Then he gives instances, very simply put, of her way of deprecating too narrow an interpretation of the duty of paying respect to our betters; of her distrust of her power to walk in the straight way she had chosen; of her humility towards the humblest; and he concludes:

In view of this record of the eternal longings with which this beautiful soul was filled at the last, it seems vain to make any reference to the earthly cares which still from time to time occupied her, in connexion no doubt chiefly with the family history, or even to the intellectual occupations which continued to engage her interest to the last. She was a diligent collector of books and manuscripts, and the last great writers with whom she corresponded were Leibniz and Malebranche, the mystical and Christian follower of her former teacher, Descartes. Shortly before her death, Elizabeth sent for her sister Sophia to pay her a long visit, and received her, Sophia relates in her Memoirs, with a joyfulness as if an angel from Heaven had descended to heal her. She then notes that the Abbess had been surrounded by people whose melancholy notions of a religious life had made hers a martyrdom. Wasted away in body, she was, however, calm in spirit and prepared for death, though full of sympathy with her sister and with the troubles which might await Sophia out in the turbulent world. Elizabeth died in peace at Herford Abbey in February, 1680; a letter addressed by her to her sister Louisa Hollandina, Abbess of Maubuisson, shows that more than three months before she was already making herself ready for death.^[55]

Not much is known as to the life of the Princess Louisa Hollandina herself during the years which followed on the occurrence of the de L’Épinay scandal, and which she quietly spent at her mother’s Court in Holland. Nothing seems to have been bruited abroad concerning her except that she was leading an exemplary life, and that she was very intimate with a lady whose name is given as Madame d’Oxsordre, and had frequent conversations with her on the subject of ‘the bases of the Protestant religion.’ In other words, a propagandist influence was steadily at work upon her, and in the end she made up her mind to become a convert to Rome. Conversions to Roman Catholicism were common during the whole of this period, and there can be little doubt but that in this particular transaction her brother Edward and his wife, the Princess Palatine Anne (of Gonzaga), had an important share. In December, 1657, Louisa Hollandina, who had reason enough to fear the maternal wrath should her intention become known, secretly left the Hague at night-time in the habiliments of a maid-servant, and made her way to Antwerp, where, in January, 1658, she abjured Protestantism for the Church of Rome. Her change of confession was not the result of any sudden resolution, but it could not fail to incense as well as grieve her mother, whose wrath, however, fell upon Princess Maria Elizabeth of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, hitherto an intimate of her court. Whether or not a letter from this lady to Princess Louisa Hollandina had finally determined her flight, further letters from the same hand, which appear to have been accompanied, or preceded, by the whisperings of verbal scandal, reflected in no measured terms on the Palatine ménage. Elizabeth hereupon insisted on the expulsion of the slanderer from her place of residence, Bergen-op-Zoom, pending further enquiry. The ‘Princess of Zollern’ hereupon entered into a series of further charges, culminating in the suggestion that Louisa had been obliged to fly in order to conceal her shame. The Queen behaved with prudence as well as dignity, counselling her son the Elector to contradict this calumny, but to do so quietly and civilly, without demanding proofs as if he had any doubts on the subject. In December, 1658, or thereabouts, Louisa Hollandina addressed a not undignified letter to her mother, in which she announced her admission into the Church of Rome, which the occasion of the Christmas Communion had made necessary to her conscience, and begged her mother’s pardon for the trouble thus caused to her. About the same time the Princess made her way to Havre, having ascertained that she would be received with open arms by the French Court, which had formerly remained deaf to her mother’s solicitations for support. Immediately after Louisa’s arrival on French soil, she was welcomed by her brother, the Prince Palatine Edward, and conducted by him to the Abbey of Maubuisson, near the river Oise, and almost immediately facing Pontoise, the ancient capital of the Vexin. Edward’s own daughters, Maria Anne and Benedicta, were being educated here, each receiving at the same time a handsome pension out of the Abbey funds. This ancient Benedictine nunnery (originally planted in a wooded part of the country infested by brigands; whence the name le buisson maudit) dated from the middle of the thirteenth century, and the favour accorded to it by Queen Blanche, who was buried in the convent after assuming its habit on her deathbed, attracted to it the frequent presence of her son, St. Louis. His example was followed by other sovereigns of France, and the later history of the Abbey is full of interest. But here it must suffice to say that, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the prevalent decay of conventual life in France particularly affected Maubuisson, which had so long been connected with the Court, and lay so near to Paris, and that this corruption became complete under the reckless régime of Angélique d’Estrées, the sister of Henry IV’s Fair Gabrielle, who was herself buried with one of her infants in the Abbey. After her death Henry IV came there no more; but this period of worldly misrule was not ended, till in the next reign Mère Angélique came from Port Royal to reform Maubuisson under the supervision of St. François de Sales, and after a hard struggle effected her purpose. Once more there was a terrible backsliding; but better times returned in 1627 with the choice as Abbess of the worthy Mère des Anges (Marie Suireau) who was really a nominee of Mère Angélique’s, and who brought with her a fresh infusion of religious zeal from Port Royal. Her twenty-three years of conscientious administration once more restored the convent to a well-ordered and pious life. On her return to Port Royal, the worthy abbess of Lieu Dieu became Abbess of Maubuisson, where in the course of her short rule she received Louis XIV; and after her Louisa Hollandina’s immediate predecessor, Catharine d’Orléans, an illegitimate daughter of the Duke de Longueville, against whom nothing remains on record except a series of unfortunate ‘architectural improvements’ in the Abbey church. But these changes have long been obliterated, together with the church itself, which, after at the Revolution the Abbey had been taken over by the nation and sold, was in 1790 blown up by powder. At the present moment the traces of this notable historic monument are described as hardly discernible.

There can be little doubt that, probably owing to the efforts of Louisa Hollandina’s powerful sister-in-law, the French ‘Princesse Palatine,’ it had been from the first determined to provide for this interesting princely convert at Maubuisson. No sooner had her foot touched the soil of France than the royal favour of Louis XIV, whose magnanimous hospitality never did things by halves, shone upon her. After her first visit to Maubuisson she was taken to see her aunt, Queen Henrietta Maria, who was at the time residing with the Visitandines at Paris, and who, after vain attempts to convert her sons Charles and James to the Church of Rome, was engaged in a project for obtaining the hand of the young French King for her daughter Henrietta, brought up as a Roman Catholic. Hereupon, Louisa was received at Court, and assigned a liberal pension by the King; and thus she was enabled, on terms befitting her position, to form a definite connexion with the Maubuisson convent. After a noviciate of eighteen months, she took the vows on September 19th, 1660, in the presence of a distinguished assembly, before whom the Bishop of Amiens preached ‘divinely.’ Happily for her peace of mind, the kindness shown her by the French Court had impressed itself upon her mother, for whose forgiveness Queen Henrietta Maria persistently sued. In October, 1659, Elizabeth informed her son Charles Lewis that this intercession had prevailed with her, and that, in obedience to the King and Queen’s commands, she had forgiven ‘Louyse,’ and prayed God also to forgive her, ‘which is all my letter in a few lines.’^[56] But Louisa Hollandina was the only one of her mother’s surviving children left without mention in her will.

The long evening—if it should be so called—of Louisa Hollandina’s life, which lasted till 1709, was a peaceful one; but it would be unjust to her, more especially in view of some misconceptions which have arisen on the subject, not to say a word as to the spirit in which she both entered upon this period of her existence, and to which she throughout remained true. Just before she took the vows, she is said to have been warned by one of the Maubuisson sisters, who belonged to a reactionary clique in the convent, desirous of obtaining a mitigation of the severer rule introduced from Port Royal, not to engage herself to observe any standard of discipline in excess of the proposed reduction, for which it was probably hoped to secure the requisite sanction with the aid of an Abbess in so much favour at Court. But she refused point-blank, and, during the few years which she spent at the convent as a simple religious, would not consent to be relieved from any one of the duties incumbent on her. When, in August, 1664, she was, on the death of the Abbess, named as her successor, her first act after accepting the office was to sell part of the silver plate which had been presented to her by the Queen of France in order to defray part of the debt pressing upon the convent. She abolished the practice of former abbesses of keeping up a retinue and footmen of her own, saying that she had abandoned the world on purpose to see no more Courts; and her niece, the Duchess of Orleans, in her humorous manner, describes her as going about the convent and garden all alone and with her skirts tucked up, and giving her orders in an authoritative tone that nobody ventured to disobey. She even—no insignificant sacrifice for a Palatine—ceased to use the arms of her House. This simplicity was partly natural to her, for even before her retirement it had been noted how careless she was as to matters of dress and outward appearance. Partly it was due to a resolute humility of spirit, and a determination to avoid any assumption of superiority on her own part over the sisters of the convent, to which Saint-Simon bears express testimony. She would not seat herself on the throne hitherto occupied by the Abbess in the convent church, and as a fitter object of reverence placed a statue of the Virgin there. On the other hand, she opposed a steadfast resistance to the tendency manifested by some of the nuns towards a relaxation of the conventual discipline; she observed the entire seven months’ fast imposed by the Cistercian rule, until at last she became as thin as a lath; according to the account of her niece she never ate flesh except when ill, and slept on a mattress as hard as stone, with no other furniture in her chamber but a straw-chair; and she rose every midnight for prayer. Beneath her dress she wore an undergarment of hair-cloth. She was careful to obey the rule which, except in special circumstances, prohibited the religious of Maubuisson from leaving the convent, and absented herself from it only thrice in the forty-nine years of her residence. According to the Duchess of Orleans, who spoke on this subject with sympathetic insight, the good Abbess’ tongue was her temptation; and she always chose a deaf sister to live with her in her chamber, so as not to be seduced into conversation.

On the charitable activity of the good Abbess there is less necessity for dwelling, since it accorded with the habits that were natural to her, as well as with her Palatine warmth of heart. In her indefatigable activity she resembled her brother Charles Lewis, to whom in her later years she bore so striking an outward likeness. Idleness of any kind was impossible to her; ‘never,’ writes a contemporary, ‘was she without some virtuous and religious occupation; either she was plying her brush or her needle, or reading or praying.’ To her love of painting, an art which she is said to have practised from her eighth year to past her eightieth, reference has already been made. Though it would not appear that her artistic powers increased in her later years, she utilised them for the decoration not only of the Abbey, but of several churches of the neighbourhood, and even found time to paint pictures for other recipients. Sacred subjects seem to have chiefly occupied her in these days; to the Cour des Comptes at Paris, which had rendered an efficient service to her Abbey, she presented an elaborate pictorial allegory of Justice.^[57] During her administration the structural accommodation of the Abbey was considerably enlarged, and, in the centre of it, a handsome fountain was for the first time erected.

Beneath all the other qualities of Louisa Hollandina and, one is tempted to say, at the root of them, lay that cheerfulness of soul which is a blessing to all who are brought into contact with its happy possessor. The Duchess of Orleans, who had all her aunt’s vivacity of mind, but little of her tranquillity of spirit, refers again and again to the delightfulness of her periodical visits to the dear old lady; and we may well believe that in their intercourse the seasoning of malice (in the French sense of the word) was not wanting. But Saint-Simon, an observer not less keen, though the satirical vein in him took a different turn, informs us that the Abbess of Maubuisson was adored by all the sisters of the convent, of which she had made herself the very life and soul, because of her charity, her sweetness, and her loving-kindness. From a character so pure—or perhaps it should be said so purified—the shafts of ill report glance off harmlessly; nor is it impossible that they had their origin in traditions with which the Palatine Princess had no concern, and which her rule as Abbess ought to have been allowed to extinguish. While she held sway at Maubuisson, it became a chosen place as a religious retreat by ladies of rank; among these was Madame de Brisson, l’âme de Saint-Cyr, as Madame de Sévigné calls her, soon after her dismissal from that seminary. In 1679, the good Abbess had the pleasure of a visit from the Duchess Sophia, who was delighted with the happy regularity of her sister’s life, ‘which would suit me quite well, had I no husband and children.’ The Duchess of Orleans herself, though she would hardly have come in the character of a penitent, in one of the crises of her life at the French Court begged the King to allow her to finish her days at Maubuisson.

Some two years before her death, Louisa Hollandina, who had hitherto only been subject to the migraine—for the statement that she had died in 1704 to save herself the trouble of periodically reminding the States-General of the annuity granted to her at her baptism was only a friendly jest—had a paralytic stroke, and the remainder of her life was full of suffering. She took it all easily, saying that people would not desire life so much if they knew to what it amounted near the end. She died in February, 1709, eighty-six years of age; the good Princess, wrote her heart-broken niece to Louisa Hollandina’s sister Sophia, ‘is now where she long was wished to be’; Sophia herself, in her very direct way, observed that, as there was so little besides life left in her sister, there was the less to deplore in her loss. She was buried by the nuns, who had loved her dearly and nursed her tenderly, in her abbey-church at Maubuisson, as her sister Elizabeth had been buried in hers at Herford twenty-nine years earlier; and both the Catholic and the Protestant Abbess deserve each, in her own way, to be remembered among the good women in whom their age, with all its shortcomings, was so rich.

And here we must take leave of the Palatinate family, except in so far as Sophia herself and those younger members of it with whom in her married life she came into personal contact are concerned. Late in 1659, Queen Elizabeth had the pleasure of a visit from Sophia at the Hague, having had to solicit from Charles Lewis ‘a little money in extraordinaire’ for the purposes of the meeting. They seem to have been happy together, and the Queen wrote that she would be ill-natured had she failed to show ‘kindness to Sophie, because she shows so much love to me,’ The real success of the visit was, however, Sophia’s little Palatine niece Liselotte, of whom more hereafter, who captured her grandmother’s heart, although ‘you know I care not much for children.’^[58] Sophia remained in Holland till March, 1660, when her mother was so much hindered by people coming in to tell the English news about Monck that she could hardly find time for writing.^[59] Mother and daughter, however, met again in the following year; and Sophia’s last farewell to ‘cette bonne princesse,’ her mother, took place on board the vessel on which, in May, 1661, Queen Elizabeth was about to sail from Rotterdam for England. For the high-souled royal exile was not, at the last, denied an honourable refuge in her native land, though she arrived there without the special invitation which she had been led to expect, and an attempt was even made to delay her on the way. What could surpass in pathos the picture of her arriving in London in the darkness, with hardly a friend but the faithful Earl of Craven to guide her home from the riverside? At Craven House she resided till she moved to the house in Leicester Fields successively occupied by her great namesake’s two favourites, the Earls of Leicester and Essex. She had no intention, as she told Prince Rupert, of playing the poor relation. The King, her nephew, showed much cordiality to her as well as to her sons; but his courtesies were for the most part inexpensive, and she confessed that he owed her nothing, though the Parliament owed her much.^[60] He promised, accordingly, to see if her debts could not be paid by Parliament, and it actually granted her certain sums, which she applied as fast as they came in to the redemption of her jewels, though she still had to appeal to Charles Lewis for assistance in the process. A series of unpleasant demands and counter-demands ensued between the King and the Elector, each calling upon the other to pay to the Queen the outstanding moneys lawfully due to her. In the end, King Charles II granted her a pension of a thousand pounds a month, of which she did not live to enjoy the first year’s total, and offered her a residence (Exeter House), into which she had not time to move.^[61]

The Queen of Bohemia, as she called herself to the last, was seen at times in public—at the theatres and elsewhere—with the court; and much attention was shown to her by her son Prince Rupert, who (as has been seen) had returned to England a few months after the King. Pepys, whose mention of Rupert’s return is the first notice of this Prince in the Diary, observes that he was ‘welcome to nobody.’ Perhaps the diarist had a presentiment of the friction which, sooner or later, could hardly fail to occur between a budding official like himself and a man of the sword with a popular reputation, whom he appears to have throughout regarded as passionate and self-willed. But Prince Rupert was well received in England both by the Royal Family and by the public at large, though it proved before long that he, like others who had served the throne in the days of stress, was out of touch with the younger generation of courtiers and politicians. He had not found congenial employment abroad; but his readiness for active work had not yet passed. The proposed expedition under his command to the Guinea Coast was abandoned (1664), partly because of an illness which had befallen him; but he was placed at the head of one of the squadrons in the First Dutch War, and in the Second superseded the Roman Catholic Duke of York as commander-in-chief of the English fleet. The breakdown of his plan of action by his want of success in the last battle of this war (1673) was attributed by him to the misconduct of the French and the intrigues of the friends of the Duke of York; and thus it rather heightened than hurt his popularity. For a time he seemed to be cultivating relations of intimacy with Shaftesbury and the Opposition; but he never harboured any disloyal intentions, though his sympathy with the Protestant feeling in the country is of a piece with the traditions of his family and with the whole of his own career. He now withdrew more and more into a retirement which suited both his scientific pursuits and his growing aversion from the hopeless frivolity and viciousness of the Court. Although he still continued to take an occasional part in public affairs, his time was chiefly spent among his chemical apparatus and his pictures and curiosities in the Round TowerTower at Windsor Castle, of which he had been named Constable in 1668. He died in 1682, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the faithful Lord Craven acting as chief mourner on the occasion.

His mother, to whom he had been a good son to the last, had long before this passed to her rest. Her correspondence with her son Charles Lewis had in the last period of her life assumed a more painful tone than ever, turning as it did upon a past that could not be set right, whatever might happen in the future. In the contention as to whose fault it had been that she had not temporarily taken up her residence at Heidelberg he seems to have been more in the right than she; and it is satisfactory to observe that, though in the very last letter preserved from her hand, while she expresses a hope that his anger will be now over, she begs that he will add to what he is paying to her of the jointure which is her due, his last letter to her, and the draft of one dated in the month of her death, end on a dutiful and even affectionate note.^[62] After her death, Charles Lewis, as her eldest—he had once been her favourite—son, made a claim for her jewels as heirlooms; and once more a bitter dispute ensued between the brothers.^[63] The proposal that her eldest daughter should cross the water to see her had met with no response. Of Sophia’s seeming content with her lot the Queen had, shortly before coming to England, heard with pleasure; but she could not shut her eyes to the changes that fate brings; ‘for it is easier said then done to care for nothing.’ Still, wherever she might find herself, the lonely woman kept a stout heart and an unclouded front; though, whether at Whitehall or at Combe Abbey (if she visited it again), she must have seemed to herself like a revenante—a ghost of the past come back. She died, at Leicester House, on February 13th, 1662—a few hours before the dawn of what, had her husband still been by her side, would have been her golden wedding day; and, on a night as full of storms as her life had been, she was buried in the Abbey where so many of her descendants were to be crowned with a crown less rapidly evanescent than hers.