I
 
DESCENT AND PARENTAGE; CHILDHOOD AND GIRLHOOD
 
(LEYDEN, THE HAGUE, AND RHEENEN, 1630-1650)

Sophia, the youngest daughter and the youngest but one of the thirteen children of Frederick, sometime Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia, and of his wife Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of King James I of England, was born at the Hague on October 14th, 1640 (N.S.). She was thus, by only a few months, the junior of her first cousin Charles, afterwards King Charles II, whose ‘star’ was so long to remain under a cloud in the period of her youth, and who was himself in those dubious days to play a transient part in her personal history; while the date of her birth was preceded, at a not much longer interval, by that of the landing of Gustavus Adolphus in Pomerania, the turning-point of the Thirty Years’ War, although not, as her family had hoped, also that of their fortunes. Her baptismal name of Sophia she doubtless owed to the remembrance of her mother’s youngest sister, buried in Westminster Abbey in 1607, the ephemeral flight of whose earthly existence strangely contrasts with the long life in store for the younger Sophia.

It was by her marriage to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, on St. Valentine’s Day, 1613, that James I’s only surviving daughter Elizabeth was first brought into contact with the political problems that were agitating Europe. The bridegroom, it is true, was only a boy of sixteen, who would not till August, 1614, be entitled to assume the government of his paternal inheritance. Elizabeth was only a year older than he, and her previous life had been marked by but one personal experience of general interest. As early as 1603 she was consigned to the care of Lord and Lady Harington, and with them she soon took up her residence at Combe Abbey, near Coventry, in Warwickshire—the lordly castellated mansion which, whether or not she re-visited its moated solitude towards the close of her life, still remains as it were consecrated to her royal memory.[3] King James, in the early years of his English reign, had good reason for dreading the designs of some of his Roman Catholic subjects, and Elizabeth’s mother, Queen Anne, the sister of Christian IV of Denmark, had not yet given way to the influences which (as is now ascertained beyond all doubt) afterwards caused her to become a secret convert to the Church of Rome. The sound Protestantism, of the Puritanising type, but probably intermingled on both sides with strains of literary sentiment, that had marked out Lord and Lady Harington for this charge, was unmistakably the primary source of those feelings of attachment to the Reformed religion from which in times both fierce and fickle Elizabeth never swerved a hair’s breadth. In her childhood the country round Combe Abbey was full of more or less open adherents of the Church of Rome; and by some of these a conspiracy was hatched, which was to co-operate with, and supplement, the Gunpowder Plot. On the day at last fixed for the demonstration in chief at Westminster, the eight-year-old Princess at Combe Abbey was to be seized by a body of gentlemen who had agreed to assemble for the purpose on the pretext of a meet of hounds, and so soon as the throne became vacant she was to be proclaimed Queen, professing herself at the same time a member of the unreformed Church. But non tali auxilio was this future ancestress of our sovereigns herself to ascend a throne. Combe Abbey was warned, the moat was drawn up, and the towers were manned, and the Princess was conveyed in safety to the loyal town of Coventry, where the townsmen armed in her defence. As fate would have it, John Digby, the young Warwickshire gentleman who bore to King James I the tidings of his daughter’s peril and preservation, was afterwards to be the most prominent agent of the royal policy which, with admirable intentions, only served to thwart the English nation’s hope of helping to restore, at least in part, the fortunes of Elizabeth and her children.

The political significance of the marriage, which in 1613 brought the Princess Palatine Elizabeth’s girlhood to a close, was perfectly patent alike to James I’s subjects and to those Powers which more or less benevolently interested themselves in his foreign policy. In 1612, when the marriage was arranged, that policy had not yet fully revealed its visionary purpose and its shifty methods; while at home his quarrels with his Parliaments had scarcely more than begun. Three years earlier the affairs of Europe had, with the death of Henry IV of France, assumed a wholly new aspect, and it had become evident that the struggle between the House of Habsburg and its adversaries, in which James I had long hoped to play the august part of a pacificator, must take place under quite new conditions. This aspiration, together with a pride of descent natural to a Stewart and a Scot, had led him to scheme marriages for his children with half the chief reigning houses in Europe, including those of France, Spain, and Sweden (whose youthful King, Gustavus II Adolphus, was, however, soon put aside as unequal to a match with a daughter of the House of Stewart). But when, in 1610, friendly relations, soon to be sealed by a double marriage, had set in between the French and Spanish Courts, James I was not slow in perceiving how this turn of affairs must affect the political prospects of his own kingdom. On the outbreak of the European conflict which was expected on all sides, it would go hard with the Protestant interest, unless it contrived to consolidate itself into an alliance capable of confronting the great Catholic Powers. When, in March, 1611, the Count of Cartignano arrived in England as a special ambassador from Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy to negotiate a double marriage between the Houses of Savoy and England, James, though he refused to enter into this scheme, seemed willing to approve of the marriage of his daughter to the Prince of Piedmont. In November, Cartignano reappeared with fresh instructions, and at the audience in which he asked Elizabeth’s hand for the Prince Sir Henry Wotton, who had had a hand in the negotiations, was present. But the King had practically already decided how to dispose of his daughter’s hand, and the Savoyard returned home in dudgeon. The step which was now taken by James I, and by means of which a Protestant Succession was ultimately to be secured to the English throne, was in full accordance with the identification of England with militant Protestantism, which had been accomplished as a matter of fact rather than of deliberate purpose in the great age of Queen Elizabeth. After, in March, 1612, concluding an alliance with the Union of German Protestant Princes, of which the Palatine House had from the first assumed the leadership, James, to the delight of the large majority of his subjects, resolved upon the marriage of his only surviving daughter to the young ‘Palsgrave,’ as he was called in England, Frederick V.

The line of the Electors Palatine boasted a high antiquity and dignity; and though it would take us too far to account for the claims maintained by them to the first place among the temporal Electors, the familiar fact may be recalled that early in the fourteenth century the Elector Rupert III, of the older Electoral line of the Wittelsbach House to which the Simmern line had since succeeded, had worthily held the high dignity of German King.[4] It is after him that Elizabeth is supposed to have named her third son, whose name of Prince Rupert is so familiar to our ears; but she may also have been aware that an earlier English Princess who had become Electress Palatine—Blanche, daughter of King Henry IV and wife of the Elector Palatine Louis II—had named her son Rupert, and that during his short life he bore the cognomen ‘England.’ Though portions of the Palatine territory had from time to time been split off in accordance with the German tendency to subdivision which no systematic effort was made to repress till after the times of the Thirty Years’ War, the electorate about the time of the opening of that war extended far on both banks of the Rhine, being on one side contiguous with the kingdom of Bohemia. If not equal in size to any of the other temporal electorates, it was not far inferior to Saxony, and hardly at all to Brandenburg, in territorial importance, being largely composed of districts peerless among the German lands in beauty and productivity—amidst whose orchards and vineyards throve a busy and light-hearted population. The religious sympathies of the electorate were in so far divided, that the Upper Palatinate (on the left bank of the Rhine) adhered to Lutheranism, while the inhabitants of the Lower or Rhenish were, like the dynasty, Calvinists. The electoral residence was Heidelberg, whose castle and its treasures were reckoned among the wonders of the Western world. To its graceful earlier buildings, the florid taste of the Elector Frederick IV had added the splendid but pretentious structure, in the artificial style of the latest Renascence, of which a characteristic remnant is the inner side, decorated, something after the manner of Alnwick, with statues of defunct Palsgraves. The outside commands the wondrous view over the valley of the Neckar, to which nothing but the genius of a Turner could have imparted an additional charm. The choicest possession of the castle was the electoral Library, the finest collection of books in Germany and far beyond, thrown open with rare liberality to the use of all qualified comers. And the pride of both court and town was the University, now again, as it had been under the single-minded rule of the Elector Frederick III, the foremost Calvinist seminary of higher learning in Europe.

But though the Electoral Palatine House honoured learning, and, as both the bringing-up of Frederick V and that bestowed by him on his own children showed, set a high value upon a many-sided intellectual as well as upon a careful religious and moral education, its interests had in the early years of the seventeenth century become engrossed by public affairs, and it had acquired a political importance out of proportion to its territorial power. Partly by force of circumstances and because of the situation of the Palatinate, on the confines of France and on the water-way to the Netherlands, but still more by their own zeal and ambition, its Princes and certain of their statesmen stood in the front of that active party in the Empire which might be termed the advanced, or militant, Protestant Opposition. This party, among whose other members Landgrave Maurice of Hesse and Count Christian of Anhalt are pre-eminent, derived its impulse entirely from Calvinist sources. Palatine blood had been shed and treasure spent under the Elector Frederick III and the Administrator John Casimir on behalf of the Revolt of the Netherlands and the cause of the French Huguenots; and under his successor, Frederick IV, these designs had taken a wider range. He was a man of great intellectual force; and, more especially in connexion with the later history of his dynasty, it is interesting to note that in the later years of his life he was much occupied with the scheme of a union, on a broad basis, between all Protestant confessions.[5] But the young Elector Frederick V had probably been more especially influenced by the pure Calvinism of his mother the Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana, the daughter of William the Silent and of Charlotte de Montpensier, who had taken refuge at the Palatine Court for the sake of the Religion. Louisa Juliana, though at the crisis of the Palatine fortunes her judgment was not obscured by her sympathies, was one of those women the fervour of whose religious convictions communicates itself as a legacy of faith and love to the minds of their descendants for generation upon generation.[6] Maurice of Hesse-Cassel also had a Nassau Juliana to wife, so that the three Houses at the head of the Calvinistic movement were closely linked together by intermarriage. In his father’s lifetime, the young Frederick had been placed at the Court of the Calvinist Henry Duke of Bouillon, whose second wife was likewise a daughter of the great William of Orange, and to Sedan he afterwards returned, with fit diplomatic and theological counsellors by his side, for a second sojourn till the year before his marriage. To these multiplied influences the Princess Elizabeth’s husband may in part have owed the fortitude of spirit which, although not naturally a man of strong character, he exhibited under a long and heavy pressure of trouble; while to the liberality of his education may fairly be ascribed something of the refined and lovable gentleness which he preserved to the last.

Under the Elector Frederick IV, the first head of the Union, vast designs had been set on foot against the Catholicising policy of the House of Habsburg, and for a dismemberment of its dominions. In 1612, the hopes of the Palatine House and its counsellors were already directed towards the attainment of the Bohemian Crown; moreover, as the Spanish ambassador, Don Alonso de Velasca, informed the Spanish Council early in 1613, James I was then of opinion that in a few years Frederick V would be King of Bohemia. Thus, the expectation of the Bohemian Crown unmistakably contributed to bring about the marriage which determined the course of Elizabeth’s life.[7] To the English public, of course, ‘the Palsgrave’ was a handsome and courtly Prince, the nephew of Maurice of Orange, heroic father’s heroic son,[8] and in their eyes his union with the Princess Elizabeth promised to connect the royal family not only with the great Protestant Houses already mentioned, but with the Protestant interest at large.[9] As a matter of fact, English royalty was thus to become connected with the dynasties of Brandenburg, Sweden, and Transylvania.

The young Elector Frederick V had hardly presented himself at the English Court, when a deep shadow passed over the sunny prospect seemingly opening before Elizabeth, and she and her possible descendants were suddenly brought nearer to a Succession undreamt of by her for them. In November, 1612, Henry Prince of Wales, whose heart was entirely with his sister’s in her Protestant preferences as in other matters, died suddenly of typhoid fever, though, in accordance with the evil fashion of the age, credulous or clamorous Protestants, perhaps not quite inexcusably, attributed his death to poison. At the Court of James and Anne, or in its vicinity, for which the Princess had since 1608 exchanged the retirement of Combe Abbey, she had continued to carry on her studies, which were specially directed to the French and Italian tongues and to the art of music, while the general guidance of Lord and Lady Harington still continued to sustain the serious impulses that contended with the frivolous in her receptive and responsive nature. As a matter of course, the brother and sister, who dearly loved one another, were companions in the elaborate entertainments that absorbed so large a share of their royal parents’ attention, and in the field-sports by which the masques and tilts were diversified, and in which Elizabeth long retained an eager interest. There is some evidence that she also shared the higher aspirations discernible in the many-sided and ambitious activity of the brother who was taken so suddenly from her side.[10] But youth and the exigencies of her position exercised their effacing powers; and thus, within little more than three months, the brother’s funeral was followed by the sister’s wedding. Indeed, while the echoes of both events are loud in the literature of the time, the same poetic voices occasionally attune themselves in turn to condolence and to congratulation. But, though the show was great that carnival week, and though besides so much of the powder as would go off for the fireworks, plenty of incense was burnt on the occasion by Chapman, Beaumont, Thomas Heywood, Campion,[11] Francis Bacon, Taylor the Water-poet, and the rest, an undertone of doubt or apprehension was audible among the rejoicings. The bride laughed too much at the wedding, and her father yawned too soon in the course of the ensuing festivities, which he finally felt obliged to cut short in fear of the bill and of the House of Commons. And most ill-omened of all was the fact that among the representatives of foreign Powers bidden to the solemnity the Spanish ambassador remained away. Count Gondomar ‘was, or would be, sick.’

It was not till after Easter that the young Electress and her husband were allowed to take their departure from London, nor till the beginning of June that, after a semi-royal progress from Holland up the Rhine, they at last set foot in Heidelberg. The greater part of the Electress’ English suite, which included Francis Quarles and Nicolas Ferrar, soon afterwards left her—Lord Harington, by a pathetic fate, dying on the way at Worms, so that his wife returned home a widow. Elizabeth’s life in her new home was for many a day much what it had latterly been in her old—a round of Court festivities, banquets, and hunting-expeditions. Nor does she, after the protracted honeymoon was over, seem to have ceased to be preoccupied with the trivialities of her daily life. We may discount the report of a divine who visited her husband’s Court, that ‘she is not often heard to speak of God ... she is fond of grandeur and the precedence of rank.’ And we may excuse her for not allowing the ascendancy of the Court-preacher, Abraham Scultetus, to dominate her thoughts and conduct, in spite of the potent authority exercised by this divine, afterwards one of the most vigorous of the anti-Remonstrants at Dort (where he had the satisfaction of seeing that Heidelberg Catechism, which Sophia was so ruefully to remember as the religious pabulum of her youth, adopted as the symbol of the Dutch Church). At Heidelberg she had her own English Chaplain.[12] For the rest, it seems to have been the use of her horse and gun which, on the occasion of the death of her firstborn child, assuaged the first sharp sorrow of her married life. While the high state kept by King James’ daughter—with her army of ladies-in-waiting, chamberlains, chaplains, and the rest—could not fail to heighten the splendour and swell the outlay of the Palatine Court, her influence must have helped to soften and refine its tone, though in neither respect was the ground unprepared. It may safely be ascribed to Elizabeth and to her bringing-up that the place of German was taken by French as the Court tongue at Heidelberg. Her husband, whose favourite extravagance was that of building, was much engaged at this time in perfecting the Castle gardens in the most approved French style, and in adding a new ‘English wing’ to the Electoral residence itself. On January 1st, 1617, she gave birth to her eldest son, and half the Protestant Powers of Europe were represented round the baptismal font. The fortunes of the family had sunk low, when, fifteen years later, this Prince—Henry Frederick—was, in his unhappy father’s sight, drowned off Haarlem. On December 22nd, 1617, another son was born to the Electoral couple, Charles Lewis, afterwards Elector Palatine; and on December 26th, 1618, followed the birth of their eldest daughter, Elizabeth.

There were, however, certain drawbacks to the perfect contentment of Elizabeth in the ‘merry’ Heidelberg days, which readily revealed themselves to the eye of the sympathising observer. Even at a distance she dwelt as it were in the shadow of the paternal throne; and the pride of her father, to which her own seems to have very readily responded, obliged her to assert extravagant claims in matters of precedence. As to these pretensions full information is furnished by the communicative pen of Sir Henry Wotton, who in April, 1616, when on his way to Turin and Venice, spent six days in the Electoral Court at Heidelberg. He had some public business of moment to transact with the Elector, to whom he submitted a plan for a league with Savoy, which Frederick approved and promised to lay before the Princes of the Union. But it was his chief duty to give some account to the King of the Court of Heidelberg, and of the treatment there extended to the King’s daughter in those matters which her father had so much at heart. Sir Henry Wotton, whose deep admiration for Elizabeth, expressed in undying verse, has indissolubly linked his name with her own, addressed himself to his task with even more than his usual diligence. He describes the Electoral Court as one ‘of great sobriety,’ and very well attended. The Elector he found ‘par boutades merry, but for the most part cogitative, or, as they here call it, melancolique; his chiefest object was money, and his principal delight architecture.’ The Electress, although already at that time ‘the mother of one of the sweetest children,’ still retained ‘her former virginal verdure in her complexion and features.’ Very manifestly, though the ambassador approaches the subject with many courtly involutions, things had not at first, and did not even now, run quite smoothly between the Elector and his consort. At first, some trouble was caused by the ‘emulation’ of servants—in other words, rubs between the English and the German members of the Court; and now there remained the cardinal difficulty about ‘placing her Highness.’ The claim which James I had set up before his daughter’s departure from England, and which Frederick had then promised to allow, that she should have precedence in her husband’s and other non-royal Courts, had proved one which Frederick found it impossible in practice to reconcile with self-respect; and Wotton hardly bettered the situation by trying to prove too much.[13] The problem was ultimately settled in no very satisfactory fashion; the Electoral pair decided to pay no further visits to other Courts; and Louisa Juliana, the Electress Dowager, whom Elizabeth had expected to give her the pas, withdrew for some time from her son’s Court.

Wotton had judiciously recommended the Elector to state his case to the King through a nobleman particularly valued by the Electress—Hans Meinhard von Schönberg (Schombergh), Marshal of the Palatinate. Schönberg had, in March, 1615, married Anne Sutton, daughter of Lord Dudley, a favourite lady-in-waiting of Elizabeth, with whom she had remained after Lady Harington’s departure; but she had been taken from him by death in the following December. Schönberg’s advice, the Electress informed Wotton, had been of the utmost value to her, ‘though by divers provocations and offences, of the greatest part for her sake, he had been moved and had himself resolved to be gone.’ (He was now serving as a colonel under Maurice of Nassau.) She also spoke with gratitude of the attentions of Frau von Pless (who had been her husband’s governess), though she desiderated the company of another English lady of Anne Sutton’s age. With the services of the English secretary, Albertus Morton (Wotton’s nephew), whom her father had sent to her, Elizabeth was well content.

We must conclude from this report that the English-born Electress had to bear at Heidelberg some of the unpopularity incurred by her countrymen who, in search of amusement or employment, swelled her Court without being attached to it; and that she had also to suffer from the consequences of a self-consciousness fostered by her father. It is further clear that, in one way or another, she came at this early period of her career to be oppressed by a burden of debt which it was not easy, with or without good advice, to shake off. Perhaps these features of her life as Electress Palatine should be called to mind, before the customary version of her conduct at the crisis of her consort’s destinies and her own is unhesitatingly followed. In 1619, the great opportunity for which the Palatine diplomatists had been so long scheming arrived at last. It has been seen that the idea of the Bohemian Crown had been present to them for some time; probably, the first suggestion of it arose in the course of the negotiations carried on by the Palatine Government in 1605-7, the chief advocate of the notion being Lösenius, while it was actively supported by Christian of Anhalt.[14] But, though the chance of carrying it into execution was now before the Palatines, it found them and their allies, great and small, unprepared. They had not succeeded in turning to account the strong feeling which prevailed in many quarters against the choice as Emperor of the Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, the destined head of the House of Austria, and the formally acknowledged successor to the Bohemian and Hungarian thrones. They had dallied with idle thoughts of the King of France and the Duke of Lorraine, and had then concentrated their efforts upon the paradoxical device of securing as a candidate the head of the Catholic branch of the House of Wittelsbach, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, who was also the head of the Catholic League. But Maximilian, though by the tradition of his House jealous of Habsburg, better knew his own mind and his own interests. Thus, when (in March, 1619) the Emperor Matthias passed away, the Elector Palatine wasted the little time remaining in protests; and, when the day of election arrived (August 28), after some empty words accepted the predetermined vote in favour of Ferdinand of Styria. The pupil of the Jesuits was seated on the Imperial throne; but, on the very evening when this defeat of the Palatine policy was proclaimed at Frankfort, the news arrived that it had scored a victory at Prague. Here, only a year previously (1618), the troubles between the government and the Utraquists had come to an outbreak, and on the Hradschin had been perpetrated the defenestration (ejection through the window) of certain Ministers of the Crown, which it is usual to regard as the opening of the Thirty Years’ War. Quite unable to establish his authority in Bohemia, Ferdinand had been actually menaced in his palace at Vienna by the Utraquist chiefs, with an army at their back. And now it was announced that, after deposing Ferdinand, the Bohemian Estates had elected Frederick V Elector Palatine King of Bohemia in his stead.

‘Thou hast it now.’ After a few diplomatic operations by Achatius von Dohna, the Elector Palatine had only to stretch his hand from Amberg across the Bohemian frontier, and a great historic throne was his,[15] with its large territorial dependencies, and with a second electoral vote ensuring the majority in the College to the Protestant interest. He was Calvinist enough in his habits of mind to be able afterwards to declare conscientiously that, in accepting this Crown, he obeyed an inner voice, which he thought spoke the will of God. And, certainly, there was no pressure of advice to urge him in this direction. His Council, setting forth the pros and cons in the argumentative fashion of the day, could only find six reasons in favour of acceptance to balance fourteen against; and the gist of their opinion was after all that everything depended on the support the Elector would receive in a forward policy. But at most of the friendly Courts opinion was found to be adverse; and while Maurice of Orange and others eagerly advised acceptance, Maximilian of Bavaria with honourable candour raised a clear voice of warning. As for Frederick’s father-in-law King James, he was not at present prepared to depart from his masterly attitude of declining to pronounce against acceptance, while desiring not to be supposed to have advised in favour of it. Whether or not a strong protest from James before Frederick’s formal acceptance of the Crown might have arrested that final step, no such protest was made.

Frederick’s mother, Louisa Juliana, though a woman cast in no ignoble mould, is said to have burst into tears and fallen ill on hearing of her son’s election to the Bohemian throne. On the other hand, it has again and again been asserted, or at least represented as highly probable, that it was the urgent representations of the Electress Elizabeth which determined her consort to cast the die; and everybody has heard the anecdote of her taunting him with the avowal that she would rather partake of sour-krout with a King, than of a joint of roast meat with an Elector. Elizabeth is unlikely either to have forgotten herself so far, or to have sought for any analogy between her own position and that of the Bohemian Princess who shortly after Wyclif’s death had mounted the English throne. Moreover, we have the statement of her grand-daughter, the free-spoken Duchess of Orleans, that at the time of the Bohemian offer the Electress knew nothing at all about the matter, her thoughts being in those days entirely absorbed by plays, masquerades, and the reading of romances. No doubt the Duchess, though deeply attached to her father’s house, is not to be absolutely trusted in her statements as to all the members of her father’s family; but her account of the condition of Elizabeth’s mind at the time when she was first brought face to face with the chief problem of her life, harmonises with all we know as to its previous current. After all, however, the point is not very material. Even before her husband had actually decided to become a King, she stood forth every inch a Queen; nor was it with a light heart, or in a spirit inflated with vanity or ambition, that at the last she left the decision in his hands. She was, in her own words, prepared to bow to the will of God, and, if need were, to suffer what He should see fit to ordain. Of her worldly goods she at the same time declared herself ready to make any reasonable sacrifice, by pledging her jewels, or whatever else of value she possessed. Early in October (1619) the last bridge had been burnt.

From this time forward, Elizabeth’s troubles came thick upon her; and indeed, but for a very imperfect return of prosperity towards the close of her life, they may be said never to have ceased again on earth. When, with Frederick, she quitted the Palatinate for Bohemia towards the end of October, they left behind them at Heidelberg, in the care of the Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana, their two children Charles Lewis and Elizabeth; but, though the former was long his mother’s favourite, it was hardly in her way to be deeply affected by a separation from her babes. The part which the new King and Queen were called upon to play during the twelve-month of their residence at Prague was from the outset the reverse of easy. The self-conscious and stiff-necked Bohemian Estates had not the least intention of being ruled in fact as well as in name by the sovereign of their making; while part at least of the population was steeped in ignorance like the peasants who welcomed his entry with shouts of ‘Vivat rex Ferdinandus!’[16] In Frederick’s mistake of importing and maintaining among Utraquist (i.e. Lutheran) surroundings, a rigid and aggressive Calvinism, incarnate in the iconoclastic Scultetus, Elizabeth probably had no share; for, as is worth remembering in connexion with the rather complicated religious history of her children, she never became a Calvinist herself or displayed any liking for Calvinistic ways. She did her best to gain popularity for herself and her consort, checking the insolence provoked among her courtiers by the uncouth manners and customs of her new subjects, and delighting all and sundry by pleasant English ‘hand-shakes.’ Now and then, offence was given by such innovations as the holding of Court balls on great Church holidays, and by the fashions of the attire worn on these occasions by the Queen and her ladies; and more serious umbrage was taken at the King’s conclusion of an alliance with the Calvinist Transylvanian, and at the project of another with the Sultan himself. Finally, there was the eternal difficulty as to ways and means, alike in Silesia (where the royal pair had been received with great rejoicing) and in Bohemia itself. Among all these agitations Elizabeth’s spirits from time to time flagged, both before and after the birth of her third son; for the changeful story of Prince Rupert’s life began at Prague in December, 1619.

Within less than a year from this date the brief glories of her Bohemian royalty had ‘turned to coal.’ In July King James, while sending Sir Edward Conway and Sir Richard Weston to Prague, ordered Sir Henry Wotton to repair to Vienna, where, if the King of Bohemia consented, he was to propose the settlement of the difficulty by means of an Imperial Diet; while to all Princes visited by him on the way he was to protest his master’s abstinence from any participation in the election to the Bohemian Crown. The choice of Wotton for this singularly futile mission was in itself extraordinarily infelicitous; very naturally, however, his task impressed itself at once upon the chosen ambassador’s vivid imagination. For it was on the eve of his departure for Vienna that Wotton, ‘being in Greenwitche Parke, made a sonnet to the Queen of Bohemia,’ of which he sent copies to Lady Wotton and Lord Zouche, and as to which Wotton’s latest biographer remarks, with perfect truth, that ‘such is the magic of art, these verses have done more than anything else, perhaps, to make both’ Ambassador and Queen ‘remembered.’[17] Neither the Prague nor the Vienna mission had any effect whatever; indeed, before Conway and Weston’s reply reached Wotton, all was over. Early in September the Leaguers under Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the rival Wittelsbach line, had joined their forces against him, while Spinola’s Spaniards were approaching the Palatinate. Soon the enemies of the new Bohemian monarchy had closed in upon it. The battle of the White Hill was waged and lost in an hour (November 8th); and, though Frederick can hardly be blamed for the actual loss of the battle, in his accidental absence from which there was nothing disgraceful,[18] he had entirely failed to take precautions for the event of such a catastrophe, and lacked the self-confidence which alone could have made possible further resistance on the spot. Thus, though he did not at first quite understand the full significance of his overthrow, Bohemia had passed for ever out of the weak hands of the Winter—or Twelfth Night—King. When, on the evening of the rout, the long stream of vehicles, headed by Queen Elizabeth’s coach, ebbed out of Prague, bearing with it whatsoever was portable of the Protestant interest, no hopes remained except such as were wholly illusory. But Elizabeth intended that, even though Bohemia was lost and the Palatinate, which, as Louisa Juliana had formerly lamented, had ‘gone into Bohemia,’ might prove to be lost with it, the drama so swiftly played out should have no ignoble epilogue. She had resolved—in her own words—‘not to desert her husband, and, if he was to perish, to perish by his side.’ Fate dealt with her after no such sudden fashion; but she was true to the spirit of her vow.

From Prague Frederick and Elizabeth first made their way into Silesia, then still a dependency of Bohemia; but soon Frederick, though, owing to Wotton’s protest against the invasion of the Palatinate, the ban of the Empire did not descend on him till the following January, had to realise the position to which he was reduced. He sent on his wife before him, to seek shelter in the dominions of his brother-in-law, the Elector George William of Brandenburg. This Prince, a Calvinist and one of those who had advised the acceptance of the Bohemian Crown, was afraid at the same time of the Swedes and of the Emperor, to whose policy he had not yet rallied; and in after days the great Elector’s sister, the brave Duchess Louisa Charlotte of Courland, recognising in the experiences of her own married life some analogy to those of her Aunt Elizabeth’s, recalled as memorable the impunity with which her father had afforded a passing refuge to his unfortunate relatives.[19] The intimacy between the two Calvinist Electoral Houses was to survive backslidings on the part of Brandenburg in the course of the great War, and was at a later date to be very notably renewed, in spite of the perennial jealousy between the two dynasties and governments, by the marriage of Elizabeth’s grand-daughter Sophia Charlotte with the future first Prussian King. But, in these early days, the welcome extended by the Elector George William to his fugitive kinsfolk was limited to the coldest courtesies. At Küstrin, where on Christmas Day, 1620, Elizabeth gave birth to her fifth child, the Prince Maurice to be known in later life as Rupert’s fidus Achates, the royal mother and her attendants are said to have hardly had enough to eat, and, when in January, 1621, they were joined by her husband from Breslau, he brought no good tidings with him. The Union was on the eve of dissolution; an offer of aid from the Sultan, so at least it was rumoured, had been refused by Frederick; and the vacillations of King James were more hopeless than ever. At Berlin, where the fugitives were received by Frederick’s sister, the Electress Elizabeth Charlotte, they were glad to leave behind them the infant Maurice in the faithful charge of his grandmother Louisa Juliana, who, with his elder brother and sister in her care, had taken her departure from Heidelberg even before the battle of Prague. Her own estates, together with those of her second son Lewis Philip, long remained sequestrated; though neither of them had taken any part in the Bohemian business. The boys were afterwards removed to Holland; but the young Princess Elizabeth continued under her grandmother’s care till her ninth year, chiefly at Krossen in Silesia. This early training and the closer connexion into which it brought her with the Brandenburg Electoral family, were to exercise a notable influence upon her character and upon her later personal history.

From Berlin her parents, luckless emigrants, had still been obliged to move on, Queen Elizabeth journeying to Wolfenbüttel, the residence of the elder branch of the House of Brunswick, Frederick roaming about the Lower Saxon Circle in quest of military or other aid. Finally, they entered the Netherlands together by way of the Rhine. Everywhere in the Low Countries they were warmly welcomed, not only as kinsfolk of the House of Orange, but also as fellow-martyrs of those Protestant refugees to whom, in the Elector Frederick III’s days, the Palatinate had accorded so hospitable a reception. On April 14th, 1621, they were received with the utmost cordiality by the great Stadholder, Maurice of Orange, in the midst of a large assemblage of princes, nobles, and foreign ambassadors; and soon the States-General of the United Provinces, and the States of Holland and Friesland in particular, gave substantial expression to the universal warmth of the public welcome.

But the arm of the young Dutch Republic, though strenuous, was not long enough to reach effectively into the heart of the Empire. In the previous autumn, Frederick Henry of Nassau, the Stadholder’s brother, had made a show of protecting the Palatinate with a couple of thousand men, among whom there was an English contingent; but the effort had come to nothing. Already in 1620 the greater part of the Lower Palatinate had been occupied by the Spaniards; and in 1621, after Frederick had been placed under the ban of the Empire and the execution of the sentence had been entrusted to the expectant Duke of Bavaria, the inhabitants of the Upper Palatinate were called upon to forswear their allegiance. Frederick’s cause was upheld only by the English volunteers under Sir Horace Vere and by Mansfeld’s mercenaries. The Union had dissolved itself in the spring, and after midsummer James, while still cherishing the hope of bringing to pass a friendly intervention by Spain, was attempting through his ambassador Digby to obtain favourable terms at Vienna. Before the year was out, Maximilian of Bavaria had, with the aid of Rome, obtained an imperial promise of the reversion of the forfeited Electorate; and the future, as well as the present, seemed wholly dark for the Electoral couple and their children. Near or far, no ally seemed prepared to strike a blow in their interests, except that already, in 1621, the Queen of Hearts—as she came to be called in the days when she exercised no other sovereignty[20]—had found a true knight neither anxious, like King James, about probabilities of failure, nor, like the great condottiere Mansfeld, solely intent upon the main chance. This was Duke Christian of Brunswick, the administrator or (as an English letter of the time aptly calls him) the ‘temporal bishop’ of the see of Halberstadt.[21] There is no evidence of his having ever met, or so much as corresponded with, the Queen; but Sir Thomas Roe distinctly states that it was only for her sake that he had engaged in the war, and he made much the same confession himself to his mother; while the story of his having worn in his helmet a glove belonging to the Queen, which he had vowed to restore to her in reconquered Prague, can be traced back as far as 1646. After losing an arm, he rode forth in 1624 with a substitute made of iron. Though a poet’s son, he was as rough a campaigner as any of the captains of the age; and in 1625 a flagrant act of violence placed him under a cloud. In the following year a fever ended the excesses of his military career, his wild defiances of Spain and the League, and his romantic passion, which, as we know from a letter written by his sister, Sophia of Nassau-Dietz, pined almost to the last for some mark of recognition by its object.[22] Elizabeth’s power of attracting the sympathy of soldiers, which had been so conspicuously exhibited in the case of Christian of Halberstadt, and to which afterwards Lord Craven’s life-long devotion was to testify, was further exemplified by the goodwill shown to her in these times of distress by her martial kinsmen of the House of Orange. The readiness of the great captain Maurice of Nassau to further her interests so far as in him lay was shared by his younger brother, Prince Frederick Henry, who, in 1625, succeeded him in the stadholdership, and between whom and one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, attached to her person since her Heidelberg days, Maurice a few weeks before his death arranged a marriage. But the new Princess of Orange proved to be as proud as the beautiful Countess Amalia von Solms had been poor; and, before long, her desire of furthering the interests of the House into which she had been admitted made her hostile to those of the family of her former mistress.

The charm of Elizabeth’s beauty, and the stimulus of her high spirit, also inspired with a warm personal concern in her affairs, those of her father’s numerous diplomatists who were or became known to her. Sir Henry Wotton seems never to have seen her again after their ‘merry hour’ of meeting at Heidelberg; but he remained stedfast in his admiration for his ‘Royal Mistress,’ and among the intimate letters of the days of his retirement at Eton are those which he addressed to her, then a half-forgotten exile at the Hague. In his will he left to the Prince of Wales her picture, with an inscription[23] which reappears, with slight modifications, in two of his published pieces. Wotton’s successor at Venice, Sir Dudley Carleton (afterwards Viscount Dorchester), who had likewise been received by the Electoral pair at Heidelberg, and who was English ambassador at the Hague when the fugitives arrived there, cheerfully gave up his house for their use; besides judiciously exerting himself in their interest both in this and in his second embassy to the United Provinces. Lord Herbert of Cherbury was warmly thanked by Elizabeth for his exertions at Paris; and Lord Conway did his best for her cause with the Emperor at Prague. Lord Doncaster (afterwards Earl of Carlisle) had, during his futile mission before the Bohemian crisis, gained her goodwill in such a degree as to be honoured by her with the intimate nickname of ‘camel-face’; and it was through him that his eloquent chaplain Donne was privileged to ‘deliver mesages’ to the Queen when in sore straits. More to the purpose were the active services of Sir Thomas Roe, the ‘honest fatt Thom’ of her correspondence; but, although these had begun before this diplomatist’s return from Eastern Europe, he does not seem to have come into much personal contact with her before 1628.

Only a few brief indications can be given here of the general course of the exiled family’s fortunes during the quarter of a century which elapsed, before a definitive settlement of the Palatinate problem was at last reached in the Peace of Westphalia. Negotiations were at first carried on in Sweden, through Ludwig Camerarius, who from 1623 directed the diplomacy of the Palatine House, with the purpose of engaging King Gustavus Adolphus in offensive operations, in the course of which the latter intended that Frederick should appear in the Palatinate at the head of an army; but the perennial Danish jealousy of Sweden put a stop to the plan. About the same time (1623-4) the faithful Rusdorf sought, by negotiations in London, to obtain fair terms for his master at Vienna, Frederick signifying his willingness to allow his eldest son (Frederick Henry) to be educated at Vienna, with a view to his marriage with an Imperial Princess; but the overtures came to nothing, as did the specious offers of the disguised Capuchin della Rota. These latter proved, in truth, to be mere pretences on the part of Maximilian of Bavaria, who, in 1624, was received into the College of Electors in Frederick’s place. Towards the close of 1623, King James I, who earlier in the year had broken off negotiations with Mansfeld and Christian of Halberstadt and concluded a truce with the Infanta at Brussels, which Frederick was obliged to ratify, had at last been undeceived as to the intentions of Spain. He saw at last how during the Spanish marriage negotiations he had been tricked into the false hope that good terms would be obtained by Spanish mediation for the Palatines; and, during the last year of his reign, when war with Spain was becoming more and more imminent, a treaty promising an English army for the recovery of the Palatinate was concluded with Mansfeld, who was for the moment the lion of London, whither he was soon followed on a similar errand by Christian of Halberstadt. Thus, when in March, 1625, James I was succeeded on the English throne by Charles I, Elizabeth’s hopes rallied with pathetic buoyancy, and she cherished the hope that her brother’s approaching French marriage would further advance the interests of her family. There can be no doubt of Charles I’s intention to serve his sister and her children; and his wishes on this head were shared by Buckingham. The Duke is even said, when visiting the Palatine family at Leyden, not long before his assassination in January, 1629, to have had in his head a scheme—which, if fate had so willed it, might have had strange consequences for the British Succession—of a marriage between his daughter Lady Mary Villiers and Elizabeth’s eldest son, Prince Frederick Henry. But, as is well known, the history of Charles I’s foreign policy during the first part of his reign, in which the question of the recovery of the Palatinate could not possibly hold the central place as it had in his father’s, had, as Eliot summed it up in his scathing speech, been one of constant and utter failure. Afterwards, of course, the King was so hopelessly at issue with his Parliament, that all chance of effective intervention had come to an end. Mansfeld’s army at first remained inactive in the Low Countries, where it was not increased, except by fragments of the levies of Christian of Halberstadt, which a tempest had scattered at sea. Instead of reinforcing the mercenary troops, the English expedition which sailed under Lord Wimbledon in October, 1625, had orders for Cadiz. When, in 1625, Elizabeth’s uncle, Christian IV of Denmark, at last took the field as chief of the Lower Saxon Circle, the death of his namesake soon deprived him of his best commander; and, in 1626, Mansfeld, after being defeated by Wallenstein at Dessau, was ‘chased’ by him into Hungary, whence, after making over his army to Bethlen Gabor, he took his departure only to die. In August of the same year, Tilly entirely overcame Christian IV at Lutter, and the ‘Danish War’ was virtually at an end. Henceforth, no further intention was entertained either at Vienna or at Munich of granting any terms to Frederick, although, on Cardinal Khlesl’s principle of never either dropping negotiations or concluding them, conditions were still offered him. In return for the restoration of part of his paternal dominions, he was, while renouncing both the Bohemian Crown and the Electoral dignity, to pay the costs of the war, and to consent to bring up his children as Catholics; but the former condition he could not, and the latter he would not, accept. It is said that, at this very time (1627), the unhappy ex-Elector paid a secret visit to the Palatinate, whose fate seemed sealed for ever by the Austro-Bavarian treaty of the following year. The Spaniards held the left bank of the Rhine and the Bavarians the right; conversion was forced upon the inhabitants, who began to emigrate rather than submit to it; and, when, in June, 1630, Rusdorf presented a letter from his master at Ratisbon, where the Bavarian policy was conspicuously to the front, the Emperor had no answer to return except a demand of unconditional submission. Had the Palatine family yielded to this demand, and accepted the further condition of conversion to the Church of Rome, they might perhaps have been allowed some sort of domicile in the Empire. But they were of a different metal, and held out, though their prospects had never been gloomier; for, in the same year, peace was concluded between England and Spain, and whatever hopes had been placed upon King Charles’ anti-Spanish policy were thus brought to nought.

Yet, soon after these events—in July, 1630—Gustavus Adolphus landed on the Pomeranian coast, and in him the Palatine family hoped to find both an avenger and a deliverer. The Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana met him at Berlin, and after his great victory at Breitenfeld he approached the Palatinate. Before the end of 1631 most of it had been recaptured and re-Protestantised; and early in the following year Frederick was on his way to meet the conquering hero. Frederick’s Dutch hosts had furnished him forth with great liberality, and the number of state coaches with which he arrived at Frankfort, in February, 1632, had been increased to two score by Gustavus Adolphus himself, who treated him with great courtesy as King of Bohemia. But the future of the Palatinate was left undiscussed between the two Kings; nor was it till after Gustavus had continued his victorious progress through Bavaria, that he proposed a settlement. It showed unmistakably that the treatment of the Palatinate formed but a subsidiary part of his great design, and filled Frederick, who was looking for restoration to his patrimony, with alarm. For, besides other onerous conditions, there were imposed on him the admission of Swedish garrisons to some of his chief towns, the concession of the supreme military command to Gustavus, and the grant of equal rights to the Lutherans in the Calvinistic half of the Palatinate. Hard as these terms seemed to Frederick, amicable negotiations were still in progress between him and the great Swedish King, when the awful news arrived of the death of Gustavus on the field of Lützen. Frederick had a little before this fallen ill of a fever; but, as if driven by his doom, he once more began to wander from town to town, till, on November 29th, 1632, thirteen days after the death of Gustavus, he breathed his last at Mainz. The homeless wanderer’s heart was buried in the church at Oppenheim, in his own Palatinate; his corpse was hurriedly borne hither and thither—being carried off from Frankenthal by Bernhard of Weimar on his retreat in 1635, to preserve it from desecration—till it was at last composed in peace within the walls of Metz.[24]

After Frederick’s death, the regency of the Palatinate was assumed by his brother Louis Philip, who was married to a Brandenburg Princess (Maria Eleonora); but though under his rule Heidelberg was recovered, and with the aid of foreign (especially Scottish) beneficence the prosperity of the Palatinate began to revive, the fatal day of Nördlingen (September 6th, 1634) undid all the work of the previous two years, and the sufferings of the Palatinate from both ‘friends’ and foes—from Swedes and Bavarians—began afresh. After the Peace of Prague, in 1635, the Swedes fell back upon the Main, and after Heidelberg had been once more occupied by the Imperialists, the Palatinate remained for some five years under the government of the Emperor, which banished all Calvinist and Lutheran preachers with their families and households, and in every way promoted the decay of University and schools. It cannot be said that the general condition of the population, whose sufferings were of the most heartrending description, and productive of that awful brutalisation which is so characteristic of the later period of the Thirty Years’ War, was much affected by changes in the occupation of the country.[25] The renewal of warfare in these parts, in 1640 and again in 1644, brought in the French and their German allies and the Bavarians to augment these troubles. It will be noted below how the dispossessed heir of the Palatinate bore himself in these evil years, and what he finally saved for his House out of so pitiful a wreck. The Bohemian Crown was, of course, a thing of the past, though to the end Elizabeth retained the royal title.[26]

The birth at the Hague, on October 14th, 1630, of Sophia, the youngest of the children of Frederick and Elizabeth, had preceded the death of her father by very little more than two years. Her mother, it must be remembered, was then still in the full flower of her womanhood—in the thirty-fifth year of her age—an eager horsewoman and fond of the pleasures of the chase; and in mind she remained not less vigorous than in body, venting her wrath freely on both enemies and neutrals—on that ‘devil’ the Emperor and that ‘beast’ the Elector of Saxony, just as at a later date she had to search in the Book of Revelation for analogues fitly expressing her sentiments concerning Oliver Cromwell. Yet private as well as public griefs had helped to sadden her heart as well as to sober her spirit even before the death of her husband, whose affection towards her had remained unchanged, showing itself in little expressions of care and tenderness such as abound in his letters almost to the day of his death. In 1624, they had lost an infant son, Lewis; and, in January, 1629, their first-born, Frederick Henry, a boy of fifteen, was (as already noted) drowned off Haarlem as he was travelling back in the common passengers’ boat with his father from Amsterdam, whither Frederick had gone to collect the share of the profits from a captured Spanish treasure-fleet assigned to him by Maurice of Nassau. The infant Princess Charlotte was laid in the grave by her brother’s side only three days before the christening of Sophia. But, as there survived five brothers (to whom a sixth, significantly named Gustavus, was added two years after Sophia’s birth), the statement may perhaps be credited with which her Memoirs open, that her arrival in this world caused no excess of joy to her parents. She relates that her name—the name which narrowly missed marking the beginning of a new English dynasty, and which, in token of its popularity in this country, was bestowed upon his heroine by the author of one of the masterpieces of our literature—was drawn by lot out of several written for the purpose on slips of paper, because of the small choice of godmothers remaining in the case of so large a family. Sophia’s destinies were not encumbered by a second name like that which her sister Louisa Hollandina bore in honour of her godfathers; although the States of Friesland, who undertook the same responsibility for the infant Sophia, presented her with a pension of forty pounds for life and handsome supplementary gifts. So soon as it was possible to transport her, she was sent to Leyden by her mother, who preferred that her children should be brought up at a distance from herself, ‘since,’ says Sophia, ‘the sight of her monkeys and dogs was more pleasing to her than that of ourselves.’ At Leyden, therefore, Sophia spent her early childhood, chiefly in the company of her youngest brother Gustavus, who died nine years after his birth. Her graphic reminiscences of her tender years chiefly turn on the cumbrous etiquette (tout à fait à l’allemande) by which she was environed, and on the lessons in the Heidelberg Catechism (which she ‘knew by heart without understanding it’) imparted by her venerable governess, Frau von Pless, with the assistance of her two daughters, ladies of ‘awe-inspiring’ presence, whose age seemed to the child almost equal to her own. ‘Their ways were straight in the eyes of Heaven as before men.’ The good ex-Elector had been consistently careful as to providing sound Calvinistic instruction for his children, and Frau von Pless had been his own instructress in his infancy; but his English wife, at least during part of her residence in the Netherlands, continued to employ the services of a Church of England chaplain. In general, it is clear that at Leyden, and afterwards at the Hague, Sophia, while her wits quickly opened to the demands of life, passed, like the rest of her brothers and sisters, through a training which equipped them more or less efficiently for the struggle before them. In her case, it must also have helped to regulate the remarkable intellectual curiosity with which she was naturally endowed, and which, though it cannot be shown to have carried her to great heights or depths of study or thought, at least enabled her in later life to rise serene above the troubles and trials of the hour. The usual training of the Palatine Princes and Princesses, while including some mathematics, history, and law, appears to have been based in the main upon the study of languages, of which most of them came to have several at command. Their mother they always addressed in English, but among themselves they used French, as had been the custom of their father in his letters to his wife, and as continued to be the practice of Sophia’s son and grandson in domestic conversation, even when they had become British sovereigns.

On Prince Gustavus’ death, in 1641, Sophia, who was herself suffering from illness, quitted Leyden for the Hague, bidding farewell to her bonnes vieilles, whom she said she had loved from gratitude and habit, ‘for sympathy rarely exists between old age and youth’—a maxim to be flatly contradicted by the experience of her own later years. At the Hague, where, during the rule of Frederick Henry, his consort Amalia strained every nerve to prove the authority of the House of Orange equal to that of a royal dynasty, the Queen of Bohemia was beginning to find some of the conditions of her life oppressive, and, worst of all, the continuous pressure of debt unbearable. Already in her husband’s time, the generosity of Maurice had furnished them with a pleasant summer retreat at Rheenen, in the wooded country on the Rhine, not far below Arnhem, described by Evelyn as ‘a neate palace or country house, built after the Italian manner, as I remember.’[27] But Sophia, on first arriving at the Hague, found the change so delightful as to make her think that she was ‘enjoying the pleasures of Paradise.’ This early glamour must, however, have soon passed off; for, though blessed with good spirits even in her later years, Sophia was without that gift—sometimes enviable, sometimes dangerous—of seeing things rather as one wishes them to be than as they are, which her brother Charles Lewis described himself as having inherited from their mother. And it was this mother herself to the flaws in whose brilliant and in many respects noble personality Sophia seems to have been from the first unable to shut her eyes. It cannot have been only her love of horses and dogs, or her penchant for what may be called the pleasures of the toilet which affected both Sophia and her eldest sister Elizabeth unsympathetically; there seems to have been in the Queen a vein of frivolity, inherited perhaps from her own mother, which estranged from her these and perhaps some other of her children, though they could not fail to recognise that her life was devoted to the interests of her family as a whole. It must, however, have been to his sister Elizabeth, and not to Sophia, that their brother Charles Lewis refers in expressing a hope that their mother may not find reason ‘to use her with the former coolness.’

Of her eldest brother, Charles Lewis himself, Sophia can have seen but little in the days of the family life at the Hague and Rheenen, although she afterwards grew warmly attached to him and came to regard him, as she says, in the light of a father rather than of an elder brother. He was a prince of remarkable intellectual gifts, which, till on his father’s death he by his mother’s wish took service under William II, Prince of Orange, he had cultivated to so much purpose at the University of Leyden, that he was afterwards credited with a share in the writings of Pufendorf, the chief glory of the restored University of Heidelberg. His disposition resembled his youngest sister’s in not a few points, as their correspondence shows. His nature, like hers, was at bottom both kindly and humorous, and, while both had a turn for sarcastic wit, there was, one must confess, a coarse fibre in both for which the habits and traditions of Palatinate life are not to be held altogether responsible. It must have been because of this natural wit, rather than because of the avarice born of necessity which Charles Lewis displayed in later passages of his career, that he was called Timon by his brothers and sisters, to whom Shakespeare, with whose plays Charles Lewis was not unacquainted, is quite as likely as Lucian to have suggested the nickname. He was through life a friend of English literature, and, so late as 1674, John Philpot’s edition of Camden’s Remains was dedicated to him. There is evidence of his having had other literary tastes—among the nicknames which he gave to his eldest son by Louisa von Degenfeld were those of ‘Pantagruel’ and ‘Lancelot du Lac.’ But his favourite book was the Bible (‘meinliebotes Evangelium’). At the same time he was, like his sister Sophia, free-spoken on all subjects; though, on occasion, as is not wonderful when his experiences are remembered, a pathos welled up in him which she, not so much from cynicism as from habitual self-control, steadily repressed.[28] Nor was he free-spoken only; he might be called a free-thinker but for that aforesaid love of the Bible which, together with a double share of his intellectual alertness, he bequeathed to his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orleans.

After his father’s death, Charles Lewis had been acknowledged as Elector Palatine by King Charles I and some of the German Protestant Princes; and his mother, though he was and always remained the darling of her heart, would have urged him to assume his place in the Palatinate, had not the battle of Nördlingen placed any such attempt out of the question. Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert were accordingly sent to England (1635). Here for two or three years they led a life of gaiety and dissipation; but they could hardly, in any case, have effected anything to the purpose, even had the young ‘Elector’ devised some more practical scheme than that of asking the hand of the young Queen Christina of Sweden. After their return to Holland, however, the two Princes were, in 1638, stirred to a more vigorous activity on their own account. They began badly by the loss of all their stores at Meppen in Frisia; but they, notwithstanding, resolved to make an armed attempt upon the Palatinate, of which the cost was defrayed by Lord Craven, who himself held a command in it. They were supported by a Swedish force under Major-General King (the Lord Eythin of Marston Moor); but, after siege had been laid to Lemgo, the gallant raid came to an unfortunate end at Vlotho on the Weser, both Rupert and Craven remaining behind in captivity. Hereupon, Charles Lewis, in 1639, once more set forth from Holland with the design of placing himself at the head of the army left without a leader by the death of Duke Bernhard of Weimar; but Cardinal Richelieu, whose schemes the success of the adventure would have thwarted, gave it an unexpected turn by causing Charles Lewis to be arrested and detaining him, for the most part in prison, during several months. In 1640, he used the freedom which he had regained for new efforts, first in Denmark, and then at the Diet of Ratisbon, upon whose walls Swedish guns were playing. Once more, there was much excitement in the ‘Palsgrave’s’ favour in both England and Scotland—it was in fact the last occasion on which King and Parliament might have united in a policy approved by the nation at large; and when, in 1642, the Emperor Ferdinand III propounded a settlement which would, on stringent terms, have restored a portion of the Palatinate, the English ambassador (Sir Thomas Roe) joined the agents of Charles Lewis in protesting against its inadequacy. The horrors of war were renewed in the exhausted Palatinate, and Charles Lewis once more betook himself to England (1644), where he presented a memorandum to Parliament, which allowed him £30 a day for his stay in London, but limited it in the first instance to a fortnight. Early in this year, Louisa Juliana had died, and it almost seemed as if the hopes of her descendants were to be buried with her; for, though a dim prospect of a general peace was opening, there seemed little hope that, in the conflict between the great Crowns, thought would be taken of the Palatinate. In England, the Civil War had been for nearly two years in progress; both Rupert and Maurice had, to their brother’s actual or pretended displeasure, taken service under the King; and it is hardly possible that, at such a time, Charles Lewis could have reckoned on obtaining military or pecuniary support for his schemes for the recovery of his patrimony. He has, accordingly, been supposed to have harboured deeper designs, and these have been connected with Sir Harry Vane’s proposal, rather earlier in the year, of dethroning King Charles I. But whether or not the idea of supplanting his uncle had entered into Charles Lewis’ mind—and Sophia’s mention in her Memoirs of Vane’s previous visit to the Hague lends some colour to the conjecture (she calls him Vain and speaks of him and his large chin without seriousness)—it is certain that the Prince was well received by the Parliamentary leaders.[29] In return for his supposed goodwill to their cause, to which he is stated to have testified even by taking the Covenant and sitting in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, he was granted an annual allowance of £8,000 and assigned the Deanery at Windsor as a residence, where he thought it most prudent for the time to give himself up to his scientific studies.[30]

The career of Prince Rupert, whose personal attractions had eclipsed those of his elder brother during their former joint visit to England, was widely to diverge from Charles Lewis’, now that they both found themselves once more in the land of their maternal ancestry. In those earlier days, Sir Thomas Roe had informed Elizabeth how the King took pleasure in the sprightliness of her second son, from whom, in her fondness for his senior, she had expected so little; and Charles Lewis himself reported to his mother his dismay that Rupert le Diable was always in the company of Queen Henrietta Maria, her ladies, and the Papists. At the same time, Prince Rupert was understood to be engaged in discussing with his uncle the King wild schemes for the foundation of a colony in Madagascar. The Princes were recalled home; the Madagascar scheme collapsed; and Rupert’s Protestantism henceforth stood firm. It has been already seen how he was taken prisoner in the fight at Vlotho (1638). The offer of Lord Craven, who had paid £20,000 for his own ransom, to increase this sum, were he allowed to share Prince Rupert’s captivity, was refused, and the Prince was lodged in captivity at Linz under the care of Count Kufstein. He came forth from it, having resisted all attempts to lure him from his religious belief and into the Emperor’s service; neither, however, was he inclined to avail himself of the prospects of a wealthy Huguenot marriage held out to him in Paris. With his faithful brother Maurice, he hereupon betook himself to England, where they devoted themselves to the cause of the King in his struggle against Parliament, and became the very types and exemplars of the Cavaliers. Across the seas, in New England, the good old Puritan minister Nathaniel Ward, who had held Rupert in his arms as a child, ‘when, if I mistake not, he promised to be a good Prince,’ prayed that even now he might be turned into ‘a right Roundhead, a wise-hearted Palatine, a thankful man to the English,’ and that his soul might be saved, ‘notwithstanding all his God-damn-me’s.’ But the ordinary picture of Prince Rupert as general of the horse, impetuous even to foolhardiness, and as a passionate partisan who could not restrain his vehemence even in the presence of the King himself, conveys no complete view either of his services in the Civil War, or of his character. As to the former, neither the calamity of Marston Moor, for which he was not responsible, as he certainly was for that of Naseby, nor perhaps even the surrender of Bristol, should have been allowed to obscure their lustre. As to his character, he was not less humane than resolute, and self-reliance was combined in him with the nobler kind of self-respect. His intellectual curiosity was a genuine family characteristic, though it happened in him to take a peculiar turn towards applied science and the technicalities of art.[31] After the fall of Oxford, in 1646, the Princes Rupert and Maurice left England, the former to hold a command in France; but, in the year before the execution of King Charles, he once more came forward to serve the sinking cause of the English monarchy, and took charge of the royal fleet. Maurice was, of course, once more found by his side, and, after the King’s death, they engaged in those remote maritime adventures in the course of which the younger brother met his death. Rupert’s earlier naval—or buccaneering—career continued till 1653, when he returned to France, creating a considerable sensation by his entry into Paris ‘like an old Spanish conquistador, with Indians, apes and parrots.’[32]

Sophia’s third brother Maurice was, as has been seen, an all but inseparable follower of his elder Rupert, whose equal he can have been neither in military genius nor in general intellectual ability and personal charm—‘he never,’ says Clarendon, who resented the pride of the Palatines, ‘sacrificed to the Graces, nor conversed amongst men of quality, but had most used the company of ordinary and inferior men, with whom he loved to be very familiar.’ Sophia writes to him as to one little interested in intrigues of State, and his preference through life seems to have been for the camp rather than the Court.[33] But, whatever other abatement should be made from the censures with which, like the brother of his heart, he was visited by both Puritan animosity and Royalist spite, he most certainly possessed in a rare degree the soldier’s cardinal virtue of fidelity. Thus we may fain hope that, in accordance with the most trustworthy account, his fate overtook him, whelmed beneath the deep gulf of the Atlantic, and that he was not, as a different tradition would have it, carried off by corsairs to Algiers, there to linger out a forgotten existence.