II EARLY WOMANHOOD AND MARRIAGE (HEIDELBERG, 1650-1658)

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 88of 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 89should 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 90from 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 91only 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 92an 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 93own 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 94there 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 95dollars 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 96time 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, 97whose 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 98be 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 99judge 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 100beauty 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 101him 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 102invalid. 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 103whom 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 104which, 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 105occasional 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 106appearance 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 107this 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 108is 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 109ill-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 110thought 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 111love 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, 112though ‘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 113in 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 114sent 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 115afterwards 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, 116Henrietta 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 117Electoral 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 118about 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 119foundation 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 120shown 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 121the 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]

122The 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, 123the following reminiscence of ‘the late Princess Elizabeth of the Rhine’:—

She chose a single life, as freest of care, and best suited to the study and meditation she always inclined to; and the chiefest diversion she took, next the air, was in some such plain and housewifely entertainment as knitting, &c. She had a small territory, which she has governed so well, that she shewed herself fit for a greater. She would constantly, every Last-day in the week, sit in judgment, and hear and determine cases herself; where her patience, justice, and mercy were admirable; frequently remitting her forfeitures, where the party was poor, or otherwise meritorious. And, which was excellent, she would temper her discourse with Religion, and strongly draw concerned parties to submission and agreement; exercising not so much the vigour of her power, as the power of her persuasion. Her meekness and humility appeared to me extraordinary. She never considered the quality, but the merits of the people she entertained.... Thus, though she kept no sumptuous table in her own Court, she spread the tables of the poor in their solitary cells.... Abstemious in herself, and in apparent void of all vain ornaments.

I must say her mind had a noble prospect. Her eye was to a better and more lasting inheritance than can be found below, which made her often to despise the greatness of Courts, and the learning of the Schools, of which she was an extraordinary judge.

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 124she had chosen; of her humility towards the humblest; and he concludes:

I cannot forget her Last Words, when I took leave of her, ‘Let me desire you to remember me, though I live at this distance, and that you should never see me more—I thank you for this good time; and know and be assured, though my condition subject me to divers temptations, yet my soul hath strong desires after the best things.’

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 125with 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 126Court 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 127been 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 128own 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 129of 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, 130shone 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 131mother’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 132her 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. 133Beneath 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 134pictures 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 135harmlessly; 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 136Louisa 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 137children.’^[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, 138showed 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 139was 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 140York; 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 141observe 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 142that 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.

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