By the death, on March 8th, 1702, of King William III and the accession of Queen Anne, the prospect which the Act of Settlement seemed to have once for all thrown open to the House of Hanover was again clouded over. Queen Anne, indeed, at once sent an assurance to the Electress through the Hanoverian resident, the elder Schütz, that her sentiments towards the House of Hanover were the same as those of her predecessor,^[157] and a few days afterwards repeated the message in writing. An Order in Council directed the Archbishop of Canterbury to insert the name of the Princess Sophia in the Book of Common Prayer; and, as was usual in such cases, this Order was in due course sent on to Dublin.^[158] It has been observed, nor is there great exception to be taken to the remark, that beyond the issue of this Order nothing was done by Queen Anne in the whole of the earlier period of her reign on behalf of the Hanoverian Succession. In other words, the proposals discussed at the Loo, which were to have resulted in the payment of an annuity to the Electress, and to her or the Electoral Prince residing in England, were not carried further. Interchanges of civility, however, took place; and the Earl of Winchelsea arrived at Hanover, in order to return the congratulations brought thence by Count Platen on the occasion of Queen Anne’s accession. But, though the special mission was flattering, Sophia’s wish, that the ambassador might bring with him some money which she might apply to the necessities of her sons Christian and Maximilian, remained unfulfilled. For the rest, she told the Raugravine Louisa that, for all the compliments which had passed, ‘time would show’ whether she was still wanted in England; and she continued to bear herself calmly, avoiding the appearance of excessive zeal that some of her partisans could not deny themselves. She had thought it a piece of impertinence, when, after his return to England, Toland had, early in this year, followed up his Anglia Libera by another publication provocatively entitled Reasons for addressing His Majesty to invite into England their Highnesses the Electress Dowager and the Electoral Prince of Hanover; which, soon after Queen Anne’s accession, was duly censured by the House of Lords. The Electress had reasons for disliking a championship which under King William would have been superfluous and was now inopportune. She could not consider Toland so ‘infâme’ as Cresset painted him; and she took care that in her presence he should not say a disrespectful word about Queen Anne. But, when, in 1702, Toland found it convenient again to quit England for Germany, he left the court of Hanover unvisited; nor does he seem to have reappeared there till 1707.

The Elector’s instincts as to the doubtfulness of Queen Anne’s real sentiments on the subject of the Hanoverian Succession were justified by what ensued. The hope of an immediate grant to the Heiress Presumptive out of the ample Civil List good Queen Anne frustrated by the highly popular step of making over to the Exchequer £100,000 towards lightening the burdens of the nation. The claims upon the national resources were many and urgent; and Parliament could perhaps hardly be expected to consider how much a subvention was needed by the Electress, more especially in view of the presents which, in accordance with the usage of the times, she as well as the Elector had to make to a succession of English special ambassadors. There can, however, be no doubt but that, already in this early part of Queen Anne’s reign, and even before the Toryism of her first Parliament had encouraged in her the tendency which her choice of ministers had implied, deliberate attempts had been made to influence unfavourably her attitude towards the Succession of the House of Hanover. Moreover, her nature was so peculiarly prone to strong personal attachments, and her gift of insight into the motives of men was so unmistakably accompanied by an absence of all real power of political judgment, that she could hardly but be dominated by a strong prepossession against the line so likely to succeed her on the throne of her ancestors. Yet, hitherto, neither the Electress Sophia nor any of the members of her House—and least of all her impassive eldest son, who at one time had been supposed to have a chance of the hand of the Princess Anne—had been on unfriendly terms with the new Queen; nor is there any reason for supposing her to have imparted to any of them a share in the wild scheme rumoured to have been set on foot for ousting her from the Succession. When, however, in May, 1702, the Whig Earl of Carlisle, the First Lord of the Treasury, carried in the House of Lords his demand for an enquiry into the scandalous rumour which asserted that King William had intended by a kind of posthumous coup d’état to raise the Electoral Prince to the throne, Queen Anne showed no desire for the vindication of her predecessor’s good faith towards herself, and pointedly dismissed Carlisle from office. Nor is it probable that, at this early stage, the Queen was much intent upon the interests of her half-brother, the Pretender. The favourite advisers by whom she was swayed—Marlborough and Godolphin—could have no wish to hurry her intervention on behalf of either of the two sides, with both of which they desired to stand well; and the Tory majority in the Commons, typified by the Speaker, Harley, were certainly not prepared to unsettle the Act of Settlement. The Act for the further Security of the Protestant Succession passed in December, 1702, which declared it high treason to seek to defeat the Succession to the Crown as now limited by law, or to set aside the next Succession, followed the precedent of a similar Act passed in the previous reign, and accordingly encountered no resistance. Thus Queen Anne was slow to take up any definite attitude towards the political problem which overshadowed the whole course of her reign; and she was consequently all the more unwilling, and remained so from first to last, to listen to any suggestion of carrying out William III’s promise and inviting the Electress Dowager and the Electoral Prince, or either of them, to England. The probability of this plan being brought forward, either as a practical proposal or by way of testing the sincerity of her own views on the subject, acted as a perennial irritant upon the Queen. Neither she nor her advisers are to be blamed for leaving without response the suggestion, pardonably enough made by Sophia, that the un-English title of ‘Hereditary Princess’ should be conferred upon her. Other signs were noticeable of the uncertainty prevailing at the Court of St. James. At Hanover and Herrenhausen, Cresset watched the Electress with a suspiciousness that could not escape her attention, though she commented on it with her usual insouciance; and Stepney even left off corresponding with her and her intimates, in order not to give offence nearer home. In conversing with the Englishmen and Scotchmen who attended the Court of Hanover, anxious to promote its fortunes or their own, the Electress naturally sought to emphasise her confidence in her august relative, the Queen. But in her intimate correspondence she was fain to strike a different key. She told the Raugravine Amalia that Queen Anne had no desire to be survived by her, although (quoting a Dutch proverb which she has made classical) she allowed that ‘creaking wagons go on for a long time,’ and suggested that the Queen’s real preference was for her brother.^[159] Matters continued very much in this stagnant and unsatisfactory condition during the first three years (or thereabouts) of Queen Anne’s reign. In March, 1694, Sophia writes with some bitterness, that Queen Anne ‘seems to have more friendship for the King of Prussia than for us, inasmuch as she speaks of the’ [Prussian] ‘and says nothing of the Brunswick troops, without whom the battle’ [of Blenheim] ‘could not have been won. This is a sample showing what is to be expected in that quarter.’ And she adds that the statement in the Gazette of the great presents sent by the Queen to Hanover is untrue, whoever caused it to be inserted.

It may, at this point, be noted that the violence of public feeling which about this time disturbed Scotland had very seriously endangered the prospects of the Succession of the House of Hanover in that kingdom. Here, it was universally believed that Queen Anne cherished the secret wish of securing the Succession to her brother; and no declarations to the contrary exercised the slightest effect upon the stubbornness of preconceived Scottish opinion. At the same time, a strong belief that she meditated a Prelatic as well as a Jacobite reaction, led to the anti-Episcopalian legislation of the last Scottish Parliament, which met in 1703.^[160] The Act of Security brought forward in this Parliament provided that the Estates of the Realm should meet within twelve days after the present Queen’s death, and should proceed to name a successor professing the Protestant religion. A proposal to insert the name of the Electress Sophia was rejected; but the ministers, besides frustrating an attempt at inserting a series of limitations calculated to take away the last vestige of authority from the Crown, also defeated a proposal to limit the Protestantism of the successor to ‘the true Protestant religion as by law established within this kingdom,’ which would have excluded the Lutheranism of the House of Hanover. On the other hand, the Government could not resist a clause, proposed by the Earl of Roxburghe, precluding Parliament from naming, as successor to the Crown of Scotland, the person who was successor to the Crown of England, unless conditions should have been previously settled securing the interests of Scotland against English or foreign interference. The Act of Security, with this clause inserted in it, passed by large majorities; but the Duke of Queensberry refused to give to it the royal assent. In 1704, however, the national and religious agitation remaining unalloyed, the Marquis of Tweeddale touched the Act with the royal sceptre: and a condition of things was thus legalised which might at any time put an end to the personal union of the two countries, or actually provoke war between them. But time often provides its own remedy; and, in January, 1707, the Act of Union became law, whose Second Article, limiting the Succession to Sophia and her heirs, had met with only a feeble opposition upholding the provisions of the Act of Security. When the Union was on the eve of actual accomplishment, the Electress Sophia expressed herself as well satisfied, adding that, though she had never supposed the Scottish lords against her, she thought it quite natural that conditions should be imposed—another illustration of the way in which she looked upon constitutional questions. In Ireland, the Succession had already in the previous year been regulated by a measure modelled upon the English Act of Settlement, but subjecting all officials and magistrates to a rigid Church of England test.

Even in this early period of Queen Anne’s reign, the Electress Sophia, though, according to her wont, she abstained from all restless manœuvring, was by no means without thought for the future. On June 4th, 1703, she signed three powers for Schütz, the envoy extraordinary in London, authorising him, in the event of the Queen’s death, to bring forward her lawful claim to the throne; and she kept up a correspondence with friends in England, both directly and through Leibniz. In November, 1703, she put it to Schütz that, if Marlborough resigned the command in the Low Countries, it would be right to appoint the Elector in his place; ‘for if it is wished that the Elector should have a good opinion of the English, they ought to do something towards making him entertain such an opinion and enabling him in any court to support those who were in his favour.’ As for Leibniz, though indefatigable and full of initiative as ever, he naturally enough occasionally fell short of the necessary familiarity with English persons and affairs. Thus, about this very time, the Electress had to comment on his approval of a scheme for marrying the Electoral Prince to one of Marlborough’s daughters, by reminding him that the Duke had no more daughters in the matrimonial market. Marlborough, however, gained the goodwill of the Elector, above all by commending the behaviour of the Hanoverian troops at Blenheim; and, on a visit to Hanover in December, 1704, while the laurels of his great victory were still green, he completely won over the Electress by the fascination of his manner. She declared that she had never seen anyone ‘plus aisé, plus civil, ny plus obligeant,’ and that he was as good a cavalier as he was a captain. The extraordinary civility shown to him on this occasion, when a special household was provided for him and other courtesies were multiplied,^[161] was not thrown away. His correspondence with the Electoral court—and with the Elector in particular, whose admiration for the military genius of the great commander was genuine—now became continuous.

The year 1705 marked an epoch in the history of the Succession question, as we saw that it did in the personal life of the Electress Sophia, who, during its course, lost not only her beloved daughter, but also her old admirer and constant friend, Duke George William of Celle. All the dominions of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line were now at last united under the single rule of the Elector George Lewis, and into his coffers flowed most of the great private wealth of his late uncle and father-in-law, which had materially contributed to the high consideration enjoyed by George William. About the same time the long-standing quarrel with the elder (Wolfenbüttel) branch of the House of Brunswick was brought to a close, and the House of Hanover stood stronger than ever before the world. No season could have been more opportune for taking up the question of the Succession with renewed earnestness. Its vigorous prosecution was further favoured by the circumstance that the late Duke of Celle’s prime minister, Baron Andreas Gottlieb von Bernstorff, now passed into the Hanoverian service, and, on the death of Count Platen in 1709, became prime minister at Hanover. He was already a statesman of proved ability, trained in the school of his father-in-law, Chancellor Schütz, whom he describes as one of the greatest and most capable ministers ever known to him. While he always kept his political ends clearly in view, Bernstorff’s political action was marked by ruthlessness that is apt to make a statesman of his type cordially hated where he is not eagerly followed; and his bitter jealousy of Brandenburg-Prussia in particular was unlikely to commend him to the goodwill of the Electress Sophia. Her faithful echo at Versailles allows us to make a guess as to the sentiments of the Electress concerning him; and they were afterwards reproduced by Queen Caroline, who, like Elizabeth Charlotte, was unwilling to differ in her opinion of men or measures from their venerated senior. Bernstorff’s activity in the last stage of Sophia Dorothea’s catastrophe proves that he had not been captivated by the influence which had so long been dominant at Celle; and the Duchess Eleonora doubtless held the same opinion of him as the other ladies. He devoted himself with indefatigable zeal to advancing the greatness of the Hanoverian dynasty; but he laboured in no narrow spirit and with no petty aims, as an adequate survey of his statesmanship in the earlier years of George I, should it ever be made, could not fail to show. With Bernstorff (to mention no other name) Jean de Robethon had passed from the service of Celle into that of Hanover—a perfect type of the sort of man and the sort of mind whose destiny it is to be a secretis of those whose grasp is on the wheel of State. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had driven him, like so many other capable Frenchmen, into the service of the foes of France, he had served his apprenticeship under no less a master than William III. During Queen Anne’s reign he became one of the most assiduous and useful instruments in the transactions connected with the Succession. For a time, he in Bothmer’s absence attended to affairs at the Hague; but he then returned to Hanover, where as confidential secretary he was of infinite service to both the Elector and the Electress, and played a political part not the less important because it was to a great extent played behind the scenes. Bernstorff trusted no man more implicitly than Robethon, who, in the end, was said to have acquired an unbounded influence over him; and by Robethon were drafted all, or virtually all, the despatches and letters sent to England by the Electoral family from the date of his entrance into their service to that of George I’s landing in England. All the more important of these documents likewise passed through the hands of Hans Caspar von Bothmer, whose services to the dynasty had likewise begun at Celle; whence he had been sent as envoy to Vienna, passing on, after he had acted as a plenipotentiary at Ryswick, to Paris. Unlike Bernstorff, and unlike Bernstorff’s master, Bothmer united political insight of a high order with remarkable diplomatic ability and tact; and, after he had, when the crisis came, shown perfect prudence in the supreme moment of success, he was perhaps the only one of the Hanoverians of the early Georgian period who attained to personal popularity in London. But this was later. On the accession of Queen Anne, it had been thought desirable that he should in the first instance take up a post of observation at the Hague, since the Queen was at present unlikely to welcome so prominent a Hanoverian diplomatist to her Court. Thus it was from the Hague that he actively helped to bring about the English legislative enactments, which we shall immediately notice, and which signally improved the prospects of the Hanoverian Succession. We shall see that, though his first and second stay as envoy in London were but short,^[162] he returned thither in time to direct the final stage in the transactions connected with the Succession, and to apply to this task a consummate skill and an equally conspicuous courage.

The ministerial arrangements made after the death of his uncle by the Elector George Lewis, who was at no time wont to delegate to others any part of what he had clearly recognised as his own bounden duty, might seem to imply that, from 1705 onwards, the conduct of the Succession question was more and more taken out of the hands of his mother. It is true that the Elector had, as the head of his dynasty, become more vigilant; but her interest in the question had remained the same. And, as a matter of fact, at no previous time had her name been bandied about between the political parties in England as it was now and during the remaining years of her life. To the close of the year 1705 belongs that strange episode in the party history of the reign, the attempt on the part of a section among the Tories to bring the Electress over to England.

Hitherto, she had wisely refrained—nor is there any indication that her eldest son and her grandson had done otherwise—from identifying the interests of her House with either of the two Parliamentary parties, both of which had had a part in the Act of Settlement. No doubt it was the Whigs who had most warmly supported the insertion of her name in that Act; the embassy which had brought it over to Hanover had been exclusively made up of Whigs; and, writing to Leibniz towards the close of 1701, Sophia, apparently with reference to the approaching English elections, excusably lets slip the phrase: ‘le parti des Whigs qui est le nostre.’ But, already in the following year, when annoyed by the officious importunities of Toland and that other grand fâcheux, Sir Peter Fraiser, she confided to her niece Elizabeth Charlotte her resolution not to mix herself up with the manœuvres of the Presbyterians and Whigs, which, as we have seen, were at that time agitating Scotland. ‘Besides,’ she observed, with a fastidiousness not inexplicable when the composition of Macclesfield’s embassy is remembered, ‘the Whigs that came to me here I found anything but charming.’ And, again in 1703, she ordered Baron Brauns not to answer one of Toland’s long diatribes against the Tories by more than a simple acknowledgment. There was no fear, she remarked, of their supporting the Pretender; no person of substance, in fact nobody but Catholics and adventurers set on making their fortunes, were on his side; for the rest, she found as many honest men among the Tories as elsewhere. She had, as a matter of fact, certain affinities with this party; while some of their opponents in the House of Commons offended her, as a true Stewart who remembered the excesses of the Commonwealth days, by comparing the Prince of Wales to Perkin Warbeck and branding him as a bastard—all in order to tickle the ears of le petit peuple. There could be no question, she told Leibniz in the same letter, as to the Prince’s claims interfering with her own; her right was based on her Protestantism; except for this, many others stood between the Crown and herself. While, then, she adhered to her determination to place herself in the hands of neither party, there was no reason why the Tories should not in their turn seek to make her listen to their charming. When, about the end of 1704, it had become known through Marlborough that the Electress would be pleased to receive a formal invitation to England, both parties seem to have risen to the occasion; but, while the Whigs returned to the notion of bringing over the Electoral Prince, some of the Tories became intent on the Electress herself being invited. Partly to ingratiate themselves with her, partly to spite Queen Anne, who preferred to their guidance that of the moderates of both sides under the leadership of Marlborough, Godolphin, and Harley, the malcontent Tories, led by Rochester and known as the ‘High-fliers,’ resolved on an attempt to take the game into their own hands. With Rochester she had been on friendly terms from the first; in June, 1702, she writes that he was among the first to vote for the Act of Settlement, and that she had always mentioned this to those who wished to set her against him.^[163] Towards the end of September, 1705, a correspondent informed Rochester of the cordial response returned by the Electress to certain overtures made on his behalf; he declared himself convinced that, whenever the Queen and Parliament called upon her, the Electress would, in the face of all difficulties, wait upon Her Majesty in England; and, more than this, she had told him, and those in attendance on her, that, so soon as the Parliament summoned her, she was ready to obey. (In a letter to Schütz of about the same date, Sophia, however, qualifies this consent by requiring a proviso that she should be supplied with means of living in England as became a Princess of Wales.) Though, Rochester’s correspondent added, the Elector was exceeding modest on the subject of some of his family coming to England, the Electress spoke as the Elector thought. Sophia was on friendly terms with other members of the Tory party besides Rochester. With Ormonde, for instance, she kept up a correspondence both in this and in the following year. But the task of moving an address to the Crown, in which it was proposed that the Heiress Presumptive should be invited to England, was committed to a quite recent convert to the ranks of the High-flyers, Lord Haversham. He displayed a proper zeal by hazarding the suggestion that it would be of the greatest advantage for the Electress to make the personal acquaintance of the Bench of Bishops. The comedy ended in the rejection of Haversham’s motion by a majority of Peers; but he returned to the fray in a pamphlet. In the Commons a letter advocating the proposal, hinting that it was approved by the Electress and censuring the Whigs for opposing it, was voted libellous. This much-vext letter was signed by Sir Rowland Gwynne, who was at the time residing at Hanover; but its real author was Leibniz. Towards the close of 1705, Marlborough made use of the opportunity of another visit paid by him to Hanover for explaining the situation to the Elector. Marlborough, who, while anxious both to please the Queen and to keep the game so far as possible in his own hands, was more and more identifying his own interests with the ascendancy of the Whigs, easily succeeded in making clear to the Elector, how it was not in his interest that his mother should at present proceed to England; and he was able to add effect to his arguments by exhibiting an official notice of the intention of the English Cabinet to introduce Naturalisation and Regency Bills in the interests of the Electoral House. The understanding between the Elector and Marlborough now became better than ever, while the Elector’s confidence in the Whigs steadily grew. It is impossible to say whether this was the time when Marlborough proffered at Hanover a loan of £20,000 in return for a blank commission signed by the Electress Sophia, which conferred on him the supreme command of the military and naval forces of the three kingdoms after the death of Queen Anne.

The High-fliers had thus merely played into the hands of the Whigs, who were in the majority in the new House of Commons that met in October, 1705. The Address to the Queen had warmly thanked her for her great care and endeavour to settle the Succession of the kingdom of Scotland in the House of Hanover; and soon afterwards the Bills were brought in which Marlborough had announced at Hanover. By the first of these, the Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover, and her issue were naturalised as English subjects; and it is strange that the legal status thus secured to her should have been so persistently ignored in English national biography.^[164] The second of these Bills, purporting to provide for the better security of the Queen’s person and Government, was introduced in the Lords with much eloquence by the ever-young Lord Wharton. This Bill made it high treason to assert in writing, and attached the penalties of a præmunire to the assertion by word of mouth, that the Queen was not a lawful Sovereign, or that the Sovereign in Parliament could not limit the descent of the Crown; and it further appointed seven great officers of State, and certain other persons, to administer the government of the realm in the event of the Queen’s demise and the absence from England of her lawful successor. The Bill met with no opposition in the Lords, though Rochester contrived to carry a limitation, supposed to safeguard the Act of Uniformity; but in the House of Commons it lay long on the table. The High-fliers, putting forward as their spokesman Sir Thomas Hanmer (who up to the last professed the deepest devotion to the interests of the Electress Sophia), were once more attempting to take the game out of the hands of the Whigs by proposing that the Electress should be brought over. Much use was made, as appears from a passage in Burnet’s inaccurate narrative, of a letter written in November by the Electress Sophia to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which she had reiterated the position consistently maintained by her, that she was prepared to come to England, should both the Queen and Parliament desire it. This position was alike logical and appropriate; but the letter did not suit the Whigs, who were well aware that Queen Anne would never be brought to express such a desire. On the rejection of Hanmer’s motion the Electress informed Burnet with much dignity that, should it prove to be in the interests of State and religion, she remained ready to cross to England if invited, provided she were created Princess of Wales. But, at the same time, she expressed to Marlborough her conviction that her intentions had been so misrepresented to the Queen that her coming to England now would be superfluous. There is no reason for accepting Burnet’s statement that her letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury had been instigated by the Tories; but neither did she show any disposition towards encouraging the Whigs. In truth, though Sophia was not destined to mount a royal throne, and though what might be termed her monarchical apprenticeship had been served in a State that had but recently ceased to be petty and whose system of government was to all intents and purposes absolute, she displayed a higher capacity for constitutional rule than Queen Anne, who could only maintain a balance between factions by subjecting herself to their leaders in turn. It cannot be satisfactorily shown that the Electress definitely preferred the Tories, while the Elector favoured the Whigs. In fact, she remained on good terms with both the leading parties; although she did not turn a deaf ear even to overtures from so unsafe a politician as Buckingham, who, after taking a leading part in the attempt to bring her over to England, tried to engage her in a fresh intrigue to that end.^[165] The Regency Bill, as it was shortly called, in the end became law; and Parliament, which had further shown its goodwill to the House of Hanover by voting a modest subsidy for the payment of additional Hanoverian and Celle troops, was prorogued in March, 1706.

In the following May, Lord Halifax, who as Charles Montagu had been a leading Whig statesman already under William III and had quite recently been appointed one of the Commissioners for the Union with Scotland, was chosen, no doubt on account of his position and accomplishments rather than because of any personal attractiveness, to proceed to Hanover, there to present the Naturalisation and Regency Acts to the Electress Sophia, now the first subject of the English Crown.^[166] Halifax was also the bearer of a Garter for the Electoral Prince, on whom a few weeks later the Queen conferred the title of Duke of Cambridge. On his way Halifax had secured the inclusion of a guarantee of the established Succession in future treaties with the United Provinces. In his suite was Addison, now one of the Under-Secretaries of State; but the reticence of this celebrated personage seems to have disappointed the Electress.

From a later remark of Leibniz we gather that, on the occasion of Halifax’s embassy, the Electress made no secret of the view held by her and the Elector with reference to the Succession. It rested, she considered, on hereditary right; though, in the interests of the nation, certain persons possessed of claims prior to her own had been excluded. In other words, she acknowledged that Parliament had a right to exclude Catholics from the Succession, but declined to regard her title to the Crown as primarily a Parliamentary one. As a matter of fact, neither the Electress nor the Elector was much edified by the embassy of Halifax. He submitted to her a list of twenty-one persons, whom according to the Regency Act she was called upon to appoint as Lords Justices, in addition to the great officers of the Crown, for carrying on the government after Queen Anne’s death in the event of her own absence from England. Of these twenty-one names, as it afterwards appeared, she struck out seven, one of which was that of Halifax himself.^[167] As to the titles conferred upon the Electoral Prince (which, Sophia said, were so many that she had to write them down in her almanack lest she should forget them), the grant of an annual income to herself as Heiress Presumptive would have been more to the point; inasmuch as the titles were given to enable the Prince to take his seat in Parliament, from which Hanover was a long way off.

The elements of satisfaction contained in the Acts brought to Hanover by Halifax were not over-estimated by the Electress, to whom it must by this time have become clear that the real difficulty in placing the House of Hanover in its proper position towards the country with which it was to be inseparably connected, lay with Queen Anne herself. More especially after the publication of Sir Rowland Gwynne’s unfortunate letter, the Queen thought that explanations were due to her from the Electress, who in truth had none to give. Marlborough had been wise enough to abstain from delivering at Hanover a letter written by the Queen in this sense and entrusted by her to him, and, instead, had held conciliatory language, advising both Electress and Elector to declare themselves absolute strangers to the obnoxious manifesto. The advice was judicious; for, as Marlborough had predicted, the original proposal did not die out. In 1707, one Scott, an Englishman or Scotchman in the service of the Elector, entered, according to Marlborough with the cognisance of the Electress, into a negotiation with the High-fliers; but he was stopped by the Elector himself. In July of the same year, the Earl of Peterborough, when returning to England from Spain to give an account of his proceedings there, spent some days at Hanover and Herrenhausen, where he addressed a letter to the Elector and another to the Electress, in which he insisted on the necessity of the residence of a member of the Electoral House in England. Sophia handed the letter intended for herself to her son, who, in the plainest terms, expressed his determination to take no steps in this direction, unless with the approval of the Queen and her ministers. Meanwhile, though perfectly prudent in her own conduct, the Electress could not altogether conceal the annoyance caused to her by the cold and suspicious attitude maintained by Queen Anne towards everything connected with the Succession. Sophia complained repeatedly that from England came nothing but titles and compliments, and declared that she would not be made to pay for any more special ambassadors from the Court of St. James. (Her present of gold plate to Halifax had cost her some 30,000 florins.) For the conveyance of honours that cost nothing she was, she said, perfectly content with Mr. Howe.^[168] When Leibniz reported to her as to prospects of the Union between England and Scotland, which was actually achieved early in 1707, she rather sharply replied that she had no wish to discuss the affairs of either kingdom: ‘comme je n’en tire rien, je n’y suis point intéressée.’ She can, however, hardly have been so indifferent to the subject as she pretended to be; since a clause in the Act of Union definitively settled the Scottish Succession upon herself and her descendants. Nor can she have remained unaware that, as Queen Anne’s reign continued and the apprehensions excited by the growing intolerance of the Church of England more and more endangered the maintenance of the Union, Scottish Presbyterianism was, irrespective of this consideration, obliged to look to the Hanoverian Succession as the best guarantee of its own security.

We know for certain that the Electress was well informed as to the existence of a secret sympathy on Queen Anne’s part with the Pretender; since we have the explicit statement of the Duchess of Orleans that her aunt believed the Queen to be secretly desirous of the accession of her half-brother, and further believed ‘that she would some day bestow the Crown upon him.’ Nor can we regard the latter clause a mere phrase, when we remember the earlier communications in this sense between Anne and her exiled father. But it by no means follows from this that this solution was one desired by the Electress Sophia herself. According to a fairly well authenticated anecdote, a bundle of letters was, some time in the reign of George III, found in Kensington Palace, endorsed in William III’s own handwriting ‘Letters of the Electress Sophia to the Court of St. Germains’; and a plan which had been formed for publishing these letters was frustrated through their being destroyed by George III’s orders. But as to the contents of these letters there is no satisfactory evidence at all. Again, it is no doubt true, and of a piece with George I’s habitual method of dealing with inconvenient evidence, that, in 1714, he requested the Duchess of Orleans to destroy all the letters received by her from the Electress which contained any reference to the House of Stewart; and, though the Duchess of Orleans, who made no secret of her own sympathies, and whose portrait quite appropriately found a place in the Stewart family museum at Caillot, says that her aunt did not obey this wish, no such letters have been found, with a single exception. In this letter, dated March 21st, 1708, after mentioning that the ‘Prince of Wales’ was at Dunkirk (whence he afterwards started on his brief expedition to Scotland), the Electress Sophia indulges in the reflexion: ‘Who knows whether God will not elevate him who suffers so innocently?’ But though, in matters concerning the line from which she was descended, as well as with regard to her own immediate family, Sophia’s nature was very far from being untouched by sentiment, she never allowed herself to be subdued by it. In her tenderness of feeling towards the House of Stewart she set an example followed by the Hanoverian dynasty when in possession of the British throne—from George I downwards, of whose kindliness of feeling towards the exiled House instances might easily be cited.^[169]

Thus, in this period Sophia returned to Queen Anne coolness for coolness, and though at times she might almost have seemed to herself indifferent to her prospects and those of her posterity, while at other times she thought of herself as ‘a candidate for Sion’ rather than as the heiress to a throne, she was content to avoid any false step, and to leave unjeopardised a future which she could not control. As late as September, 1708, in mentioning the visit of Lord Hereford and two Whig M.P.s, she writes that she found them very warm for the Succession, and that she supposed they would always continue of the same mind, so long as it paid them; at present it did not seem to pay her, for she was not treated as its Princess of Wales. But, in the course of this year, the Whigs were fully established in power; and, when the death, in the autumn, of Prince George of Denmark, together with the subsequent refusal of Queen Anne to remarry, had removed the last possibility of issue from the reigning sovereign, the Hanoverian prospects of course grew brighter. The House stood well at this season in the eyes of Europe and of England. George Lewis’ envoy at Ratisbon in this very year at last gained admittance into the Electoral College; and in the previous year (1707) the Elector had assumed the command of the army of the Lower Rhine, though his unswerving loyalty to the cause of the Grand Alliance had met with an incomplete response of confidence on the part of its military leaders. Courtiers and others cultivating a consciousness of coming events began to recognise the necessity of turning their faces towards the rising sun. Mrs. Charles Howard, for instance, had the honour of being (with her husband) presented to the Electress Dowager, and of receiving particular notice, both from her and from the Electoral Princess—as one of whose bed-chamber women she was in later days to play so conspicuous a part at the British Court. But Queen Anne persisted in the attitude which she had assumed, and in the autumn of this year frankly told Lord Haversham that she could not tolerate the notion of the presence in this country of any successor, even were it to last no longer than a week.

When the approach of the great ministerial crisis of 1710 first announced itself by the dismissal of Sunderland, the Elector was moved to perhaps the most distinct expression of political opinion in British affairs to which he committed himself at any time before his accession to the throne. In a spirited remonstrance addressed by him to the Queen, he gave words to the hope that she would enter into no further changes in the present Ministry and Parliament. The Electress in the meantime remained mistress of herself; and George Lewis followed her example, when the crisis reached its height, and the wheel of fortune once more brought the Tories uppermost. Neither Sophia nor her confidential counsellor Leibniz looked with fear or even with disfavour upon the transactions which seemed to have put a new face on the entire scheme of British State policy. The leading spirit of the new combination was Robert Harley, who possessed many valuable political qualities, but who was above all a born intriguer. The moderation of his conduct was set off by his personal merits, among which, in a brilliant literary age, his genuine love of literature was by no means the least important.^[170] Leibniz, whose own political influence at Hanover had of late visibly declined, was much gratified by the marked civility shown to him by one of his London correspondents, Dr. Hutton, a follower of Harley.

Queen Anne herself lost no time in communicating to the House of Hanover her own view of the political changes which opened the concluding period of her reign. In the autumn of 1710, Earl Rivers (by whose appointment to the constableship of the Tower these changes had been heralded) made his appearance at Hanover. His personal reputation was far from immaculate; but he had been a successful general. At the time of his arrival at Hanover, Sunderland’s dismissal had been succeeded by no further ministerial changes. That Queen Anne should not have resented the protest against this step transmitted by the Elector through Bothmer at the Hague, indicates her hesitancy in the process. But, when a further series of ministerial changes had been accomplished in England, Rivers, who had made himself very acceptable at Hanover even to the Elector, began to develop the ulterior purpose of his mission. Unmistakably, it was intended to facilitate the overthrow of Marlborough, without which these changes would remain incomplete, by putting the Elector in his place as commander-in-chief in the war, which, as Rivers assured him, the new British Government intended to carry on with undiminished vigour. The ambassador was instructed to state that the Queen could no longer suffer the insolence of those whom she had raised to the highest pitch of power and authority. But, before Rivers reached the Electoral Court, Marlborough had already conveyed to George Lewis assurances of his fidelity to the Hanoverian Succession; and the House of Hanover was thus confirmed in the attitude of caution which it maintained in this very trying turn of affairs. There was no reason why Elector and Electress should remain deaf to the blandishments of the well-affected and reasonable Tories, whose theory of the Succession harmonised with Sophia’s own. But, at the same time, it would have been not less unwise to court the goodwill of the Queen and her new ministers by cutting communications with Marlborough and the Whigs, than it would have been to yield to the Whig proposal, communicated through Robethon, to base the claims of the House of Hanover on the principles of the Revolution of 1688. Leibniz was able to demonstrate the perfect consistency of the course pursued by the House he served; and the firmness and prudence with which the Elector resisted perhaps the single temptation which, in the whole course of these transactions, he personally found it hard to withstand—the offer of the supreme command in the war—deserves a fuller recognition than has usually been accorded to it.

The final period in the history of the Hanoverian Succession—though even during this period the question had, as will be seen, still to pass through a series of stages before it was solved—began with the transformation of the British Ministry into a Tory Government, and the overthrow of the Marlborough influence, which, with that of Godolphin, had so long cast its spell over Queen Anne. During the last month or two of 1710,^[171] Schütz having died in the previous August, Bothmer was performing the duties of envoy extraordinary in London, where he remained till the following March. The Electress was extremely desirous that he should, unlike Schütz and Kreyenberg, refrain from showing any inclination towards either of the political parties; here in Hanover, she assured him in January, 1711, ‘we do not know the meaning of the terms Whig and Tory, and decline to distinguish individuals under those names’; and she applauds him for having already, as she hears, managed to create a far more agreeable impression than that made by his predecessor. But this attempt on the part of the Electress to hold the balance between the two parties, and to make Bothmer do the same, could not be of long endurance. On April 17th, 1711, the Emperor Joseph I died; there could be no reasonable doubt as to the succession of his brother, the titular King Charles III of Spain, to the Imperial throne; and an irresistible impulse was given to the desire for peace, with which the new British Ministry was known to be in sympathy.

Henceforth, until the Peace had been actually concluded, the question of its conclusion dominated all others, and that of the Succession among the rest. It might suit the purposes of the Whigs, who were opposed to the Peace, to represent the desire of bringing it about as put forward with a view to covering Jacobite designs with regard to the Succession; as a matter of fact, the Tory leaders, though they might amuse Berwick—or others who were as ignorant of England as he was—with proposals about bringing over the Pretender to reside in England on his half-sister’s invitation, were very careful not to allow any premature Jacobite outbreak to interrupt the peace negotiations. When, in October, 1711, Bothmer returned to London as envoy extraordinary, the situation had, for better or for worse, cleared up; and it would have been impossible for the most skilful of diplomatists, with the strongest wish to carry out the conciliatory intentions cherished by the good Electress, to avoid an early collision with the Queen’s ministers, and, in consequence, to place in his own way an insuperable obstacle against securing her own goodwill. For the Elector was, heart and soul, in favour of the continuance of the war; and the immediate purpose of Bothmer’s present mission was to overthrow the peace policy to which the Queen’s ministers had made up their minds. He brought with him an elaborate memorandum from the Elector, dated November 28th, 1711, against the conclusion of peace with France; and in January, 1712, this memorandum was supported by a letter from the Elector asking for a hearing for his envoy. These documents were presented to the Queen on February 14th. As a matter of course, they were ascribed by the ministerialists to Whig influence, and represented as implying an attempt to bring about the continuance of Marlborough in the command. There was no warrant for either assumptionassumption; and it may be added that the Electress instructed Bothmer to express to Ormonde, as a tried friend of hers, the particular gratification with which she had heard of his appointment.

Violent altercations in Parliament ensued; and Bothmer clearly perceived that any attempt to renew at present the proposal of inviting over the Electress and the Electoral Prince, if not the Elector himself, could have no other effect than that of uniting with the Jacobite wing of the Tory party the followers of Harley, with whom it was a cardinal principle to ‘use the Queen with all duty and respect imaginable.’ On the representations of Bothmer, Somers, Sunderland, and Godolphin agreed not to move in the matter without the Elector’s assent; and this was sure not to be given, until an invitation should have been approved by Queen and Parliament. Thus a blunder was avoided which must have proved more disastrous to the prospects of the House of Hanover than that actually committed three years later.

Both in 1710 and 1711 the air was full of more or less unsubstantial schemes for bringing about, at what already seemed the eleventh hour, the succession of the Pretender; and rumours were rife as to the gradual transformation of the Ministry into a Jacobite Cabal. Though Leibniz was no doubt right in saying that the question of inviting to England, or (as the Electress so consistently repeated) of granting an income to, one or more members of the Electoral family, was the touchstone of the real intentions of the British Government, and though this may, as he asserts, have also been the opinion of the Elector, yet there was no question at Hanover of claiming any such concession. In April, 1711, the Electress declared herself wholly uncertain of what would happen even in the event of Queen Anne’s death—for ‘what Parliament does one day, it undoes the next.’ Thus, when, in the autumn of the same year, Lord Rivers made his second appearance at Hanover, the letter which he brought with him from Queen Anne, and his assurances of her care for the interests of the Electoral family, were received by Sophia with proper expressions of gratitude, whatever she might privately say as to the expense which this mission entailed upon the Hanoverian Court, with little prospect of return. There was, indeed, some talk of the Elector being offered the chief command in Flanders after Marlborough’s dismissal in December, 1711; but nothing came of the suggestion, and in January, 1712, the Electress is found expressing her satisfaction at the appointment of Ormonde, who had always been so friendly to her. But as to the main object of his mission Rivers completely failed; for George Lewis firmly declined to give his approval to the British overtures of peace to France, at the risk of deeply annoying the Queen and her ministers by thus falling in with the wishes of the Whigs. He took his stand on the principles of the Grand Alliance, from which he had never swerved; while his mother judiciously held the balance by refusing to accept the insinuations of her correspondent at the Hague, Lord Strafford, against the inclinations of her House and Bothmer towards the Whigs, and appealing with much dignity to her conviction that, beyond the devices of Whigs and Tories, the Protestant Succession could depend on the support of the nation. Meanwhile, the two parties were alike striving to apprise the Hanoverian Court of the direction in which to look for its friends. The anxiety of the Whigs to identify their party with the Electoral House is at the same time proved by the motion of the Duke of Devonshire to give precedence to the Duke of Cambridge over other Peers.^[172] The Ministry overtrumped this modest effort by a Bill giving precedence to the entire Electoral family, which was passed in two days (January, 1712), and which the minister’s kinsman, Thomas Harley, was in July specially sent over to present to the Electress. She took the announcement of this new visit very coolly, regretting the expense to which she was put by it, and observing that, if the British throne were for sale, France on behalf of its client could afford the purchase better than the House of Hanover, which had no intention of imitating the prodigality of Augustus II of Poland.^[173] Her instinct was correct, for Thomas Harley had instructions which, while pretending to put the blame on Bothmer, seriously reflected on the Elector’s opposition to the peace policy pursued by the British Government. In the course of the negotiations carried on at Paris in August, 1712, between Torcy and Bolingbroke, the latter on one occasion even went so far as to hint at the despatch of a British fleet into the Baltic, with a view not only to controlling the northern troubles, but also to frustrating possible designs on the part of the Dutch and of Hanover.^[174]

Meanwhile the Court of Hanover, while maintaining unchanged its attitude towards the general question of war or peace, had immediate interests of its own to watch besides such as might be involved in the question of the English Succession. The recognition of the Hanoverian Electorship, for instance, was demanded from France, pari passu with that of the Prussian Kingship. Early in the year, in the negotiations already in progress, Bothmer, whom Oxford and Bolingbroke persisted in treating as antagonistic to their Government,^[175] returned to his post at the Hague. In December, 1712, Baron Thomas von Grote, who belonged to a family of high distinction in the Hanoverian service, arrived in London, nominally with the special charge of returning thanks for the Act of Precedence. His instructions, drawn up by Robethon in the name of the Electress Sophia, illustrate the penultimate stage in the final period of the transactions concerning the Succession. He was to be polite to all, and not to consider himself debarred from taking counsel with the old friends of the House—in other words, with Marlborough and the Whig leaders—so long as this was done privately and secretly; and he was to avoid giving umbrage to the Queen’s ministers, and above all to the Queen herself. The Elector furnished him with a special commendatory letter to Oxford. He was to make friends with the clergy, and to reassure them by pointing out that the ecclesiastical system of the German Lutherans was to all intents and purposes an episcopal one. The everlasting delicate question as to the summoning of the Electress or another member of the Electoral family to England he was to treat as if this event might any day come to pass; and, at the same time, he was to press for a proposal to Parliament on the subject of an establishment—say at Somerset House. The Elector, while of opinion that such a proposal would furnish the best means of testing the sincerity of the Queen’s and her advisers’ intentions, declined to influence Parliamentary opinion by means of any expenditure of his own, though it would seem that he had previously not objected to Bothmer’s attempting to gain over some noble Lords against the Peace by similar inducements. But, though he still abstained from any intervention in British home affairs, his own instructions to Grote were less carefully balanced than those of the Electress, and left no doubt as to its being the leading Whigs on whom he reckoned as the true friends of the House of Hanover.

Both at Hanover and elsewhere, however, eager friends of the dynasty advocated a more expeditious procedure. In September, 1712, the indefatigable Leibniz submitted a scheme, concocted by busy brains in London, for including the demand for establishing the Electress in England among the conditions of the Peace of Utrecht. But, though both in her correspondence, and in conversation with Thomas Harley, she had given considerable attention to the scheme, she ultimately declared it impracticable. The unsatisfactory action of the English ministers in the matter of the Dutch guarantee of the Hanoverian Succession had once more rendered her diffident; she was, she said, so old that there was no reality in all her talk; were she younger, she added with a touch of her old spirit, the sovereignty of England should not pass by her.

The Peace of Utrecht, when actually concluded in the spring of 1713, was in many respects unsatisfactory to the Elector; and as an Estate of the Empire, he must have been well content to withhold his signature from it. But it contained a very explicit recognition of the Hanoverian Succession by France and the other signatory Powers; so that, in this respect at all events, Bothmer’s exertions had been entirely successful. Yet the tone prevailing at court and in ministerial circles in London very imperfectly agreed with this result; and in Hanover there was a growing disbelief in the sincerity of the sentiments entertained in these quarters. Grote found himself coolly received, and his attempts to obtain assurances baffled. Various suggestions offered by him were ignored; and in a lengthy despatch which he sent home in February (a few weeks before his death) he drew the darkest picture of the political situation which had as yet reached Hanover. He considered that, in spite of the generalities in which Oxford shrouded himself, he had gradually gone over to the Jacobites in order to please the Queen, while Bolingbroke he regarded as an open Jacobite on his own account. He thought that, as to the Pretender, there was reason for fearing the worst; he had heard that the Queen had expressed a wish to see her half-brother in England after the conclusion of the Peace, while the question of inviting over a member of the Electoral family had been indefinitely postponed. Part of this report sufficiently tallies with the information with which about this time the Pretender was being constantly supplied by his illegitimate half-brother, the Duke of Berwick. Though sanguine as to methods of action, Berwick never minimised the chances of the Hanoverian Succession; the first thing requisite, he wrote to James in November, 1712, was to checkmate Hanover; the rest could then be easily accomplished without mentioning the name of the legitimate claimant. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke, Berwick wrote in May, 1713, were heartily resolved to go forward; in July, he reported them to be rather less ardent; but these were mere fluctuations. From all this it is tolerably clear that Oxford, in trying to deceive others, deceived himself. Much of his political life had consisted in a successful endeavour to face both ways without laying himself open to the charge of double-dealing. He now persuaded himself that he was throwing dust in the eyes of the Elector and Electress and the friends of the Hanoverian Succession, while at the same time drawing as near to the Jacobite projects as safety permitted. He was, above all things, a Parliamentary statesman, and nothing but the decision of Parliament would determine his ultimate choice of sides; but, as the majority was at present constituted, while the great achievement of the Peace assured the advance of Tory ascendancy, and the Queen seemed less and less inclined to reconcile herself to the Succession of the House of Hanover, he looked to the triumph of the Jacobite cause as the event towards which his course would be most safely shaped. With Bolingbroke, the case was wholly different. Oxford was prepared to be in the end guided by the Parliamentary majority; Bolingbroke was prepared to educate it up to that end—only he used a more sportsmanlike phraseology. For himself, he made no secret whatever of his likes and dislikes; kept up a constant intercourse with Jacobites and Frenchmen; and at times, as Grote complained, did him the honour of treating him ‘de coquin ou de fou.’^[176]

Meanwhile, the Queen and the Lord Treasurer continued their banales expressions of friendship and goodwill at Hanover, where, on March 17th, 1713, the useful Thomas Harley presented a letter from the Queen, declaring her intention of treating the interests of the House of Hanover as her own. But neither this letter, nor the amicable phrases with which in April she opened Parliament after its adjournment, evoked any warm response at Hanover. Sophia, indeed, wrote to Strafford at the Hague, begging him to thank the Queen, and adding that, as she had no expectation of ever ascending the throne herself, she hoped that Her Majesty would entertain no aversion to her on that score. But, as she told Bothmer, she only paid back Strafford in the coin she received from England—words, not deeds; and, on the whole, Leibniz’s epigram not unaptly summed up the situation—