I DESCENT AND PARENTAGE; CHILDHOOD AND GIRLHOOD (LEYDEN, THE HAGUE, AND RHEENEN, 1630-1650) (continued 2)

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 85open 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 86of 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.

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