The sixth and seventh brothers, Edward and Philip, had been brought up in common; but in their later lives they were much divided. About 1637, they had, with their brother Maurice, been sent to school in Paris, whither, as has been seen, the Palatine family long looked for political succour; and here they remained after Maurice had taken his departure, with a view to beginning his military career. In 1645 the elder of the pair took a step which estranged him not only from his brother Philip, but from the whole of the Palatine family, and which, together with a similar proceeding at a later date on the part of Princess Louisa Hollandina, stands in direct contrast to the general tenour of the family history. Anne of Gonzaga, second daughter of the Duke Charles of Gonzaga-Nevers, afterwards Duke of Mantua, was already a celebrity in French society, when, her amour with Henry of Guise having come to an end which wounded her self-esteem, she in 1645 secretly gave her hand to the Prince Palatine Edward, and henceforth became the ‘Princesse Palatine,’ under which name she plays a conspicuous part in the literature of contemporary French memoirs. We have, however, no concern here with her share in public affairs at a rather later time, when (in 1650) she effected a union between the two branches of the Fronde and thus drove Mazarin into temporary exile, and when, after being herself persuaded by the Cardinal to ‘rally’ to Anne of Austria, she (in 1651-2) succeeded in bringing over to the same side the Duke of Bouillon and the great general Turenne.^[34] Mazarin, when indicating the price (a great Court office) at which her support might be gained, described her as a femme intéressée; but, as M. Chéruel observes, it was not this aspect of her character which was in the mind of Bossuet when, in a funeral discourse, he dwelt on her great qualities of head and heart. In an age of confessional propaganda she was a great proselytiser in high places; and it was a signal instance of her activity in this direction, that she should have exacted Prince Edward’s conversion to the Church of Rome as the condition of her acceptance of his hand. For she thus secured to herself a claim for direct interference in the affairs of the Palatine House, which still possessed a certain importance and might again acquire a greater. Her foresight was justified; for, in course of time, there can be no doubt that she contrived to have a hand in the conversion of Princess Louisa Hollandina, as well as in yet another conversion, which made it possible for Charles Lewis’ daughter Elizabeth Charlotte to become the wife of Louis XIV’s brother, Philip Duke of Orleans. Although the new Princess Palatine had retained her share of the wealth of the Gonzaga, notwithstanding the efforts of her father to accumulate the whole for bestowal on his eldest daughter Marie, who in this same year 1645 became Queen of Poland, the agitation of Edward’s mother at the news of his change of religion was extreme, and was shared by most of her children. Charles Lewis besought his mother ‘with her blessings to lay her curse’ upon Prince Philip, who was about to quit Paris for the Netherlands, should he too ‘change the religion he had been bred in.’ As for Prince Edward, his fortunes were henceforth more or less severed from those of the family, though we find him, in 1651, at the Hague, as he passed the ambassadors of the English Commonwealth in the streets, calling them ‘rogues’ to their faces, and thus doing his best to embroil the United Provinces with the enemies of the House of Stewart.^[35] With Edward’s daughter, Benedicta Henrietta, born in 1652, we shall meet again as the wife of John Frederick, Duke of Hanover, Sophia’s brother-in-law. In her the Palatine type, of which Sophia herself and her niece Elizabeth Charlotte were such striking examples, was well-nigh effaced; but it will not be overlooked that by descent she stood nearer to the English Succession than her father’s youngest sister.

Of Prince Philip’s fateful conduct at the Hague immediately. While, before his return to her mother’s little Court, Sophia had necessarily seen little of him or of her brothers there or at Rheenen, she was, as a matter of course, much thrown into the society of her three sisters. At first, as she tells us, she was by no means troubled to find them handsomer and more accomplished than herself, and admired by everybody; and she was perfectly contented that her juvenile gaiety and railleries should help to amuse them. ‘Even the Queen took pleasure in my fun’; for she was gratified to see the child tormented, so that her wits might be sharpened by the process of being put on her defence. It became the established practice for her to ‘rally’ any and everybody; the clever people were delighted by it, and the others were made afraid of her. Gradually, however, Sophia’s quick ears heard the ‘milords’ at her mother’s Court say to one another that, when she had finished growing, she would surpass all her sisters. And the remark inspired her with an affection for the whole English nation; ‘so greatly is one pleased, when young, to be thought good-looking.’

Elizabeth, the eldest of the Palatine Princesses, though by no means indifferent to the family interests, or without sympathy at any time of her life with the troubles either of her father’s or her mother’s House, was of an introspective turn of mind, grave and thoughtful, and little inclined by nature to the levity inborn in most of her brothers and sisters. Both as imbued with the Calvinism in which she had been so carefully nurtured by her grandmother amidst the congenial Brandenburg surroundings, and perhaps also because, though an accomplished linguist, she alone of the sisterhood had no occasion to learn to speak Dutch, she already as a girl fell into a way of leading much of her life to herself. At the same time, she was always interested in public affairs, and more especially in marriage projects, which in those times formed an important part in politics; and it is noticeable that she continued fond of match-making even after she had herself settled down to a single life. Among the suitors for her hand was the young King Wladislaw IV of Poland, a tolerant and liberal-minded Prince.^[36] But the marriage fell through, because the Diet would not hear of their King marrying an ‘English’ Protestant; and Elizabeth, of whose noble character perfect veracity formed one of the noblest traits, refused in her turn to listen to a diplomatic suggestion that she should become a convert to Rome. In January, 1639, there was a notion of making a match between her and Bernhard of Weimar. We are not told that the Electoral Prince Frederick William of Brandenburg—afterwards known as the Great Elector—between whom and Princess Louisa Hollandina a marriage was at one time projected, had ever thought of asking the hand of herher elder sister. But he may have met Elizabeth in 1638 at Königsberg, when, after the Peace of Prague, George William was induced by troubles in his Margravate to send his whole family into Prussia, whither some of their Palatine kinsfolk also came; and he was in these years much at Rheenen, where he cannot but have been attracted by the Princess Elizabeth, whose unflinching Protestant sentiment resembled his own, which formed a constant factor in his shifting system of policy. She was afterwards a visitor to Berlin, where, in 1646, Princess Louisa Henrietta of Orange, whose spirit was akin to hers, held her entry as Electress, and at Krossen, where the Dowager Electress (Frederick V’s sister) kept a Court of her own, and where Elizabeth is said to have specially interested herself in the instruction of the Elector Frederick William’s sister Hedwig Sophia, afterwards Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel. We shall see in what fashion the Great Elector ultimately succeeded in providing for the peace and comfort of his kinswoman. Before this time, owing chiefly to her friendship with Descartes, by which she is probably now chiefly remembered, Elizabeth’s mental horizon had unmistakably widened; and, though she retained to the last a sincere piety and (a trace or so of pride of birth apart) a touching modesty of spirit, her growing familiarity with broader philosophical principles gradually freed her from some of the narrowing influences of Calvinism. Descartes’ intimacy with the Princess Palatine, against whose family he had, curiously enough, in former days borne arms in Bohemia, was during her absence from the Hague maintained by an exchange of letters between them, of which the artless Sophia contrived the conveyance.^[37] Although the relations between the great thinker and his matchless pupil were not in the least of a kind to suggest clandestine methods, Elizabeth was not, like Queen Christina, independent of control; and Sophia’s services in screening the correspondence from her mother’s unsympathetic notice, while they earned her the gratitude of the first philosopher with whom she was brought into personal relations, show that, notwithstanding her raillery and ridicule of her eldest sister’s moments of distraction, kindly feelings prevailed between them. Elizabeth’s refined beauty, though it was hardly in reference to this that her sisters nicknamed her la Grecque, is described by Sophia in her Memoirs very vividly, but not without an admixture of spite.

The second of the sisterhood, Louisa Hollandina, is stated by Sophia not to have been so beautiful in the days of the Hague and Rheenen as Elizabeth, but, as it seemed to the young critic, of a more pleasing disposition. ‘She applied herself entirely to painting, and her love of this art was so strong, that she made likenesses of people without having ever cast her eyes upon them.’ This master-passion possessed her to the last, although, perhaps, it was only when Honthorst touched up her pictures that they did full justice to his teaching. Some of her handiwork is to be found in the galleries containing portraits of her family; an Annunciation was painted by her at the age of seventy-three, and several other pictures from her hands were bestowed by her upon the parish churches in the vicinity of Maubuisson during the period of her rule there as an Abbess. In her younger days, as we learn from the observant Sophia, Louisa Hollandina, while intent upon painting the portraits of her friends and acquaintances, was too neglectful of her own personal appearance. On the other hand, it seems wholly unjust to infer from the ripple of unaffected gaiety which overspread the calm of her maturer years, that her nature was essentially frivolous. While her life, as we shall see, was one of piety and unselfishness, we may conclude her to have possessed in her youth what she preserved in her old age—much of her youngest sister’s intellectual alertness and vivacity, and perhaps also something of her humorous turn of mind, without attaining to the depth of thought, any more than she had passed through the intellectual training, that distinguished their elder, Elizabeth.

Of Sophia’s third sister, the Princess Henrietta Maria (so named after Charles I’s charming but ill-starred Queen), a portrait is drawn in the Memoirs hardly less attractive than that which pictures her on canvas. But of the younger Henrietta Maria’s disposition and character nothing is recorded, except that she cared only for needlework and preserves, by which latter taste of her sister’s Sophia declares herself to have been the principal gainer. She must, however, have had her share of the delightful vivacity which marked her sisters Louisa Hollandina and Sophia—for the Queen of Bohemia was afterwards vividly reminded of her ways by the irresistible espièglerie of the little Elizabeth Charlotte. Largely through the match-making activity and Protestant sympathies of her sister Elizabeth, a marriage was, in 1651, brought about between Henrietta Maria and Prince Sigismund, a younger son of Prince George I of Transylvania, who had died in 1648, after carrying his throne and country safe through eighteen years of peril, first as the ally of Sweden and France, and then under Turkish pressure in friendly relations with Austria. But she died a few months after her outlandish marriage, and was soon followed to the grave by her husband, who did not live to witness the troubles which in the end overwhelmed his brother, the reigning Prince George II.

Such were the brothers and sisters who were the objects of Sophia’s unstinted affection in the youthful years of which she has drawn so pleasant a picture and which to her were beyond all doubt the happiest of her life. Nor has she refrained from drawing her own portrait as a young girl, with light-brown hair naturally falling into curls, of gay and unembarrassed manners, of a well-shaped but not very tall figure, and with the bearing of a princess. Like most of her family, and especially like her favourite brother Charles Lewis, whom their mother the Queen had been wont to call her ‘little black baby,’ she had the complexion of a brunette. Even more than by their royal mien and handsome features, these Palatines were distinguished among other men and women by the vis vivida with which they were hereditarily endowed. Although, however, to their mother display was second nature, and although during her residence in the United Provinces she was in the long run most fortunate in the bounty, interested or other, of her hosts, yet the time came when she could not keep more than the ghost of a Court, and as a matter of fact frequently found herself in sore straits. In 1645 one of her sons describes her Court as worried by rats and mice, but most of all by creditors. And Sophia, who was still young enough to find even financial difficulties good fun, writes that her mother’s banquets were more sumptuous than Cleopatra’s, since in order to provide them she had sacrificed not only pearls but diamonds. Yet even the poorest of royal exiles are rarely left without hangers-on, moved by the remembrance of past kindness or by the expectation of favours to come; and such Court followers as ‘Tom Killigrew,’^[38] ‘the elder,’ as he is usually called, and the ‘reverent Dick Harding,’ of whom she often makes humorous mention in her letters, appear to have clung to the Queen’s skirts till the end of her exile was at hand. But she and her family had other friends, or at least one other friend, Lord Craven, whose attachment and devotion were of the sort that gives rather than takes, so much so that one can hardly imagine how but for him she would have tided over her troubles. Of little body, but with a soul full of generosity, he had gone forth in 1631 to serve under the Swedish deliverer; and very soon he had begun to identify himself with the cause of Elizabeth, and to lay at her feet what he had saved of the great fortune bequeathed to him by his father, the Lord Mayor of London.^[39] It has been seen how his sword had been drawn and his treasure spent in the futile raid upon the Palatinate; and now he was back at the Hague paying the homage of his service to the unfortunate Queen. But Lord Craven, though at the time little more than forty years of age and destined to outlive by some thirty-five the loved Queen of whom an unauthenticated tradition persists in asserting him to have finally become the clandestine husband, seemed to Sophia’s disrespectful young eyes merely a kind old gentleman with a purse full of money, and with a quantity of little trinkets to bestow upon the young folk. She appears not to have thought him quite so brilliant a member of society as it was his wish to be, although among other things which she heard him say purely for the sake of effect was the assertion that, when he chose, it was in his power to think of nothing at all. Perhaps she shrewdly suspected the vieux milord, as she calls him, of a tender sentiment for her mother; perhaps she could not help looking down upon him as, with all his munificence, a new man; for the Palatines were as proud as they were poor.

Of their pride—or at least of that of some of the members of the family—a lurid illustration is to be found in an episode of the year 1646 which, tragical in its results, went far towards creating a permanent breach between the Queen of Bohemia and some of her children. Colonel de L’Épinay, formerly a favourite of the Duke of Orleans, had brought with him from France to the Hague the reputation of an homme à bonnes fortunes or lady-killer, something in the style of the Königsmarck to be mentioned on a later page of this biography. He had gained a footing at the Queen of Bohemia’s Court, where probably no very rigorous rules were observed as to affairs of gallantry; and here rumour was once more busy with his supposed triumphs. The Queen of Bohemia herself was said—it does not appear on what authority, but the laws of evidence are not much studied in schools for scandal—to have looked on him with favour. Her daughter Louisa Hollandina was, so far as we know, only connected with de L’Épinay through the malicious pen of Madame de Longueville, who, on her return from a visit to Holland, declared that, after casting eyes on the Princess, she no longer thought that anyone would envy him his crown of martyrdom. In any case, the pride of Prince Philip, who may have known something in France about the earlier adventures of this squire of dames, had taken umbrage at his actual or rumoured proceedings at the Hague. A quarrel ensued between the Prince and de L’Épinay; of which the end was that one evening in June, Prince Philip, returning home late with a single companion, was assaulted by two Frenchmen, and that, while defending himself against them, he recognised de L’Épinay as one of his assailants, and called out his name. De L’Épinay took to flight; but meeting him on the following day in the market-place, Philip rushed upon him and engaged him in a hand-to-hand struggle. In this de L’Épinay lost his life. The deed, possibly for more reasons than one, roused the anger of the Queen of Bohemia against her son Philip; he fled from Holland, and, though Charles Lewis pleaded for him with his mother, she never seems to have been reconciled to him. He was one of the most luckless of the brotherhood. On his leaving Paris, his eldest brother had sought to obtain employment for him under the English Parliament; but the attempt, doubtless made with the view of strengthening Charles Lewis’ own interest in that quarter, proved futile, and the unfortunate Philip was left to his own devices. In 1649, we find him in the company of Charles Lewis (who seems to have had a special kindness for him), on the occasion of the entry of the Elector into the capital town of his diminished patrimony. Philip met with his death in the battle of Rethel in 1650, fighting among the French royalists against Turenne and the Spaniards. On the occasion of the killing of de L’Épinay the Princess Elizabeth appears to have taken her brother Philip’s side; indeed, according to one version of the matter, it was she who had instigated him to commit the fatal deed. In any case, she in 1646 absented herself from her mother’s Court and the Low Countries for more than a year; and, though she seems afterwards to have returned thither for a time and certainly to have been again on good terms with the Queen, her life was henceforth generally led apart from her mother. No deeper sympathy can at any time have existed between them. Princess Louisa Hollandina remained at her mother’s Court for eleven years after the de L’Épinay affair, leading, it is stated, an exemplary life, and gradually falling more and more under the dominion of religious ideas very far removed from the sphere of those which came home to her sister Elizabeth.

Not very long after Sophia’s introduction to her mother’s Court a succession of English visitors were attracted to it, whom the troubles that had broken out on this side of the sea had driven across.^[40] In 1642 came Queen Henrietta Maria, to ask assistance from the States-General for King Charles I, and bringing with her the Princess Royal, Mary, the youthful wife of the heir of the House of Orange, upon whom was afterwards to be thrust so important a part in the affairs of her adopted country. By discovering in Sophia a slight resemblance to her own daughter, Madame, Henrietta Maria gratified the authoress of the Memoirs so sincerely as to induce her to revise her first criticism of the little Queen of England’s charms. More direct compliments were before long paid to Sophia by some of the English lords and gentlemen; and, as time went on, the English residents at the Hague began to speculate very eagerly upon her chances of securing the hand of no less a personage than her cousin the Prince of Wales, who at the time of his father’s confinement in the Isle of Wight (which she spells Weit) was about to seek a refuge in Holland. But this scheme, or rumour of a scheme, was strongly resented by the Princess of Orange (Amalia von Solms), whose soaring ambition was intent upon gaining the valuable but not very easily negotiable prize for one of her own daughters. While to Mary, the future Princess of Orange, the Queen of Bohemia’s heart seems to have opened with a warmth of feeling which she was not in the habit of manifesting towards her own daughters, a very different sentiment had come to animate her towards Prince Frederick Henry’s consort. Upon the favour of her former dependant, who aspired to be in everything but name a Queen, Elizabeth now herself in a sense depended. We cannot, therefore, place implicit trust in the account of the intrigue the Memoirs state to have been set on foot by Amalia. If the back-stairs information received by Sophia was correct, the Princess of Orange sought to ruin her young kinswoman’s reputation by causing an unmarried son of her own to compromise her by his advances. Though this trick fell through, yet, when the Prince of Wales had reached the Hague in 1648, it soon became evident to the Queen of Bohemia and her daughter that there would not and could not for the present be on his part any question of marriage.

Charles remained in Holland after to him, in his turn, a barren royal title had accrued. When the terrible news of the execution of King Charles I arrived in Holland, it came home with the utmost poignancy to his sister and her family. The younger Elizabeth in particular was almost overwhelmed, physically and mentally, by the catastrophe; and for once the philosophical reflexions of Descartes, which certainly fell short of the occasion, afforded her little or no comfort. The time had of course long passed when any service could be rendered to the Palatine family by the King to whose good offices it had of old looked forward so hopefully; and, in this very year 1648, after two years of weary negotiations, which had almost taken the heart out of the efforts of Charles Lewis and his agents, the Peace of Westphalia had at last restored to him part of his patrimony, with the dignity of Elector. The Lower Palatinate with the fair town of Heidelberg was his once more; but the Upper remained with Bavaria, whose Duke retained the first temporal Electorate, while to the Elector Palatine fell only a newly created eighth. Alike for the Palatine House, and for the Electorate recovered by it, the conditions of the Peace were full of disappointment and humiliation; but the worst, at all events, had not happened, when there was some danger of its happening; and Descartes could impress upon his friend and pupil the expediency of her brother’s accepting the half-loaf which Fate had bestowed upon him.

In the meantime, the thoughts of Sophia—and perhaps not hers alone in the family—were still turned chiefly in a different direction. When the most enterprising of the followers of ‘King Charles II,’ the gallant Montrose, early in 1650 started for Scotland with a royal commission, he had, Sophia tells us, resolved on demanding from the King, should the enterprise prove successful, the hand of her sister Louisa Hollandina. Sophia’s own chances of securing her royal cousin’s hand still formed a subject of speculation; and, on his return from France in 1650, the Princess of Orange still thought it worth while to influence the Presbyterian leaders among the King’s suite (Hamilton and Lauderdale) against Sophia, on the ground that she was a bad Presbyterian and in the habit of accompanying his Majesty to Common Prayer. Sophia was with her mother at Breda, when Charles agreed to take the Covenant. This, she writes, was not the only weakness she observed in him. From the first he had shown her pleasant cousinly attentions; but of a sudden, at the instigation of certain of his followers who had designs upon Lord Craven’s purse and took this roundabout way of seeking to open its strings, these attentions developed rather alarmingly. After some extravagant compliments to her charms, which he pronounced superior to those of ‘Mistress Berlo’ (a misspelt alias of Lucy Waters), he informed Sophia that he hoped to see her in England. But, with the same circumspection in dangerous situations which she displayed in later years, she preserved her name free from taint on the occasion of this trying adventure. She had, as she says, wit enough to perceive that this was not the way in which the marriages of great princes are made, more especially as at Breda she noticed that ‘the King,’ who had previously sought opportunities of conversing with her, avoided them in the presence of the Scottish Commissioners. Thus she in her turn sagaciously contrived to keep out of his way; and this first brief vision of an English throne, which had probably excited those around her more than it had moved herself, came to an end. ‘King Charles II’ passed out of the horizon of Sophia’s hopes and calculations; and, when afterwards he returned to Holland, his prospects were much darker, and she was no longer resident at her mother’s court.

It could hardly be but that this episode, although it had touched neither her honour nor her heart, should have made Sophia all the more ready to quit her mother’s court, in which of late years new troubles had begun to add themselves to old sorrows, and which was now no longer the centre of the life of the Palatine family. In 1650 she was evidently rather tired and out of harmony with a sphere of existence in which at the outset she had taken so much pleasure; and this not so much for any special reason as because it was gradually borne in upon her that ‘her joy could not endure there.’ Thus it was settled between her and two ladies in her particular confidence, whom she calls the Ladies Carray (Carr?) and Withypol (the latter is mentioned under the name of ‘fraw Wittepole’ as residing in Heidelberg Castle in 1658), and the good Lord Craven, that she should try a change of scene and life by starting in their company to pay a visit to her brother, the restored Elector Palatine, at Heidelberg. At first her mother the Queen objected, still clinging to the fancy of a match between her youngest daughter and the head of the House of Stewart. At last, however, she acquiesced on being assured that this consummation would not be prevented by the proposed journey; and so, borrowing a vessel from the friendly States of Holland, Sophia, who was now in her twentieth year, and whose travels had hitherto not extended beyond an occasional jaunt to Leyden, Delft, or Rheenen, in the summer of 1650 set forth on her voyage up the Rhine towards Heidelberg and the unknown.