Great Britain was never to see the face of its heiress, and the widowhood of the Electress Sophia was almost entirely spent in the tranquillity of Herrenhausen. More than any other place associated with her name, this palace and its still delightful gardens, in the midst of which her statue now stands, recall her regal personality. The building of the palace that was so long her home, and the laying-out of the gardens where Leibniz was so frequent a companion of her long daily walks, were begun by Duke John Frederick as early as the year 1665, when the old hunting-box of Lauenstädt was transferred hither. Herrenhausen Palace seems to have been reconstructed, under the superintendence of Sartorio, in imitation of the new palace at Osnabrück, of which, as has been seen, the younger brother, Ernest Augustus, had more or less borrowed the design from the Luxembourg at Paris. Ernest Augustus and Sophia elaborated John Frederick’s beginnings, considerably enlarging the gardens, which were designed by the elder Charbonnier, and carried out by him and his son, in 1697, though it was not till 1705 that the Elector George Lewis caused them to be completed in their present form, which suggests Dutch influences. Thus a pleasing mixture of styles and associations is presented by the solid clipped hedges, some of which in the garden theatre serve as side-scenes and conceal dressing-rooms (these are attributed specially to Quirini), by the prim summer-houses and the wilderness, by the grottoes and the cascades with their stalactites and shells, and by the profusion of statuary in gilt lead among the hedges and in cool marble by the artificial water. It was in these gardens that, during her married life, when she was already accustomed to solitude, Sophia consoled herself with the company of the nightingales, and here that, in 1700, she is found amusing herself with her ducks and swans, and with the new lodgings erected by her for their convenience. She had a genuine fondness for innocent open-air delights; at Lützenburg she speaks of her promenades with her daughter as affording her the greatest delight, while her sons disported themselves at the opera and at comedies played by ‘noble’ comedians; and on the gravelled paths of her Herrenhausen gardens she indulged her love of walking almost literally to the moment of her death. No fine day was allowed to pass without an hour or two—or even more—of her favourite pastime; and her persistency tired out all her attendants, except, as Toland elegantly puts it, when they had the honour of enjoying her conversation.^[129]

Among the buildings at Herrenhausen, where Sophia spent the greater part of her life from 1698 to 1714, the Orangery, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, ought specially to attract the visitor, since a portion of it was the residence, modest in dimensions, but decorated in a florid Italian style, of the Electress Dowager. It had been erected in 1692; its great hall was painted by Tommaso Giusti and stuccoed by Dossa Grana. The Electress’ rooms are small and narrow, but overloaded with decorations, and not in the most perfect taste, with the exception of the fine portal into the little garden.^[130] There seems no reason for crediting her with an artistic taste transcending that of most of her contemporaries, or sufficiently formed to maintain the Dutch preferences of her younger days against the more debased French and Italian, but more especially Italian, modes favoured by her husband and his brother.^[131] Clever with her hands as in every other way, she understood the use of the brush^[132] as well as of the embroidery needle;^[133] but neither artistic industry nor art, although as a descendant of the Stewarts she had doubtless inherited some love of both, was a sphere in which she sought to shine. Her husband consistently treated art as a mere handmaid to luxurious self-indulgence; thus, while he devoted nearly 25,000 dollars to the furnishing and adornment of his new opera-house, he wasted an even larger sum in the expenditure of a single carnival season.

Sophia had never shown much sympathy with what may be called the Venetian tastes of her husband; and, after her youth had ebbed away, had more and more come to live an intellectual life of her own. Perhaps, before recalling the political incidents of her last thirteen years in connexion with the question which invested them with an European significance, we may pause for a moment to summarise our impressions as to the most important features of her mind and character, as they present themselves to us more especially in these final years. The tragic part of her life was now over; but, as has been well said by the finest of the modern critics of her career, Professor Kuno Fischer, she had herself never played the part of a tragedy queen. Even a panegyric like that pronounced upon her by the old Hanoverian historian Spittler—by no means an undiscerning flatterer—seems too highly strung. He speaks of the ‘Teutschgründliche überfürstliche Aufklärung’—as who should say, the enlightenment above the ordinary enlightenment of princes, and one in its depth and thoroughness possible only to the Germanic mind—that rendered her deserving of the friendship of Leibniz. Beyond a doubt, Sophia was distinguished by an intellectual curiosity that was still uncommon, though much less so than is often supposed, among the women of her age. This curiosity her linguistic attainments (she was, as has been seen, from her youth up mistress of half a dozen languages) had long enabled her freely to satisfy. To the excellent system of education under which she had been trained she owed her acquaintance with various elements of theology, philosophy, and history. This knowledge she had improved in the course of a long life, abounding in (often involuntary) intervals of leisure, and bringing with it not a few special opportunities of learned intercourse. She had spent some years at Heidelberg, once more a fountainhead of learning; and, already at Osnabrück, she had been ambitious of converting that modest episcopal city into a centre of philosophical speculation, holding colloquies there with Francis Mercurius von Helmont, the interesting son of the great physicist.^[134] At a later date she read at least one of Spinoza’s works, towards which she seems to have been drawn by ideas of moral philosophy in which some resemblance to his has been thought traceable.^[135] Yet it may be doubted whether either here or afterwards at Hanover and Herrenhausen she was ever a profound student, or even so much as an ardent reader of books. She was fond of reading memoirs—such as those of Pierre Chanut, French ambassador at the Court of Christian of Sweden, or the celebrated autobiography of Marshal de Bassompierre. She had, also, a penchant for novels, preferring to the fashionable long-winded romances of her youth works enlivened by a humour congenial to her own. She asked Leibniz to draw up for her a list of all the novels she had read; for she had come to an end with Don Quixote and Don Guzman d’Alfarache, of which she preferred the former. Of German romances, it is almost equally to her credit that she mentions Simplicissimus, while avoiding the stagnant fashionable bombast of her age.^[136] A still more striking testimony to her critical insight may be found in the remark, which the admiring Duchess of Orleans states to have been confirmed by the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis, that nobody in the world better possessed Michel de Montaigne better than her aunt Sophia. Nor was she afraid of even more potent draughts; for, during her return journey from Italy, the Gargantua was read to her by Ezechiel Spanheim, divine and diplomatist. On the other hand, she does not appear to have greatly cared for historical reading on its own account; according to Leibniz, the reason why she took pleasure in Clarendon was ‘because she was acquainted with many persons mentioned by him.’ Yet she had no personal acquaintance with the Emperor Justinian, whom, as known to her from the Byzantine historian Procopius, she compares with Louis XIV. She certainly had a liking for moral theology and philosophy, which were, in general, more in the way of the ladies of the period than the historical sciences. She had read Boëtius, and was invited by Leibniz to read the Jesuit Friedrich von Spee, a leader in the crusade against that long-lived form of bigotry—the persecution of ‘witchcraft.’ Dogmatic theology had no charms for Sophia; and even the faithful Bishop Burnet’s book on a theme which ought to have interested her, namely, the Thirty-nine Articles, she put aside as ‘bon à feuilleter, mais non pas à lire,’ flippantly adding that the good binding of her copy would make it an ornament to her library. Philosophy, like religion, seems to have interested her primarily on the ethical side; the stoical maxims of Seneca and Epictetus had impressed her mind before it had opened itself to more comprehensive problems under the influence of Spinoza, whom, as we know, her favourite brother had sought to domesticate at Heidelberg, and afterwards, and, above all, under the influence of Leibniz. She can at no time have been very well seen in metaphysics, the study of which is held to contribute so largely to the formation of ideas on religion; she shared her eldest son’s somewhat crude notions on the origin of ideas, and would not—or could not—understand Leibniz’s argument about monads. Possibly, like many clever people of both sexes, she was rather too fond of startling her interlocutors; and the excellent Molanus respectfully shakes his reverend head at ‘Serenissima nostra, quæ a paradoxis sibi temperare nunquam potest.’ On the other hand, the diplomatist Thomas von Grote, another of her intimates, moved perhaps by a not unnatural jealousy, opined that the learned companions of her Herrenhausen walks would in the end take her a little out of her depth, though he had no fear that for her the consequences would be what they had been for Queen Christina of Sweden. As for the mathematical and physical sciences, she took that casual interest in them which, in the case of great personages, and of great ladies in particular, alternately makes the delight and the despair of savants; Leibniz distinctly states that works dealing in detail with such subjects are not among those which the Electress was fond of reading. When, in the last year of her life, the Czar Peter came to Hanover and talked mathematics to her, ‘she held her tongue.’

And yet, though neither a profound philosopher nor a phenomenally accomplished blue-stocking, Sophia was the very reverse of a commonplace personage. She was a woman of the world, but a very wise one. In age, as in youth, she sparkled with wit and intelligence, and in her both these gifts were interfused with that third and greatest gift of humour, which is a property of the soul as well as of the intellect.^[137] Of her conversation we can only judge from her letters, of which we fortunately possess a quite extraordinary quantity; but, if her speech was like her writing, its style must have been equally far ‘esloigné de l’aigreur,’—to borrow a phrase from Madame de Brinon, to whom she told not a few home truths. Her letters combine with the supreme charm of perfect naturalness a pungency in the choice of expressions superior, in the opinion of the Duchess of Orleans, to any minted by the academies; ‘for to write agreeably is better than to write correctly.’ Occasionally, her wit was singularly incisive, as when she called the same Madame de Brinon ‘une religieuse qui passe pour bel esprit,’ and her eloquence extraordinary ‘car elle parle toujours’; or when, Toland having more suo taken it upon himself in argument to whitewash the cannibals, she commended him for his prudence, in that, with all Christendom against him, he had provided himself with protectors. Not unfrequently, however, frankness and cynicism did duty for wit. Her jests spared neither Leibniz, nor the House of Hanover, nor ‘le bon lord Winchilsea,’ whom she found so heavy in hand, nor Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, of whom, when it was proposed to create him King Consort, she observed that he would be a King like Jove among the frogs—and perhaps popular for that very reason. She had, too, a good deal of fun as well as wit—as when, in acknowledging the courtesy of an unknown Mr. Smith in sending a descriptive account of England and the English (among whom she had ‘been brought up till she reached the age of twenty’), she says that he describes London and St Paul’s and the ‘pantquitinhouse’ as if she had never heard a word about them. De Gourville, whose qualities as a butt possibly remained a secret to his sublime self-consciousness, suspected her of a natural inclination to criticising any fellow-mortal brought into her presence, though he allowed that the person bantered by her was sure to be the first to laugh. She was a good hater, and could even hate at second hand, as in the instance of Madame de Maintenon, the bugbear of the Duchess of Orleans. But her aversions were, like all her feelings, kept in constant check by the dictates of reason as well as by her care for the interests of her family and House; and we have seen how even her sentiments towards Eleonora d’Olbreuze underwent a gradual mitigation which outsiders judged to be a complete change. It may, too, be doubted whether sarcasm was really natural to her, though her sense of humour always responded to the irony of things. She was alike open-minded and open-handed, and had nothing of the stinginess which sits so ill on high rank and position. Though towards the close of her life she was desirous that an income should be granted her by the British Crown and Parliament, it was only for political purposes that she desired this. She had quite money enough, she said, to keep up her German establishment. When she found that the distinguished services of the Brunswick-Lüneburg officers and men were left unnoticed in the Gazette, she was anxious to pay for a proper mention of them out of her own pocket. The geniality of her disposition shows itself in an affability which was the same to both great and small, and in her power to interest herself with the same readiness in the discourse of philosophers, the conversation of ministers of State, and the gossip of country ladies on domestic thoughts intent. It also showed itself in a hospitality which made everyone welcome at Hanover and Herrenhausen, and a tact which put all at their ease there; at no court in the world, wrote the Brandenburg statesman Paul von Fuchs, are les étrangers et les gastes treated better than at the Hanoverian. Though, during her later years, she lived chiefly in retirement at Herrenhausen, she by no means secluded herself, but received a large variety of visitors, both princely, personages and political and literary celebrities. Above all, it was always a delight to her to see Englishmen at her Court, as indeed it had been even before the passing of the Act of Settlement; and in welcoming them she carefully eschewed any and every distinction between parties—divided as these were in England with a severity unknown at the time to any other country. Occasionally, when the Elector was away on his campaigns, she took his place at Hanover in the reception of distinguished guests.^[138] Amiable to all, she reserved the treasures of her affection for those who were nearest to her—not only for the survivors of her own passionately loved brood, but for all the younger members of her family, in which she included the children of her favourite brother.^[139] The Duchess of Orleans comically avows her annoyance that everyone who has had the privilege of living with her aunt should be brought to entertain towards her the very sentiments of love and affection cherished by Elizabeth Charlotte herself. Yet she was quite impervious to flattery, and, when told by a diplomatist that the court of Versailles was full of her daughter’s praises, remarked that these were the usual talk to which an envoy was treated when there was nothing else to say to him. In her later years, Sophia seems never to have indulged herself either in outbursts of temper or in moods of discontent; although she allows that her vexation about the vagaries of her son Maximilian had proved to her that her philosophy was only skin deep.

Those, wrote Elizabeth Charlotte, who thought her aunt incapable of being of use in affairs of State, could have little knowledge of her intellectual powers. We have seen, however, that during her husband’s lifetime she had been allowed little direct interference in state concerns, though on several occasions Ernest Augustus had benefited both from listening to her advice and from utilising her personal influence. Her eldest son was not the kind of man to concede, like a sultan at Constantinople, a position of acknowledged control over his Government to his mother, the Electress Dowager. When unable to render to Leibniz a service solicited by him, she wrote rather bitterly that there were times when she found silence best. But, apart from the Succession question, towards which she, of course, occupied a distinct position of her own, a considerable sphere of political influence remained open to her in the last period of her life. More especially, she rendered excellent service by maintaining a good understanding with the court of Berlin, and by restoring it when the relations between the two courts had become strained, and her daughter proved unable to manage them. The influence which had been established over King Frederick I of Prussia by his ‘gnädigste Mama,’ she contrived, though she saw through him, to exercise even after her daughter’s death.

But even Sophia’s ‘nimbleness of mind,’ to use another expression of her favourite niece’s, was not so marked a characteristic of her as was the reasonableness which proceeded in nearly equal proportions from intellectual enlightenment and from a beneficent disposition towards humanity. She was, wrote Leibniz about 1701, ‘entirely on the side of reason; consequently, all measures calculated to make kings and peoples follow reason, will meet with her approval.’ A rationalist in the stricter sense of the term she can hardly be called; though her wholly unembarrassed way of expressing herself on any subject in heaven or earth at times resembles a want of reverence.^[140] She was irritated by Toland’s restless tongue; but, while thanking Burnet for putting her on her guard, indicated that she was too old for Toland to give her another twist (perhaps this may be a coarse translation of ‘pli’) in religion than that to which she had been long accustomed. For the rest, it was not, she said, her habit to ‘catechise’ English visitors. Anthony Collins’ plea for ‘Free-thinking’ struck her as both mischievous and ridiculously superfluous—‘more especially in England, where there was such a multitude of factions’; ‘Free thinquers,’ she observed, when complaining of his insolence in sending her the book, ‘are against all religions.’ All men, she allowed, might like to think as they choose so long as their conduct was honourable; but in a well-governed State all men ought not to be free to publish their opinions. Herein her conscientiousness as a German Princess no doubt counted for something. Thus, when she was asked to lend her aid towards inducing the East Frisian Government to proceed against the spreading eccentricities of the Pietists, she upheld the rights of authority. ‘Lutheran Princes,’ she declared, ‘are the Popes of our Church, and must be obeyed.’ For herself, she had a thoroughgoing dislike of anything ‘enthusiastic,’ and would not hear of shoemakers (like Jacob Behmen) becoming inspired prophets instead of sticking to their lasts.^[141] More than this: Kuno Fischer rightly says that ‘to her clear practical intellect the mysteries of religion remained obscure and alien’; and, when he asserts that she was at bottom a deist in her opinions, this is in so far true, that, while she avowed her belief in a personal Creator, she cannot be shown to have gone further in any declaration of her convictions. In 1709, Leibniz informed Toland that the Electress ‘was accustomed to quote and give particular praise to that passage of Scripture which demands whether it be consistent with reason that He that planted the ear should not hear, and He that formed the eye should not see?’ At the same time, her latitudinarianism was perfectly candid. She certainly (in 1702) encouraged the notion which had occurred to her son-in-law, the King of Prussia, of introducing the English Church liturgy into the Calvinistic services, telling him that he might then call himself Defender of the Faith. On the other hand, she had no sympathy with the views of what in one of her letters she calls ‘Heyschortz’ men;^[142] she laughed at an English clergyman who refused to set his foot in a Calvinist ‘temple,’ and she seriously blamed the early attempts of Queen Anne, as she interpreted them, to force the Presbyterians into conformity both in Scotland and in England. It was as a declared adherent of the Reformed or (as in England alone it was called) Calvinist confession, in which she had been brought up, that, as Toland notes, she built a ‘pretty church’ in the New Town of Hanover for the French Huguenot refugees, to which in his day King William III liberally contributed; and she seems to have at least intended to build a church for the German members of the same religious body. ‘You must know,’ she humorously wrote to Leibniz on this occasion, ‘that I am une dame fort zêlée.’ It was probably no mere commonplace of shortsighted criticism when, in 1700, about which time the idea of seeking to evangelise the heathen was first taking root in Germany, she pronounced it ‘a fine enterprise indeed’ to send out missionaries to India. ‘To me it seems,’ she remarked, ‘that the first thing ought to be to make good Christians at home in Germany, without going to so great a distance for the purpose of manufacturing them.’ In a word, she should be credited with genuine religious feeling; though demonstrativeness, whether on this or on any other subject, was altogether out of her way. And she hated religious factiousness, which she thought domesticated in England.^[143]

We have spoken of the Electress Sophia’s profession of the Reformed faith—a fact as to which, although it has been called into question, there cannot really be any doubt. As we saw, she was, according to her own account, in her childhood taught the Heidelberg Catechism; and, when she married the Lutheran Ernest Augustus, it was arranged that, though she was to take no Calvinist minister with her to Hanover, one should visit the town three or four times in each year, in order to administer the Sacrament to her. Toland explicitly states (as de Gourville, who in 1687 had a little scheme of his own for bringing over her husband and his family to Rome, had also stated at an earlier date) that the Electress was a Calvinist; but he adds, in illustration of the tolerance prevailing at the Court of Hanover, that ‘most of her women and other immediate servants were Lutherans, just as her son the Elector, though himself a Lutheran, had many Calvinists belonging to him; and both their Highnesses, to show a good example and their unfeigned charity in these lesser differences, do often go to church together.’^[144] Their only daughter married a Calvinist,^[145] and Sophia herself steadily adhered to the confession in which she was born, though her latitudinarian tendencies fell in easily enough with the tolerant principles prevailing in the Lutheran Church of Hanover, and represented by the head of its ecclesiastical administration, the worthy ‘Abbot’ Molanus.^[146] Nor is there any reason for supposing that, had she been actually summoned to ascend the English throne, she would, in the matter of religion, have failed to do what was expected of her. Early in 1713, she wrote to Leibniz that Molanus had so well explained to her his Lutheran creed, that there had been some talk of putting his exposition into print for publication in England. Clearly, it was not any question of this kind which would have interfered with her accession to the throne. She had sufficient confidence in herself to shrink from no step approved by both her reason and her conscience. Moreover, there are indications that she by no means regarded the Church of her mother and her brother’s native land with coldness; and, had Leibniz apprehended any objection on her part, he would hardly have proposed that the English establishment which he desired for the Electress should include an Anglican chapel. Indeed, in 1703, she is found expressing a wish that Queen Anne would carry her ecclesiastical zeal as far as Hanover, and contribute to the English church there; ‘in which event we would call it the English Church, and read the Book of Common Prayer in both tongues.’

The one change, however, to which she would at no time have consented,—not even, whatever de Gourville may have believed, when her husband was entertaining some such thought in connexion with his long effort for the Ninth Electorate^[147]—was conversion to the Church of Rome. In her old age, when Princess Caroline of Ansbach, for whom she cherished a particular affection, was systematically tempted to qualify herself by conversion to Rome for the hand of Archduke Charles, afterwards the Emperor Charles VI, there can be little doubt that the Princess was encouraged in her resistance by the Electress as well as by Leibniz.

Sophia was no stranger to one of the loftiest among the lofty conceptions which occupied the great mind of her friend and counsellor, Leibniz,—that which aimed at the reunion of Christendom. The correspondence on this topic between Leibniz and Bossuet, which took place in 1691-5, and after a pause was renewed in 1699, was brought about through the joint mediation of Sophia and her sister, the Abbess of Maubuisson. Mixed up in the transaction was Madame de Brinon, who found a refuge at Maubuisson after the sudden termination of her rule at Saint-Cyr. This good lady, whose ardent temperament was in glaring contrast with Bossuet’s imperturbable calm, made repeated attempts to bring the Electress of Hanover back into the fold, en attendant its enlargement by means of the Reunion. But Sophia was not at all flattered by these high-minded efforts. She trusted—so she told Madame de Brinon—in the goodness of God, who could not have created her in order that she should be lost; for the rest, she could not reconcile herself to the persecutions of the Protestants in France.^[148] But her aversion from Roman Catholicism went further than this. Although at times she spoke of such doctrines of the Church of Rome as the Intercession of Saints with nothing more than contemptuous indifference, she occasionally assumed an attitude of open hostility towards a creed which, as a child, she had been taught to hate. Of all religions, she told Lord Strafford, there was none that she abhorred so much as the Popish; for there was none so contrary to Christianity. Other passages to much the same effect might be cited. For the rest, in an undated letter to Madame de Brinon, Sophia, with her characteristic humour and perhaps her characteristic want of external reverence, so clearly explains her general religious position, that we may conclude our attempt to indicate it by extracting from this letter the following passage:—

Leibniz, whose name has already so often occurred in this chapter and in this volume, was consulted by the Electress Sophia in other matters besides religion, philosophy, and science. Both as enjoying her confidence and on his own account, he was a welcome guest at several courts, including the Imperial; and to the Houses of Hanover and Celle, in whose joint employment he stood as historiographer, he rendered invaluable service, not only in that capacity, but also as a publicist, on important occasions, demanding a comprehensive as well as effective treatment of the problems handled by him. But his direct influence upon the policy of the dynasty seems practically to have been limited to the question of the English Succession, which, as we have seen, had, up to the passing of the Act of Settlement, been regarded as more or less personal to the Electress, and which, after that date, continued to be largely, though by no means entirely, dealt with in the same way. Thus his position at the Electoral Court, where there is no sign of his having been consulted in matters of general politics by either Ernest Augustus or George Lewis, was perhaps occasionally misunderstood at the time, and has certainly been misunderstood since. He was never the Electress’ secretary, or even her quasi-official political adviser; he was only her trusted personal friend and servant, whose function in such matters was to suggest rather than to advise, and whose influence upon the conduct of affairs in which the Electress took an interest accordingly varied at different times. His exertions as to the English Succession, before 1701, have been already noticed. After the passing of the Act of Settlement, the Electress Dowager appointed, as her confidential agent to England, a diplomatic adventurer of the name of Falaiseau, who had come over to Hanover in Lord Macclesfield’s suite; and his reports seem, as a rule, to have passed through the hands of Leibniz. From 1702 onwards, as will be seen, the conduct of the relations of the House of Hanover began to fall largely into the hands of Bothmer; and, in 1705, on the union between Celle and Hanover, Bernstorff, and with him Robethon, passed out of the service of the late Duke George William into that of his nephew, the Elector. The more regular system of diplomatic representation at the Court of St. James of itself diminished the influence of Leibniz on these relations, more especially as Sophia never seems to have had much personal liking either for Bernstorff (perhaps because of his ineradicable ill-will against Brandenburg-Prussia, perhaps for other reasons) or for Robethon, who became invaluable to the Elector as his private secretary. The credentials of the Hanoverian envoys—the Schützes, Bothmer, and Grote^[149]—and residents at the Court of St. James—de Beyrie and Kreyenberg—were made out in the joint names of the Elector and the Electress Dowager, and all the official letters sent to England from this time forward in the name of either were drafted by Robethon. Thus, notwithstanding the active interest taken by Leibniz in a question the progress of which had owed much and continued to be indebted to his assiduity, its threads were no longer continuously in his hands. Whether this was a misfortune for its ultimate development and solution, need not be here discussed. From his earlier days onwards he had exhibited something of the defect habitual to politicians more exclusively academical than himself, who had a considerable experience of affairs—the defect of excess, which includes the mistake of not letting well alone. Not only, however, did the force of his genius enable him to find out the heart of every political problem to which he addressed himself, but the universality of his insight made clear to him its various aspects, and the energy of his mind supplied the impulse which converts design into action.^[150] Finally, his literary skill,^[151] added to his gifts of finding his material and disposing it according to the leading ideas with which he approached it, made him in the times in which his lot fell, as it made Gentz, an infinitely inferior personality, in another period of even deeper national humiliation, the foremost publicist of his age.^[152]

That Leibniz, whose political services to the Electress and her dynasty were, in any case, highly important, should at the same time have become her chosen intimate and personal friend, forms one of his titles to the grateful remembrance of those who believe this pair to have been worthy of one another. From his conversation and correspondence, which, in her later years, became more and more of a necessity to Sophia, her active and receptive mind derived constant stimulus and refreshment; while his humane as well as lofty wisdom, at no time seeking to avoid contact with the actualities of life, but neither ever conceding to them a larger claim than was their due, helped to fortify her character against the risk of being mastered by the element of frivolity inborn in most of her mother’s children. Leibniz’ own activity at Hanover, from the time when (as far back as 1673) he had first entered into the service of Duke John Frederick, was remarkably varied. He held the offices of librarian, archivist, and historiographer; fostered, among other activities in the dominions of his patrons, the endeavours of technical science, as in the instance of the mining industry of the Harz; and organised both scientific and literary effort, in connexion with his onerous task as the historian of the Guelfs, with his work as a philologer and with the studies in mental and moral philosophy, which were, in 1710, crowned by the production of his Théodicée. His influence upon the foundation of academies as levers for the advancement of scientific research^[153] was by no means limited to Berlin, where success had attended on his labours in consequence of the sympathetic support of Sophia’s daughter. The hopes placed by him on the third of the illustrious ladies of the Hanoverian dynasty who felt themselves honoured by his intimacy, were, notwithstanding her loyal efforts at the outset, doomed to disappointment. The Electoral Princess (Caroline of Ansbach) had been solaced by his Théodicée in a season of great anxiety; but, when the political consummation to which Leibniz had so actively helped to prepare had been actually achieved, he had to remain behind in Germany; and she found herself unequal to the task either of impressing his claims upon her impassive father-in-law—or of reconciling his merits with those of Newton.

During the years of Sophia’s widowhood, to which we must here confine ourselves, Leibniz was drawn nearer to her, not only by intellectual and moral sympathy, but also by the discomforts to which she was subjected by the Elector’s coldness, and by that Prince’s habit of expecting all services to be absolved as per contract. Sophia was unable to secure the fulfilment of Leibniz’s wish for a sinecure like that by which his friend, ‘Abbot’ Molanus, was recompensed for his ecclesiastical services. But her friendship with Leibniz was not dependent upon favours given or received. Not only was the encouragement which he derived from his intimacy with her and from that which through her he enjoyed with Sophia Charlotte and Caroline, of high value to him in the labours and in the trials of his life; but in the Electress Sophia’s case, at all events, her nature was in many respects supplementary to his own. Their correspondence thus furnishes a memorial of a friendship alike sincere and productive; and their names will always remain inseparable from one another.

Sophia Charlotte, though her marriage had long since made it necessary for her to leave her mother’s side, and though the trials to which she had since been subjected had greatly added to that mother’s anxieties, and had often been mitigated by her tact and good-humour rather than by those of the Queen herself, remained Sophia’s truest joy, till taken away by death in 1705. Mother and daughter had kept up a continuous correspondence with one another, besides interchanging visits when possible; nor could the completeness of the confidence existing between them be better illustrated than by the treatment which, after Sophia Charlotte’s death, it was thought judicious to apply to the documents of their mutual affection. At the instigation of Leibniz, the extant letters of the Electress Sophia to her daughter were committed to the flames at Berlin, so that only a small remnant of the series, copied out by him for his own use, have been preserved. Inasmuch as neither have any letters from Sophia Charlotte to her mother come down to us, they may be surmised to have been similarly destroyed by way of precaution. Possibly, these proceedings may have been in part due to evidence contained in these letters as to efforts made, in the Hanoverian interest, at the Court of Berlin by Leibniz or others. The chief trouble of Sophia Charlotte’s married life—King Frederick I’s infatuation for the Countess von Wartenberg—had been particularly acute in the period just preceding the Queen’s death; and her last visit to her mother (in January, 1705) could only be carried out by her submitting to the condition that an invitation to Hanover should also be sent to her detested rival. During this visit Sophia Charlotte died, the victim of a painful and incurable disease that befell her when her intellectual abilities were at their full height. Her death, even more impressively than her life, proved the justice of her grandson Frederick the Great’s tribute to her strength of soul. The illness of the Queen had been concealed from her mother, who herself lay ill; and thus, as she wrote, heart-broken, to her widowed son-in-law, she lost her darling child without even setting eyes upon her.^[154]

Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach had, in her thirteenth year, been left an orphan by the death of her mother, who had been united to the Elector John George IV of Saxony as her second husband. In 1696, the child had been placed under the care of her guardians, afterwards the first King and Queen in Prussia. Thus Lützenburg became the home of Caroline’s childhood; and here she became familiar with the intellectual society which Sophia Charlotte loved to gather around her, and above all with Leibniz. The nature of their intercourse may be gathered from the letter, sublime in thought, which he wrote to her on the occasion of Sophia Charlotte’s death. Only a few months after this event—in September, 1705—Caroline, lovely in person and richly endowed in intellect, had illustrated the saying of the Electress Sophia, that ‘nowadays princesses are sacrificial victims.’ After a proper interval had been allowed to elapse upon the breakdown of the project of marrying Caroline to Archduke Charles, the Electoral Prince George Augustus, to whom the thoughts of his grandmother, the Electress, had been directed already during the attempts made in 1704 to induce Caroline to change her religion, paid a preliminary visit to Ansbach. The rumour which had arisen in 1702, that the Electoral Prince was to find a consort in Sweden and Queen Sophia Charlotte’s counter-suggestion of the Duchess Marie-Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, had alike come to nothing. On September 2nd, 1705, the marriage between the Electoral Prince and Caroline of Ansbach was celebrated at Hanover. Here Caroline spent the following nine years of her life, beyond a doubt its happiest period; and, during the remainder of Sophia’s own existence, she in a large measure filled the place in her affections which her daughter Sophia Charlotte had so long occupied. The congeniality of their tastes and dispositions made her a delightful companion at Herrenhausen to her grandmother-in-law; and thus a kindly fortune granted to Sophia, who was so singularly capable of enjoying it, the truest joy of old age. The Electress repeatedly speaks of the happiness of the marriage; nor can there be any doubt as to the genuine affection on both sides which constituted that happiness. Early in 1707, the Electoral Princess gave birth to her eldest son (destined afterwards to disappoint an indulgent world as Frederick, Prince of Wales), upon whom, a year later, his great-grandmother is found bestowing an infantine equipment for a fancy ball; and three daughters were subsequently born to the young pair, before they accompanied King George I to England. The prospects of a permanent establishment of the Hanoverian dynasty upon the British throne were thus signally advanced by this marriage; and to these prospects and their initial realisation we must now finally turn. They filled Sophia’s last years with anxieties and uncertainties; yet, on the whole, life flowed more easily for her in this final period of her existence; although the joyousness of girlhood, which she so vividly recalls in her Memoirs, was a thing of the past, together with the experiences—some grotesque, some painful, some tragic—of her married days. The deep agitations of her life were at an end; and she might pace the Herrenhausen gardens without caring too deeply even for the chances of the English Succession.

Thus we may imagine this spirited and sensible lady, at any time in these last thirteen years of her long life, exemplifying the old saw of ‘mens sana in corpore sano.’ In the main, she enjoyed excellent health; and Leibniz’ description of the day of her arrival at Lützenburg is certainly astonishing for a lady of seventy-four. It included, in accordance with her usual habits, two hours of walking exercise. Erect and handsome, with her mother’s aquiline nose and abundant hair, she was, if not a Gloriana as imagined by poets, a princess worthy to mount a royal throne—or at least one who, if placed there, would of a certainty not lose the firmness of her footing by reason of such an elevation.

After, in 1701, a copy of the Act pledging King and Parliament to the new limitation of the Succession had been placed in the hands of the Electress Sophia, thirteen long years of expectancy awaited her, which might have made a less stout heart grow faint. Or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say that a nature less happily balanced, and uninured by experience, both inherited and personal, to the necessity of patience and resignation, might have fallen into mistake upon mistake, and have thus courted failure. Sophia, prudently choosing her own path, almost to the last did nothing to affront the approach of success. To suppose, however, that either her policy or that of her House was one of masterly inactivity, would be almost as contrary to fact as the converse assumption that, either before or after 1701, she was possessed by an absorbing desire to find herself seated on the English throne. The former supposition is confuted by the single circumstance that, by way of furnishing the necessary means in the event of a sudden crisis, a sum of not less than 300,000 dollars was secretly provided by the Committee of the Calenberg Estates, and placed in the hands of the Hanoverian envoy in London—the secret of this expenditure being kept for not less than seventy years.^[155] The other assumption is simply irreconcilable with the whole tenor of Sophia’s life.

The festivities at Hanover and Celle, on the occasion of the transmission of the Act of Settlement, were hardly at an end, when King William III had a meeting at the Loo with his old friend Duke George William. The Duke was accompanied by his grandson, the Electoral Prince George Augustus, whom, according to Toland, the King received as a son. This Prince certainly seems in his youth to have displayed attractive qualities, which were afterwards driven into the background by his master quality, self-conceit; curiously enough, though he was a fair linguist, it had not been thought necessary to make him well acquainted with the English tongue. At this interview, the account of which shows how loyally the old Duke of Celle was working for the interests of the dynasty, King William promised to use his influence in order to obtain from Parliament an annual revenue for the Electress Sophia, and mentioned his intention of inviting her and the Electoral Prince to visit England in the coming spring. On his sounding his next heir, the Princess Anne, at all events as to the proposal of summoning the Electress, she is said to have pretended to be still in hopes of an heir. The Electress on her side seems to have trusted in the fulfilment of the King’s promise, not only during the remainder of his reign, but for a few months afterwards.

But no time was left to the King for carrying out his design. On September 6th, 1701, nine days after the conclusion of the Grand Alliance to which William III had set the seal on his visit to Holland, James II died; and, by recognising his son as King of England, Louis XIV once again, and more completely by his own act than ever, identified himself with the Stewart cause. His grandson, King Philip of Spain, followed his example; and Pope Clement XI publicly extolled the action of Louis XIV, as entitling him to the gratitude of posterity. In the final form of the instrument of the Grand Alliance—which William III was not to live to see actually concluded—a clause was inserted binding the contracting Powers not to conclude peace with France, until the King of England should have received satisfaction for the grave insult involved in the recognition of the ‘pretended Prince of Wales’ as King. In other words, the War of the Spanish Succession had become a War of the English Succession also; and, to whatever extent this fact might be overlooked during the course of the conflict, it was certain to become prominent again so soon as a settlement began to be seriously discussed. Inasmuch as the first public suggestion of such a clause had been made by a prominent Tory politician (Edward Seymour), it can hardly have been inspired from Hanover, though in a letter to the Electress, written as early as 1701, Leibniz had stated such a stipulation to be desirable.

In England, the recognition of the Pretender by Louis XIV had an immediate consequence in the Attainder and Abjuration Acts, passed in January, 1702, by William III’s sixth Parliament. The Act of Attainder had been criticised beforehand by the Electress Sophia, who, in October, 1701, told Leibniz that there was an intention of declaring the poor Prince of Wales a rebel, such as Monmouth had been declared to be before him, ‘though his personal merit deserved a better fate.’ Why should she have refused this modicum of sympathy to her kinsman, who, not more unfortunate in his fate than he was in his infatuation, was about this very time rejoicing that Pope Clement would manifestly ‘leave no stone unturned to show how much he favours us’? The Abjuration Act, which led to long and warm debates in both Houses, provided both for abjuring the ‘pretended Prince of Wales,’ and for swearing fidelity to the ‘rightful and lawful King’ and ‘his heirs according to the Act of Settlement.’ A motion in the Commons, carried by a single vote, made these engagements obligatory; the opposition in the Lords ended in nothing but a protest, the list of whose signatories, including the names of Craven and Jeffreys, as it were mirrors the story of the downfall of the Stewart monarchy in England.

On March 8th, 1702, King William III died, after a fortnight’s illness following on his fall from his horse. To Portland, the faithful friend for whom the King had asked, without being able to speak to him intelligibly, shortly before his death, the Electress Sophia, when the first shock of the blow had passed over, wrote in unaffected sorrow—