Note 72 — III THE DUCHESS SOPHIA (HANOVER, OSNABRÜCK, AND HANOVER, 1658-1688)

It should be noted that, at the time of Elizabeth Charlotte’s change of confession, toleration still obtained in France. We have her own assurance that, had the persecutions of the Huguenots at that date already begun, she would have refused to be converted. In 1698, she writes to her aunt Sophia: ‘At Court one never hears a word spoken on behalf of those of the Reformed faith. If they had been persecuted in this way twenty-six years since, when I was still at Heidelberg, you would never have succeeded in persuading me to turn Catholic.’ Sophia herself, when replying to a renewed attempt upon her Protestantism by Mme. de Brinon, by the remark that she trusts in the goodness of God, who cannot have created her to see her lost, adds that she cannot reconcile herself to the persecution of the Protestants in France, who crowd England, the Netherlands, and Germany as refugees.