A home, to which Elizabeth of Bohemia was fated never to return, was opened to her daughter Sophia. For eight years—from 1650 to 1658—she was the guest of her beloved brother Charles Lewis in that part of the Palatinate which had been at last restored to the family in his person. To these congenial surroundings she easily acclimatised herself; nor did she ever afterwards forget how, before her destiny at last bore her away from Heidelberg and its familiar neighbourhood, the interests of her maiden life had long centred in the affairs of her brother, in his troubles both public and private, and in his children, for whom her large heart never ceased to cherish a peculiar tenderness, even after the welfare of her own numerous family had become the chief anxiety of her existence. She was not at first aware that her departure from Holland had been against her mother’s wish—a fact which she discreetly passes over in her Memoirs.^[41] After telling of her leisurely journey along the route formerly followed by her parents on their wedding journey home, she graphically describes the forlorn poverty which stared her in the face, when she first entered her brother’s shrunken dominions. He and his Electress met her at Mannheim and took her on with them to Heidelberg, where the castle still lay in ruins, and they had to lodge in the town.

In truth, the Lower Palatinate had barely begun to recover from the tribulations which it had undergone both in the earlier and in the later periods of the Thirty Years’ War; and the population was literally the merest fragment of what it had been before the outbreak of the conflict—one-fiftieth part of it, according to a calculation which it seems almost impossible to accept. Moreover, Charles Lewis only gradually recovered possession even of the moiety of his patrimony allotted to him, nor was it till 1652 that the last Spaniard quitted the land. It is all the more to the honour of this Prince, and in a measure atones for the grievous aberrations of his private life, that after his restoration he should have held his head high in the Electoral College, to which, as his father’s son, he had been so grudgingly readmitted; and still more, that during the whole of his rule—which lasted till 1680—he should have spared neither thought nor effort for the welfare of his sorely tried subjects.

It was not his fault that, while engaged in these beneficent labours, he had again and again to turn the pruning-hook back into a sword.^[42] In 1666, he maintained a brave heart through his weary campaigning against French and Lorrainers, although he met with little luck under arms and suffered severely in health. Five years later, he sacrificed the happiness of his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte by yielding to the French demand for her hand, and went near to sacrificing his honour by allowing her, against her own wish or disposition, to be converted to the Church of Rome. When, in 1674, the first of the wars between the Empire and France broke out, Charles Lewis may have indulged in some passing dreams of an Austrasian kingdom under French supremacy; as a matter of fact, he found that neither the Orleans marriage nor his exertions to remain neutral protected his unhappy lands from invasion and its attendant horrors. Things went better when, in 1675, he had thrown in his lot with the Empire; for there can have been no truth in the rumours which made themselves heard in the city of gossip, Venice, that his father’s son was aiming at the Bohemian Crown. The troubles of the Palatinate recommenced when, in 1679-80, the French added to pretended reprisals the monstrous mockery of the so-called réunions; but of these Charles Lewis only survived to see the beginnings, and he was spared the bitterness of witnessing the devastation of his beloved Palatinate in the so-called Orleans War, of which his own daughter’s supposed claims were, to her unspeakable anguish, made the pretext. For the rest, the Elector Charles Lewis was a genuine son of the Palatinate, to which he devoted so much care and labour; he loved its good things, including the Bacharach wine, whose praises he sang in homely dithyrambs, and the wealth of choice fruit, mindful of which he denounced the sour pears and bullet grapes outside his own promised land. Like his daughter after him, he was nowhere so happy as in the midst of it, and his very diction is coloured with a proverbial phraseology of native Palatinate growth. As late as 1665, he is found declaring that if ten years more of life were granted him, and no war or pestilence came in the way, he would, en despit de l’envie, turn Mannheim into a second Rome. Nor were his thoughts only set upon material things; whether justly or not, he was regarded as one of the most learned princes of his age; he was consistently anxious to revive the prosperity of the University of Heidelberg, and had nearly crowned his efforts on its behalf by securing Spinoza as one of its teachers. The education of his own children was to him a subject of anxious and minute care.^[43] In his youth, the evil times on which Charles Lewis had fallen had (it is not uncharitable to assume) taught him to dissimulate; but in his later years he had retained little of the Puritan associations of his earlier manhood except a love of the Bible and a hatred of Rome, and of priests and priestcraft in general. He was, in short, a most liberal-minded and tolerant Prince, who found satisfaction in the Imitatio Christi as well as in the New Testament, who would gladly have made his Palatinate a refuge for persecuted adherents of any religious creed, and whose dedication, not long before his death, of a church (at Mannheim) to Sancta Concordia was far from being an empty pretence. He had, moreover, inherited his mother’s taste for poetry, and during his sojourn in England had acquired considerable familiarity with its literature, and its drama in particular. In a way it brings Sophia herself nearer to us that her favourite brother freely quoted Shakespeare, that a version by him of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus was acted at Heidelberg, and that he was so sturdy a critic as to pronounce the Spanish drama superior to the French, but the English best of all.

But, heavy as were the burdens laid upon the head of the Palatine House after Charles Lewis’ partial restoration, the troubles that came nearest home to him, and that in the end infected the whole atmosphere of his court, were of his own making. He cannot be held accountable for the financial difficulties which obliged him to discourage his mother’s desire to return to the Palatinate; and, even before the troubles in question broke out, more general considerations may have rendered him the reverse of eager for her presence. His policy was to bury the past, which she in a sense typified; and he may have feared her extravagant ways, and thus preferred to lighten her expenditure by inviting his sisters Elizabeth and Sophia to his capital. His offer of some rooms in the Ottheinrichsbau of Heidelberg Castle, which he could not afford to furnish, failed to attract, and the hope which she had cherished, that she might end her days in her own good dowry town of Frankenthal, it was not in his power to fulfil. Meanwhile, the compensation for the temporary occupation of the place by the Spaniards, which had been promised in the Nürnberg settlement of 1651, supplementary to the Peace of Westphalia, remained unpaid by the Emperor. Charles Lewis, who had in the first instance to think of his Electorate and its defences, was without resources enabling him to respond to his mother’s requirements; and the recriminations which followed on her part left the situation unaltered. Even before mother and son had been at odds on this subject, there was a dispute between them as to various heirlooms at the Hague and at Rheenen, which she refused to give up to him as he demanded. In short, their correspondence had reached a most painful stage, and it is pitiful to read the description of the sore straits to which she found herself reduced, just when the cloud seemed to be at last lifting from the fortunes of their House. She was, she wrote, entirely dependent upon the monthly allowance of the States-General; it amounted only to a thousand florins, and was not made for more than a single year, and she had only accepted it as a pis aller when she found it out of the question that her claims on payments from England should be made part of the Anglo-Dutch treaty concluded in 1654. As a matter of fact, her case was a very hard one; for her creditors had never been so pressing as now, when there seemed a chance of payment; the very heirs of the faithful Ludwig Camerarius demanded the redemption of a favourite jewel which she had pawned to them; all her children were in debt like herself, from the high-minded Elizabeth to the volatile Edward; and it is touching to find her entreating a loan of a thousand pounds for the purpose, because the jewel ‘was my brother Prince Henry’s.’ At an earlier date, Charles Lewis had suggested to an agent that it would be desirable for her to approach Cromwell as to the relief of her creditors, but was told in reply that she would certainly never do this, ‘but only break into passion against those that should give such advice.’ So matters went on till other reasons came to a head which made the Elector undesirous of receiving her at his Court; and his seeming ingratitude infused another drop of bitterness in her cup.

The quarrel between Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert, which became mixed up with the cardinal trouble of the elder brother’s later years, and caused great sorrow to their mother, had its origin in the financial difficulties which beset them all. In 1653, the Elector had settled a modest allowance on his brother Edward, and in 1654 he made a similar arrangement with Rupert, who on his arrival in Paris had entered into negotiations on the subject through the Palatine envoy, Pawel von Rammingen. Rupert was to be allowed 2,500 dollars per annum, to rise after five years to 4,000, while the Emperor agreed to pay him a substantial sum under the Nürnberg settlement. But Rupert could not sit down contented with this compact, and, quite in the spirit still prevailing in many of the princely Houses of Germany, demanded a share of the Palatinate territory as his younger brother’s portion. Charles Lewis at first dallied with the proposal, which, however, could not be to his mind, more especially as he had no wish for introducing into his Electorate the permanent influence of so martial and combative a spirit as his brother’s. Rupert, however, insisted on his demand, and in 1656, after refusing to receive any further payments of his allowance, asked for an immediate interview. The Elector having declined to receive him at Heidelberg, but offered to meet him at Neustadt, and in the meantime to increase his allowance, the fiery Prince repaired uninvited to the capital, and, having been refused admittance to the castle by the colonel in command, swore an angry oath that he would never return to the Palatinate, and passed on to Mainz. Here he proceeded to lay his grievances before the Arch-Chancellor of the Empire, and then offered his sword to the Emperor. But, though he seems to have actually entered into the Imperial service, he found its atmosphere uncongenial, and, when in 1661 he made another attempt to obtain a high command (in the Turkish War) and at the same time to obtain payment of the sums promised him under the Nürnberg settlement, he was unsuccessful. This failure he ascribed to the intrigues of his brother the Elector, and he now settled down after a fashion in England, whither he had betaken himself on the Restoration. Though it was not till later that the brothers were again on good terms, the dispute between them was settled in 1670, when the arrangement of 1654 was put into force again, Rupert’s allowance being, however, raised from 4,000 to 6,000 dollars, the balance of the Nürnberg compensation paid over, and the Rheenen property being given up to him—an old notion of his mother’s, which he had formerly rejected.^[44]

At the time when Charles Lewis’ quarrel with Rupert broke out, the elder brother was in the midst of a difficulty which, unlike those just described, was essentially of his own making. Of this trouble Sophia’s quick wit had, already on arrival at Mannheim, and first meeting with her brother the Elector and his bride, detected the germs. She had perceived at once that all was not well between the pair. While her brother met her with his usual geniality of manner, the Electress, whose mien was fort dolente, said very little. When the party proceeded to Heidelberg, where Sophia had the satisfaction of seating herself in the best-appointed carriage on which she had cast eyes since her departure from the Hague, she found that her praise of this vehicle gave offence to her sister-in-law, to whom it had been presented as her wedding-coach, and in whose opinion it was vastly inferior to one presented to her sister for her marriage with the Prince of Tarento. This afflicting comparison was, however, only the first and slightest clause in her long litany of grievances.

Charlotte Elizabeth, daughter of Landgrave William V of Hesse-Cassel, and his wife, Amalia Elizabeth, seemed marked out by descent as a most fitting consort for the restored Elector Palatine. Her grandfather, Landgrave Maurice, had in his day been one of the foremost representatives of militant Calvinism, and at once the boldest and the most steadfast of all the Princes of the Union. Her mother, the Landgravine Amalia, deserves lasting remembrance as one of the most remarkable Princesses of her age, by whose exertions Hesse-Cassel was preserved from ruin in the Thirty Years’ War, and to whom more than to anyone German Calvinism owed the rights of parity at last secured to it in the Peace of Westphalia. But her married life with the Elector Charles Lewis, which began in February, 1650, proved a singularly unhappy one; nor can there be any pretence but that she was made to suffer grievous and intolerable wrong. It is at the same time undeniable that the aggravating elements in her character—to Sophia’s critical eye there seemed to be such even in her beauty—contributed to the beginning of the end. Sophia rapidly arrived at her own conclusions as to the intellectual capacity of her sister-in-law—what with her love of dress and her stories of Duke Frederick of Würtemberg-Neustadt, not to mention the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes, George William and Ernest Augustus, and several other admirers, to whom she had been forced by her mother to prefer her present jealous ‘old’ husband. In his turn, Charles Lewis, although he far too demonstratively adored his handsome wife, confessed that there were defects in her education, which he entreated his shrewd youngest sister to correct. Very soon, however, Sophia perceived that the comedy was taking a serious turn. The quarrel between the pair began with an outburst of jealousy on the part of the Elector, followed, in more violent fashion, by another from the Electress. Charles Lewis hereupon became violently estranged from his consort; and his aversion was deepened by a passion which he conceived for one of his wife’s maids-of-honour, Baroness Louisa von Degenfeld. Perhaps this more decorous Anne Boleyn was rendered all the more attractive in his eyes by her literary turn of mind, if we may judge from their initial correspondence under names borrowed from an Italian novel,^[45] and from the liking which she afterwards showed for such classics as Lucian, Corneille, and Molière. For some years or so, however, the husband and wife rubbed on together, two children being born to them. The elder, born 1651, was Charles, afterwards Elector Palatine, the last of the Simmern line, who died less than five years after his father (1685); had he survived, he must of course have stood before Sophia in the English Succession. In most respects he had little character of his own, perhaps partly because he had been over-educated; but he was a devout Calvinist, and would probably have remained such had it been his fate to mount the throne to which, in earlier times, some of the English Parliamentary politicians may have thought of raising his father. The younger of the two children, born 1652, was Elizabeth Charlotte, the Liselotte of her father’s affections and of those of her aunt Sophia, by whom she was partly brought up, and a darling of whose later years she became.

For a time the Elector contrived to conceal his amour from his wife; but, in 1657, a letter addressed by Prince Rupert to the Elector’s mistress, by whose beauty and wit he seems to have been attracted on a previous visit, having fallen into the hands of the Electress, and the quarrel between the brothers having probably contributed to exacerbate matters, there was an end of the secret. Put on the track of her husband’s infidelity, the Electress ruthlessly ran him and his mistress to earth; and the result was a public scandal without an equal in the domestic annals of this anything but shamefaced age. The Elector having at last withdrawn from Heidelberg with Louisa von Degenfeld, whom he in the first instance settled with many precautions at Schwetzingen, there ensued a long and disgraceful series of proceedings which, to the unfortunate Electress, must have recalled a notorious episode of her native Hessian history in the days of Landgrave Philip the ‘Magnanimous.’ Salving his conscience as best he might with the obsequious assistance of his court divines, Charles Lewis, early in 1658, married Louisa von Degenfeld as his second wife. He had previously conferred upon her the ancient title of Raugravine Palatine, with a provision that a corresponding titulature was to be transmitted to their issue. From this abnormal union, which lasted till Louisa’s decease, twenty years afterwards, there sprang not less than fourteen children, of whom eight survived their mother. The marriage—if marriage it may be called^[46]—supplied him with the felicities of a tranquil home, though for some time he had to keep watch over it with an anxious care, of which the humorous aspect escaped him, against the evil designs imputed by him to ‘X,’ his repudiated wife, and though her Hessian relations long endeavoured to assert her rights. Latterly the ‘second wife’ seems chiefly to have resided with her children at Frankenthal, where the proud Queen of Bohemia had hoped to find repose for her last years. The correspondence between Charles Lewis and Louisa shows him to have been entirely faithful to her, and to have passionately loved his children. But, though his fidelity to his chosen companion was unswerving, the relations between them were disturbed by occasional dissensions. On her death he put forth, together with an account of her Christian ending drawn up by the divine whom he had originally consulted as to his ‘second marriage’ (Hiskias Eleazar Heiland), an elaborate analytical statement of her virtues and shortcomings during their union, for which, with a conscientiousness showing that there was still a drop of Calvinistic blood in his veins, he had himself contributed the most important materials. For his children, the surviving Raugraves and Raugravines, he had intended to make ample provision, but had perplexed himself so much about its conditions, that his legitimate son and successor, the Elector Charles, declared all his father’s arrangements on the subject invalid. Several of the sons afterwards distinguished themselves in the field. Charles Maurice, who was till his death in 1702 a familiar figure at Hanover, and who is the Trimalchio of the banquet ‘after the manner of the ancients’ described in Leibniz’s correspondence with Sophia, drank away his remarkable intellectual powers. But the children of Louisa von Degenfeld were treated kindly by the Dowager Electress Charlotte, and Sophia took them one and all to her heart, more especially the two sisters Louisa and Amalia, ‘les deux sibylles de Francfort.’ Louisa was in later years at Hanover appointed Mistress of the Robes; and it is said that there was at one time some intention of entrusting her with a confidential mission to England in connexion with the Succession question.

After the death, in 1677, of Louisa von Degenfeld, Charles Lewis, having in the first instance (with Sophia’s approval) taken to himself a mistress, was desirous of inducing the Electress to consent to a divorce, which would have enabled him by a ‘third’ marriage to seek to secure the Succession of his (the Simmern) line, resting as it did on the life of his legitimate son Charles only.^[47] But Charlotte Elizabeth was not found ready to oblige her erratic husband thus far. Prince Rupert, with whom Charles Lewis had gradually come to be on better terms, had already, in 1675, declined to come to the rescue. The match-making Princess Elizabeth had in vain desired a match between her brother Rupert and her young kinswoman Princess Charlotte Sophia of Courland.^[48] That young lady’s aunt, Landgravine Hedwig Sophia of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, opined that nothing would come of the match, especially as Prince Rupert was on the look-out ‘not only for beauty, but for means.’ As a matter of fact, the ardour of Rupert’s aspiring youth had by this time settled down into a sober though still singularly active maturity; moreover, he had formed a connexion so close that it has been suspected to have amounted to a secret marriage, with Francesca Bard, an Irish Roman Catholic lady of good birth, with whom and their child, called ‘Dodley’ (Dudley) by Sophia, the indulgent Palatine family were on friendly terms. But neither this boy nor, of course, Ruperta, Prince Rupert’s daughter by the actress Margaret Hughes, was ever formally acknowledged by him; and thus this brother, too, left no descendant who when the time came, might have forestalled the claims of Sophia and her progeny to the English Succession.

Sophia’s own life at Heidelberg, though much clouded by her brother’s domestic troubles, of which more than enough has now been said, and towards which, in its initial stages, she appears to have borne herself with a discretion already habitual to her, was by no means without its agreeable aspects. It had at first been made uncomfortable by the ways of the Electress Charlotte, whose favourite amusements, field sports and the card-table, were not much to Sophia’s personal taste. Still, the life of the Palatine court, though an economy little dreamt of in former days now prevailed there, was not without diversions in which she took pleasure—among them those Wirthschaften, a fashionable amusement half-way between a fancy fair and a bal costumé, of which the Queen of Bohemia had shared the vogue in Holland. Mention has already been made of Charles Lewis’ familiarity with the literature of the English stage; and the English comedians whom he saw at Frankfort possibly also found their way to Heidelberg. But his sisters had more direct opportunities for keeping up their interest in England and things English, since Charles Lewis seems to have entertained a good many English gentlemen at his capital, where some of them settled down as they have done in later days. Among his English guests was the former Parliamentary General, Sir William Waller, though with the Restoration Charles Lewis became a good Royalist again, and contrived to put himself on good terms with Lord Chancellor Clarendon. We have already seen how Prince Rupert himself was an occasional visitor at Heidelberg, as was his younger brother Edward—though the latter proved so full of ‘ralierie’ that Charles Lewis refused to take him to visit the lady whom he wished to be regarded as his wedded wife. Before this, Princess Elizabeth had, in 1648 and again in 1651, arrived as a visitor at the Electoral Court—much changed, as on the latter occasion Sophia and Edward thought, both in outward appearance and in tone of mind, which Sophia expressly attributes to her recent sojourn at Berlin, at the Court of the pious Electress Louisa Henrietta. Perhaps, too, she was saddened by the death of Descartes (1650), and perhaps by a growing estrangement from her mother; in any case, her whole nature was more and more tending towards that contemplative life whose attractiveness for some minds seems so incomprehensible to others. Unfortunately, as Sophia confesses, she was weak enough to join her brother and sister-in-law in rebelling against a certain air of superiority which in their eyes Elizabeth seemed to assume. She warmly interested herself in the Elector’s efforts to give a new life to the University of Heidelberg, where she is said to have acquired a personal reputation by her exposition of the Cartesian philosophy. Sophia’s day for listening to the conversation of philosophers had hardly yet arrived, and she at no time aspired to place herself on what may be called the professorial level. There is no appearance of the two sisters having been permanently alienated from one another; but mutual sympathy could not otherwise than dwindle between one who was preparing to bid farewell to the world, and one who was intent upon establishing her position in it.

The real reason of Sophia’s quitting Holland had been her sense of the uncertainty of her own position there; yet, even had the prospect been wholly agreeable, she could not now look forward to a permanent residence at the strangely distracted Court of her eldest brother. As the solitude of a religious, or of a quasi-religious, life would not have been to her mind (though it was about this time that she sat for her portrait in the costume of a Vestal Virgin), a suitable marriage engagement had, in a word, become a necessity for her. So attractive and high-spirited a princess might fairly expect to find an acceptable husband without having, like her sister Henrietta Maria, to espouse a Transylvanian prince. Unluckily, in the latter part of 1651 or beginning of 1652, Sophia underwent an attack of small-pox, which, as she confesses, seriously impaired her beauty. But she had no mind to take whoever might be the first comer; and not long after her recovery she declined overtures made to her on behalf of the Portuguese Duke of Aveiro; ‘having had thoughts of marrying a King she could not stoop to a subject.’ In much the same mood she about this time broke off an innocent correspondence (on the subject of compositions for the guitar) into which she had entered with a prince with whom she had in her childhood made acquaintance in Holland, and who, when recently passing through Heidelberg on his way to Venice, had seemed to her more charming than ever. This prince, who ‘pleased everybody,’ was no other than her future husband, Duke Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Since, however, he was the youngest of four brothers and (as will be seen immediately) without any present prospect whatever of enjoying any territorial dominion of his own, he was clearly not bon à marier; and it was best to avoid a kind of gossip of which Sophia had only too vivid an experience.

There appears to have been some talk of other matches for Sophia, and above all of a design of marrying her to a more important personage than the disinherited King of England—the young King of the Romans, who, as such, during the last year of his life bore the designation of Ferdinand IV.^[49] It is true that, in 1652, the Elector Charles Lewis had, on the occasion of his being received by the Emperor Ferdinand III within the unconscious walls of Prague, established excellent relations between the Imperial House and himself. But it is difficult to suppose that anything could have come of this scheme, which would have involved as a preliminary transaction the conversion of Sophia to the Church of Rome; and the statement that the young King of the Romans had fallen in love with Sophia, and intended to marry her, rests only on the authority of the Duchess of Orleans. Charles Lewis might, in the interests of the Palatinate, have assented to the match; but Sophia would assuredly have refused it with more determination than was afterwards shown by her niece when the Orleans marriage proposal was pressed upon her. The earlier project, however, came to a speedy end with the death of the young Roman King in 1654.

Thus the first suitor proper of Sophia during her stay at her brother’s Court was Prince Adolphus John, brother of the newly crowned King of Sweden, Charles X Gustavus, and like him a scion of the Zweibrücken line of the Palatine House. Though he had no prospects of the throne, he was, as his subsequent conduct at a critical moment after his great brother’s death showed, an ambitious prince, and his suit was favoured by the Electress Charlotte, who would have been pleased to be rid of her sister-in-law. But Sophia looked very coolly on the negotiations that ensued; for she had conceived an aversion to this suitor, which she declares could only have been conquered by a virtuous effort. He was a widower, and was said to have ill-treated his first wife. Fortunately for Sophia, the difficulty of marrying a princess who had been trained as a Calvinist into a rigidly Lutheran land, stood in the way of the proposal; and, though the match was announced with much satisfaction to Secretary Nicholas by the Queen of Bohemia for the information of King Charles II, the negotiations were still incomplete, and the King of Sweden’s approval of his brother’s offer in doubt, when the likelihood of another proposal intervened. The House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, this time in the person of George William, the second of the brothers between whom its territorial inheritance was divided, now appeared upon the scene. It will be more convenient to review at a rather later point the general position and prospects of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg at the time when Sophia definitively threw in her lot with its destinies, and when the first step was thus taken towards its acquiring an interest in the question of the English Succession. At the time of his visit to Heidelberg, in 1656, George William, afterwards the ruler of the Lüneburg-Celle portion of the paternal inheritance, held the Calenberg-Göttingen portion, and resided at Hanover. He had recently been urged to marry by his Estates, who were anxious to avert any likelihood of blending the several divisions of the family inheritance; and, though he had always felt the strongest repugnance to any such step, much preferring to a married life the Venetian pleasures of bachelorhood, he now thought of giving way to the Estates, if they would in return vote an increase in his revenue. George William and his brother Ernest Augustus were united by an intimacy and affection as close as that which in the next generation tied the namesake of the latter to his eldest brother George Lewis (George I); and there is every probability that it was the report of Ernest Augustus after his earlier visit which induced George William to make preliminary enquiries through an agent, George Christopher von Hammerstein, who was much in the confidence of the dynasty. Hereupon he paid a visit to Heidelberg in person, but accompanied by his favourite youngest brother. George William’s attentions to Sophia were well received; and though (for the painful reasons to be indicated below) she could never have been brought to confess it in her Memoirs, her heart seems to have been really touched; and it may be added that, through all the vicissitudes which ensued, she retained a kindly feeling towards him. As for the present, she allows that when at last he requested her permission to ask her hand from her brother, she failed to answer like a heroine in romance, ‘for I did not hesitate to say Yes.’ Probably what attracted her in George William, whose political principles must at the time have been a matter of indifference to her, while she could not, like King William III in later days, have much sympathised with his love of hunting and of a good glass of wine, was the comparative refinement of manners which distinguished both him and his younger brothers among the German princes of the day. Though two of the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes afterwards came to be known as resolute opponents of the political designs of France, yet George William and Ernest Augustus, as well as their brother John Frederick, belonged to the new school of German princes, who loved the society and cultivated the fashion and manners of Frenchmen, and who with more or less of success sought to model their Courts on Versailles. This fact should not be overlooked; for patriotic Englishmen (especially when in Opposition) afterwards made a constant point of deriding the unrefined Teutonism of the Hanoverian Court. At the same time, George William’s frequent visits to Italy, and especially to Venice, cost a great deal of money to the Estates of his principality; and they were accordingly anxious that he should arrive at a settlement, while he, with a view to the bargain proving to his advantage, kept the engagement to which the Elector Palatine had assented as secret as possible. Of a sudden there came from Venice, whither the brothers had proceeded after their visit to Heidelberg, the unexpected and mortifying news that George William, who had been leading a loose life at Venice, had found it necessary to break off his engagement. Sophia, though ‘too proud to be touched,’ thus found herself placed in a most cruel position. Who can say what in these circumstances might have been the result of an offer made to her on behalf of Ranuccio II, Duke of Parma (dependent, of course, upon her previous conversion), had not her Hanoverian suitor shown himself most anxious to do what in him lay to remedy the wrong which he had inflicted on her? He now proposed that his youngest brother Ernest Augustus should marry her in his stead, taking over with her the principalities at present held by George William, and in return only promising to pay to the latter a comfortable pension. But to this arrangement the third of the four brothers, John Frederick, a prince of much ambition as well as obstinacy of character, very naturally objected as unfair to his own interests, and a serious illness which had befallen Ernest Augustus further delayed proceedings. Thus it was not till 1658 that the transaction was actually carried out, though on lines somewhat different from those first contemplated. Sophia’s hand was transferred from Duke George William to Duke Ernest Augustus, the former undertaking to remain unmarried during the lifetime of his brother and his consort, and in that of any male heirs whom they might leave behind them. This renunciation, for which there were several precedents in the annals of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg and doubtless in that of other German princely houses also,^[50] is set forth at length in the original German in Sophia’s Memoirs, though even she could not when copying it out be aware of the full significance which it possessed for the future of the family. She knew, however, that of her husband’s three brothers the eldest was childless and the third still unmarried, while the second had renounced the prospect of lawful issue. The possibilities of future importance which her marriage now open to her husband and herself were, therefore, wholly due to the arrangement by which this marriage was accompanied. The renunciation of George William contained in it the germ of the greatness which awaited the line founded in his stead by his brother; while the consequences of the fact that his promise was half broken, half kept, clouded the initial stage of that greatness with the shame of a terrible family catastrophe. Sophia dwells on the weakness and inconstancy of George William in yielding to the demands of his councillors that he should reduce the handsome yearly allowance promised by him to his brother; unhappily, as she hints, the same defects were to be exhibited by him in matters of far greater gravity.

Sophia’s engagement to Ernest Augustus was for a time kept secret from her mother; but she seems to have borne the pair no malice, and to have sent her blessing in due course, with congratulatory letters from King Charles, in English to the bride, and in Latin to the bridegroom.^[51]

The Elector Charles Lewis, however, who acted in the place of a father to his sister, found the expenses of her marriage weigh heavily upon his reduced finances. ‘Besides her due,’ he wrote to the Queen, his mother, by way of excusing himself for being ‘uncapable of what her Majesty was pleased to require of him,’ ‘I am bound to an extraordinary, more especially for the friendship she always shewed me, and because nobody else hath done anything for her.’ Sophia tells us that on Ernest Augustus’ arrival for the wedding she found him lovable, because she had made up her mind to love him; and something of this resolute spirit of attachment may, in the face of many provocations to the contrary, be said to have characterised her relations to him throughout their married life. According to Leibniz, the wedding took place towards the end of September, 1658; but, according to a contemporary authority cited by Sophia’s biographer, Feder, the date was October 17th of that year. She describes the wedding solemnities, which, if not so magnificent or appealing so persuasively to the imagination as those of her mother on the banks of the Thames, showed the Palatine House to be equal to itself in the maintenance of a stately etiquette. A few days afterwards he posted back to Hanover, and she soon followed, attended by an ample escort which he had provided for her. The indispensable Hammerstein conducted the journey, on which her brother, the Elector, accompanied her as far as Weinheim. She held her entry into Hanover on November 19th, being received by the whole family, her mother-in-law, the Duchess Anna Eleonora (widow of Duke George), at its head. On her wedding-day Sophia had, like her niece Charlotte Elizabeth on her subsequent marriage with the Duke of Orleans, renounced any future claims to the Succession in the Palatinate, unconscious of the remoter claims which she was to owe indirectly to her Palatine, as well as directly to her English, blood. But, though she dearly loved her brother, and shed a few tears on parting from him, they would, as she declares, have flowed more abundantly had her heart not been with her husband, and, as we may add, had not her hopes rested on the future which she went forth to meet by his side.

While to Sophia, at an age of life neither late nor very early—for she was near concluding her twenty-eighth year—married life thus opened with its duties, cares, and consolations, it was otherwise with the two sisters of whom she has told us most, and whose life was likewise to be prolonged beyond the period of early womanhood. (Her third sister, Henrietta Maria, had died already in 1661.) Both of them, by a singular dispensation of fate, at a time not far removed from that of her marriage, embraced a religious life, though in two different communions; each was to end her days as the abbess of a conventual establishment, revered and beloved in no ordinary measure by those around her. Since Sophia’s marriage, though it cannot be said to have estranged her from either of these sisters, concentrated her interests upon spheres of activity from which theirs were in the main or altogether removed, the present may be the most appropriate place for recalling the twofold picture of their later lives, whose tranquillity contrasts so strangely with the agitations with which hers was necessarily filled.

The Princess Elizabeth, whom we have seen more or less absorbed in her own high thoughts and ennobling pursuits while still a resident at her mother’s Court in Holland, and again actively interested in the learned studies for which the rule of her brother, the Elector, had once more provided a home at Heidelberg, remained behind in the Palatinate for some three or four years after Sophia’s marriage. They cannot have been happy years, for the scandal of the Elector’s second union was now at its height, and the Electress, on whose side, whatever Charlotte’s faults of temper, her sister-in-law’s high sense of moral rectitude could not fail to range her, still held out, perhaps chiefly for the sake of the Electoral children.^[52] When, in 1662, the Electress, her own efforts and those of her kinsfolk having proved vain, at last left Heidelberg for Cassel, Elizabeth followed her thither. In the preceding year her attached cousin, the Elector Frederick William, had named her Coadjutress of the Abbess of Herford, and her ultimate destiny was thus assured. The six years (or the greater part of them) which intervened before she succeeded the Countess Palatine Elizabeth Louisa as Abbess of the Westphalian convent were peacefully spent by her at Cassel, in the society of the Landgravine Hedwig Sophia, a daughter of her aunt, the Electress of Brandenburg, and herself a lady of strong religious feeling and, as her administration of her dower-estate of Schmalkalden showed, a determined Calvinist. Elizabeth’s own Calvinism, it is interesting to note, had, already before she settled for the remainder of her days at Herford, assumed a peculiar hue. She seems about this time to have been much impressed by the Dutch divine, Johannes Cocceius, professor at Leyden, whose personal acquaintance she had made on a visit to her aunt at Krossen. Cocceius, who played an important part in the religious movement known as Pietism, in so far as it affected the Reformed or Calvinistic Church, recalls to us other eminent religious teachers in whom the evangelical and the latitudinarian have been blended. The gist of this teaching was a direct appeal to Scripture and a deprecation of any insistence on the formulæ of dogma. Elizabeth, whose mind had expanded, and whose religious conceptions had deepened under influences very different from the rigid Calvinism of an earlier type, welcomed the simple and profound enthusiasm of Cocceius and of the so-called ‘Lodensteyners,’ whom the endeavour to bring home religion to the individual mind and conscience had all but led into secession or sectarianism. Thus it came to pass that, after Princess Elizabeth had, in 1667, become Abbess of Herford in her own right, her rule was signalised by her sympathetic relations with sectarian movements.

In the middle of the seventeenth century the prosperous Westphalian Hanse town of Herford which had always been Lutheran, had lost its position as a free imperial city, and had been finally annexed by the Elector of Brandenburg, as representing the former Protectors of the Abbey. This foundation had been Lutheranised rather less than a century before; but since the time of the Thirty Years’ War the Abbess might be either a Lutheran or a Calvinist, and the Brandenburg influence of course favoured the second alternative. Though she had lost her sovereign rights, she was still regarded as an Estate of the Empire, and as such represented at the Diet; she had a Court of her own, with regular (even hereditary) officers, and a limited jurisdiction; and with her and her Chapter was connected a foundation, which indeed outlasted them, for the education of young ladies of family. The position was thus one of considerable traditional dignity and actual influence; and nothing of either was lost in the tenure of Elizabeth, a true princess as well as a genuine student. She was at the same time well aware that, as a matter of fact, the authority of the Abbess of Herford was dependent upon the stronger arm of the Elector of Brandenburg—in her case a dependence ungrateful neither to the protector nor to the protected.

Thus, when in 1670 she was asked to extend the hospitable shelter of Herford to Jean Labadie and his following of women and men, which from some fifty gradually rose to seven or eight times that number, her first step was to assure herself of the consent of the Great Elector. With him, as with her, religious tolerance was a constant principle; nor is there any reason for assuming that the goodwill shown by her towards both Labadists and Quakers had any other root than Christian humility, wherein for such as she lies the beginning of wisdom It is of course easy to trace the more immediate influences by which she was drawn to the founder of the now half-forgotten sect of Labadists. He had begun his career as a Jesuit, and, after seeking to set up a new congregation within the Church of Rome, had become a convert to Calvinism, and in this new sphere tried the experiment over again with a freer hand, and with greater success. At Geneva he was assisted in his endeavours by the brother of Anna Maria von Schurmann, whose learning had made her the ‘wonder of her age,’ but whose thoughts were now set on other things. Soon afterwards, she permanently associated herself with Labadie’s attempt to realise without delay his scheme of the true Church. After ministering to a small Walloon congregation at Middelburg in Zeeland, he was duly excommunicated; whereupon he carried on his work at Amsterdam, in a small community with peculiar institutions, as a declared schismatic. It was from the tyranny of the Amsterdam mob that, at her friend Anna Maria von Schurmann’s request, the Abbess of Herford summoned, them to take refuge in the ‘liberties’ of her abbey. Very soon, notwithstanding the Elector’s approval of her reception of the fugitives, the Lutheran burghers of Herford raised a loud clamour against the practices of the strangers, and then tried to starve them out, till a commission of enquiry, appointed by the Elector, arrived in the town. During the respite thus obtained another visitor, attracted by motives of curiosity, arrived at Herford in the person of the Abbess’ sister Sophia. She brought with her no faith in supernatural gifts and a mocking tongue; and the account of her visit admirably illustrates the innate difference between the two sisters. The report of the commission was on the whole favourable to the liberties of the strangers; and, after Elizabeth had with much spirit refused to obey a mandate of the Imperial Aulic Tribunal at Speyer ordering their removal, and had journeyed in person to Berlin to bring about a decisive intervention on the part of the Elector, the question was solved in 1672 by the imminence of the French invasion of the Low Countries. This danger obliged Labadie and the majority of his followers to fly t`o Holstein, while the rest remained behind under the protection of the Abbess. Thus closed a noteworthy episode, in the course of which a high-minded and enlightened princess had, on behalf of a band of sectaries with whom her own sympathy can hardly have been other than imperfect, successfully upheld the cause of tolerance against both official and civic bigotry.^[53]

The last of the Labadists had not yet left Herford, when Elizabeth began to hold intercourse with a sect of greater significance than theirs in modern religious history—the English Quakers, or, as we find her brother Charles Lewis disguising their name, ‘quaquors.’^[54] Three years later, in 1667, she received two visits from William Penn and Robert Barclay during their missionary journey in Holland and Germany, including the Palatinate. From Penn’s account of these interviews, and the letters exchanged between him and the Abbess, it is clear that the latter, who was on both occasions attended by her intimate friend, Countess Anna Maria van Hoorn, a canoness of the Abbey, was deeply moved by Penn’s appeals to her heart and conscience. But it is equally clear that the humility which bade her listen prevented her from accepting the conclusion that she, too, was divinely called to teach. Her mind was equipped; her soul alert; but she still waited. Five years later, when she had passed away from the religion of doubts and difficulties, Penn inserted in a new edition of his treatise, No Cross no Crown, among the testimonies to the significance of Serious Dying as well as Living, the following reminiscence of ‘the late Princess Elizabeth of the Rhine’:—