event, among which none was more remarkable than that which exhibited the portrait of the English Matilda, the consort of Henry the Lion, and, on the reverse, that of the Electress Sophia, ‘Angliae princeps ad successionem nominata.’ But it may be worth our while in our next chapter to return to Toland, and to his account of the Court of Hanover, as giving an interesting, though no doubt rather rose-coloured, picture of the Electress and her surroundings, at a point of time which may be described as the climax of her fortunes.
90. It is interesting to find Queen Mary Beatrice thanking the Dowager Duchess Benedicta at Hanover for her congratulations on the same occasion, and referring to her constant interest in the royal family, and to the links between them.
91. Macaulay, who mentions this doubt, illustrates it by the supposed case of an infant prince of Savoy. (See below.)
92. Notes on the Diplomatic Relations between England and Germany, ed. C. H. Firth: List of Diplomatic Representatives and Agents, England and North Germany, 1689-1727, contributed by J. F. Chance, Oxford, 1907.
93. As Colt died in 1693 (at Heilbronn), on a mission on which he was sent to treat with the Elector of Saxony, to bring him into the Grand Alliance, I cannot say what was the nature of the series of holograph letters from the Electress Sophia to Lady Colt, extending from 1681 (?) to 1714, reported in the Times of April 14th, 1905, as sold by auction.
94. There seems good reason for believing that the foreign lady, named Louise-Marie, married by Cressett in 1704, about the close of his residence at the Court of Celle, was a kinswoman of the Duchess Eleonora. Cf., as to a survival of this connexion with the dynasty, H. Walpole’s Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George II (1822), Vol. i. p. 79.
95. In 1700 he was also accredited to Berlin, where already in 1702 Queen Sophia Charlotte thought him a trifle passé.
96. In 1701, however, the Duchess Anna Maria protested against the Act of Settlement, which limited the Succession to Sophia and her issue, being Protestants. For an account of the reasons of Victor Amadeus’ original estrangement from France, and a searching analysis of his character, see a remarkable Relation de la Cour de Savoie, July 15th, 1692, in Appendix to G. de Léris, La Princesse de Virrue [for a time the Duke’s mistress et la Cour de Victor Amad. de Savoie, Paris, 1881, pp. 238-9.]
97. See as to F. C. von Platen’s mission on the subject in December, 1686, R. Fester, Die Augsburger Allianz, pp. 124 sqq., 167 sqq.
98. Droysen, Geschichte der Preussischen Politik, Vol. iv. Part i. p. 87.
99. See as to his opposition Bodemann, Anton Ulrich und seine Correspondenz mit Leibniz, in Zeitschr. d. histor. Ver. für Niedersachsen, 1879. It was largely from ambitious motives that this Duke entered so zealously into the great scheme for a reunion between Catholics and Protestants. (See Clemens Schwarte, Die neunte Kur und Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, in Münstersche Beiträge zur Geschichtsforschung, Neue Folge, Münster, 1905.)
100. The supplementary (sixth) volume of the Roman Octavia, which contains the story of Sophia Dorothea under the title of the History of the Princess Solane, was first published in 1707, when Sophia Dorothea’s lady-in-waiting, Fräulein Eleonora von dem Knesebeck, who had, from first to last, been in the secret of the Princess’ relations with Count Königsmarck, either was or recently had been resident at Wolfenbüttel under the protection of Duke Antony Ulric after her escape from prison. In the revised edition of this ‘historical novel,’ published at Nürnberg in 1712 and dedicated to the ‘Hochlöbliche Nymfen-Gesellschaft an der Donau, the name of Solane was altered to Rhodogune, and there were certain other changes. The derivation of the traditional narrative from Duke Antony Ulric’s romance was convincingly traced by the late Professor Adolf Köcher, who, though disbelieving in the genuineness of the correspondence to be mentioned immediately, succeeded in throwing a flood of light upon the entire course of Sophia Dorothea’s story.—Writing, in 1709, about the amour between the Landgrave Ernest Lewis of Hesse-Darmstadt and the (married) Countess von Sintzendorf, the Duchess of Orleans observes that, since the lady is quite ready to show the Prince’s letters, it would be easy for Duke Antony Ulric to turn their affair into a romance.
101. See Briefe des Herzogs Ernst August, &c., p. 33, note.
102. ‘That the Elector is a dry and disagreeable gentleman,’ writes the Duchess of Orleans in 1702, ‘I had opportunity enough to discern when he was here ... but where he is entirely in the wrong, is in his way of living with his mother, to whom he is in duty bound to show nothing but respect.’
103. He served with distinction under Marlborough in Flanders. The marriage took place in 1696, two years after the Königsmarck catastrophe. Yet the late Mr. Wilkins makes Countess Platen, ‘with a refinement of cruelty,’ try to induce Sophia Dorothea to be present at the wedding. This significant blunder, repeated in the second edition of The Love of an Uncrowned Queen, is exposed by Mr. Lewis Melville, The First George, Vol. i. pp. 52-6. A Fräulein von Weyhe was in Sophia Dorothea’s service. The court of Hanover, after all, has much of the aspect of a large family party. In 1701, Sophia mentions a tour to the Harz made by the Elector in a company which included three ladies, ‘the Schoulenburg, Madame Wey, and Ernhausen, the Schoulenburg’s sister.’
104. The Palace was enlarged about this time, and entirely ‘restored’ in 1831-41. In Sophia Dorothea’s days the bear at his chain and the lynx in his cage were still to be seen near the guard-house at the outer gate.
105. Of the persistently repeated story of King George I’s morganatic marriage to the Duchess of Kendal there appears to be no proof. The late Dr. Richard Garnett, who could hardly have failed to come across whatever evidence on the subject existed, assured me that he knew of none.
106. For an examination of the whole question of the genuineness of the Lund letters I must refer the reader to an article on the original edition of Mr. Wilkins’ book, The Love of an Uncrowned Queen, contributed by me to the Edinburgh Review for January, 1901. I have since re-examined the cipher with the aid of the key supplied by the late Count Schulenburg to the late Mrs. Everett Green; and it certainly fills one with amazement that any rational human beings should have thought concealment attainable by so perfectly transparent a disguise. But the miserable folly of the whole business is at least consistent with itself.—As to the Berlin letters, Mr. Wilkins does not explicitly say that he had seen them; but it was unnecessary that he should do so, as an exhaustive account of them (with the text of two of them) was given by Dr. Robert Geerds in the Beitlage to the Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 77, Friday, April 4th, 1902. The eminent historian Dr. A. Köcher, after first directing attention to these letters in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Vol. xxxiv. (art. Sophia Dorothea), and declaring them an audacious forgery (he repeated this assertion privately to myself), deposited in the Royal Archives at Berlin a statement of his belief that a comparison of handwritings left him in no doubt as to the letters being spurious; but Dr. Geerds’ explanations on this head (see Appendix B) are to my mind perfectly satisfactory.—I should like to add that at my request Count Königsmarck, in December last, most kindly allowed the examination of his family archives at Plaue near Berlin on my behalf by Archivrath Dr. Paczkowski, but that no part of any correspondence between Sophia Dorothea and her lover was discovered there. Dr. Paczkowski carried out the task which he was so good as to undertake with a thoroughness and savoir faire reflecting the highest credit upon himself and the distinguished official body of which he forms part.
107. See Evelyn’s Diary as to the scandal which surrounded the trial.
108. See Schiller’s Dramatischer Nachlass, ed. G. Kettner, Vol. ii. pp. 220 sqq. (Weimar, 1825), and the references there given to articles by Kettner on the subject.—The play to which allusion is made in the text is Mrs. Woods’ The Princess of Hanover (1902).
109. First, they use pseudonyms of a more or less allusive nature in lieu of proper names. Thus Don Diego and la Romaine signify the Elector and the Electress (the former is not a flattering nickname in contemporary English literature; it will be remembered that the eldest of Sophia’s sisters had in former days been called la Grecque by the younger); le Grondeur, la Pédagogue, are farcical names for the Duke and Duchess of Celle, while the Electoral Prince, Sophia Dorothea’s husband, is (not quite so intelligibly) called le Réformeur; Countess Platen (query with an allusion to Monplaisir) la Perspective, and Sophia Dorothea herself goes by the appellation of la petite louche, or of le cœur gauche, or of Léonisse, a character in a romance of the times. Aurora von Königsmarck is l’Avanturière, and Prince Ernest Augustus l’Innocent. Secondly, the writers of these letters employ a numerical cipher of a tolerably simple kind. Of this Professor Palmblad, who published a few of the letters (carefully selecting the worst), and who formed a monstrous hypothesis upon them, lacked the key; Mrs. Everett Green, who possessed it, was already able to decipher most of the names; Mr. Wilkins had not to leave much obscure. Thirdly, names, and occasionally other words, are spelt in figures, the chief difficulty of deciphering being in this case the phonetic spelling adopted by Königsmarck (biljay = billet, &c.). Finally, the lovers also resorted to an occasional cryptogram, which would not deceive a child. A name, such as Chauvet, is split up and interlarded with the letters ‘illy’—thus: ‘illychauillyvetilly.’ The farce of insertion might have gone further. Cf. Appendix B as to the Berlin letters.
110. ‘Le bonhomme’ in the lovers’ cipher.
111. Of this castle little or nothing remains at the present day but a ‘restored’ gate and staircase.
112. According to W. H. Wilkins, A Queen of Tears, George III similarly ordered the destruction of the entire correspondence with Copenhagen occasioned by the catastrophe of his daughter Caroline Matilda of Denmark and Struensee.
113. In the spring of 1695, Cresset reports that the Duke and Duchess of Celle feel some distaste, now, for the company of the Electress, on account of the divorce proceedings.
114. Her habit of driving along it at a furious pace recalls the practice of a very different captive—Napoleon at St. Helena.
115. It is a curious instance of a certain cynical hauteur in George Lewis (which, however, contains an element of manly self-possession) that he should have supplied the Duchess of Orleans with a key to the characters of the Supplement to the Roman Octavia, in which Duke Antony Ulric had taken the opportunity, perhaps with the help of Fräulein von dem Knesebeck’s reminiscences, of giving to the world a version of the whole story of the Duchess of Ahlden.—A French MS., Histoire de Frédegonde, Princesse de Chérusque, Duchesse d’Hanovre, Épouse de George, Roi de la Grande Bretagne, proposing to give an account, inter alia, of ‘sa Prison au Chateau d’Alhen, où elle a fini ses jours,’ supposed to date from about 1740, was not long since advertised for sale.
116. Lord Hervey’s story of his having preserved his mother’s picture may be true; but the further statement that he proposed, if she had survived, to have brought her over and declared her Queen, needs a stronger qualification than the ‘it was said,’ by which it is accompanied. (Memoirs, Vol. iii. pp. 348-9.)
117. Early in 1694, Cresset reports him as ‘moving heaven and earth’ on the subject.
118. ‘I used,’ she writes to the elder Schütz in 1703, ‘to know all the common prayers, practically, by heart, but I was never taught that our religion much differed from the reformed religion of France and Germany, and I have communicated in this also;’ and, again: ‘I have had prayers offered for the Queen’ [Anne] ‘in both the German and the French reformed churches here’ [at Hanover], ‘with the permission of the Elector.’—Erman, preacher at the French Reformed church in Berlin, subsequently wrote Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Sophie Charlotte, Reine de Prusse.]
119. See H. Breslau, Der Fall des Oberpräsidenten E. von Danckelmann, 1692 (H. Breslau and S. Isaacsohn, Der Fall zweier Preuss. Minister). Berlin, 1878.
120. Curiously enough, on the day after the opening of this august institution, Leibniz took a prominent part in a ‘Village Fair’ at the Court, of which a graphic description remains in a letter from him to the Electress Sophia. It seems to have been a revised edition of the Wirthschaften of her youth, and of similar Arcadian diversions of later days.—For an interesting survey of the relations—both personal and philosophical—between Leibniz and Sophia Charlotte, see A. Foucher de Careil, Leibniz et les deux Sophies, Paris, 1876.
121. This was the time when James II refused Louis XIV’s offer of aid towards securing for him the Polish throne, then vacant by the death of John Sobiesky; on which occasion Sophia wrote to the Duchess of Orleans that King James might pass for a saint, since we are told to become as little children, or we shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
122. These were of a kind of which the Electress Sophia had, as we have seen, had some experience. According to English usage, the King was alone entitled to an arm-chair (fauteuil); but, according to the German rule, the Electors were privileged to occupy an arm-chair even in the presence of the Emperor. Hence the King and the Elector could not sit in one another’s company; and, when the King actually came to Cleves, the Elector had to absent himself from the royal partie.
123. This favourite seat of both George I and George II was in September, 1813—shortly before Leipzig—the scene of a Hanoverian success against a French division.
124. It may be noted that Borkowski, Königin Charlotte als Mutter und Erzieherin (in Hohenzollern-Jahrbuch for 1903), defends the Queen against the charge of having insufficiently cared for the education of the heir to the throne, and cites in proof letters addressed by her to Alexander von Dohna, whom she selected and maintained against all opposition as the supervisor of her son’s education.
125. She told Schütz, about this time, that she was very sensible of the kindness shown her by the English people, but very sorry that she was so old that she would never be of any use to them, and much annoyed that her son had not the same inclinations on this head as she had herself, and made no secret of his sentiments.
126. ‘I do not see,’ writes Sophia in April, 1701, ‘how he can claim the English Crown before King James and his two sons, being himself as much a papist as they are; but perhaps he is offering to have his son educated in the Anglican religion.’
127. She writes that Macclesfield’s father had been most friendly to her as well as to Prince Rupert—‘car il voulait me donner au roi Charles.’—Macclesfield died shortly after his journey to Hanover.
128. The Electress bestowed on him a golden ewer and her portrait in a jewelled frame—the total expense amounting to 20,000 dollars—rather more than two-thirds of the sum spent during twoscore years on the maintenance of the palace buildings at Hanover. No wonder that this profuse expenditure was looked upon without much satisfaction in the long years of waiting that ensued.