Part 6

After his father’s death, Charles Lewis had been acknowledged as Elector Palatine by King Charles I and some of the German Protestant Princes; and his mother, though he was and always remained the darling of her heart, would have urged him to assume his place in the Palatinate, had not the battle of Nördlingen placed any such attempt out of the question. Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert were accordingly sent to England (1635). Here for two or three years they led a life of gaiety and dissipation; but they could hardly, in any case, have effected anything to the purpose, even had the young ‘Elector’ devised some more practical scheme than that of asking the hand of the young Queen Christina of Sweden. After their return to Holland, however, the two Princes were, in 1638, stirred to a more vigorous activity on their own account. They began badly by the loss of all their stores at Meppen in Frisia; but they, notwithstanding, resolved to make an armed attempt upon the Palatinate, of which the cost was defrayed by Lord Craven, who himself held a command in it. They were supported by a Swedish force under Major-General King (the Lord Eythin of Marston Moor); but, after siege had been laid to Lemgo, the gallant raid came to an unfortunate end at Vlotho on the Weser, both Rupert and Craven remaining behind in captivity. Hereupon, Charles Lewis, in 1639, once more set forth from Holland with the design of placing himself at the head of the army left without a leader by the death of Duke Bernhard of Weimar; but Cardinal Richelieu, whose schemes the success of the adventure would have thwarted, gave it an unexpected turn by causing Charles Lewis to be arrested and detaining him, for the most part in prison, during several months. In 1640, he used the freedom which he had regained for new efforts, first in Denmark, and then at the Diet of Ratisbon, upon whose walls Swedish guns were playing. Once more, there was much excitement in the ‘Palsgrave’s’ favour in both England and Scotland—it was in fact the last occasion on which King and Parliament might have united in a policy approved by the nation at large; and when, in 1642, the Emperor Ferdinand III propounded a settlement which would, on stringent terms, have restored a portion of the Palatinate, the English ambassador (Sir Thomas Roe) joined the agents of Charles Lewis in protesting against its inadequacy. The horrors of war were renewed in the exhausted Palatinate, and Charles Lewis once more betook himself to England (1644), where he presented a memorandum to Parliament, which allowed him £30 a day for his stay in London, but limited it in the first instance to a fortnight. Early in this year, Louisa Juliana had died, and it almost seemed as if the hopes of her descendants were to be buried with her; for, though a dim prospect of a general peace was opening, there seemed little hope that, in the conflict between the great Crowns, thought would be taken of the Palatinate. In England, the Civil War had been for nearly two years in progress; both Rupert and Maurice had, to their brother’s actual or pretended displeasure, taken service under the King; and it is hardly possible that, at such a time, Charles Lewis could have reckoned on obtaining military or pecuniary support for his schemes for the recovery of his patrimony. He has, accordingly, been supposed to have harboured deeper designs, and these have been connected with Sir Harry Vane’s proposal, rather earlier in the year, of dethroning King Charles I. But whether or not the idea of supplanting his uncle had entered into Charles Lewis’ mind—and Sophia’s mention in her _Memoirs_ of Vane’s previous visit to the Hague lends some colour to the conjecture (she calls him Vain and speaks of him and his large chin without seriousness)—it is certain that the Prince was well received by the Parliamentary leaders.[29] In return for his supposed goodwill to their cause, to which he is stated to have testified even by taking the Covenant and sitting in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, he was granted an annual allowance of £8,000 and assigned the Deanery at Windsor as a residence, where he thought it most prudent for the time to give himself up to his scientific studies.[30]

Footnote 29:

As to the possibility of an offer of the Crown to Charles Lewis by the Parliamentary leaders, see W. Michael, _Englische Geschichte_, &c., Vol. i. p. 282.

Footnote 30:

It should be remembered that in this morigeration Charles Lewis had the support, up to a certain point, of his mother, who in the days of the Civil War blamed Queen Henrietta Maria for opposing the attempts of Charles Lewis to bring about a reconciliation between his uncle and the Parliament. Gradually, however, all that the King did seemed right to his sister, and she blamed Charles Lewis for remaining on good terms with the Parliament. See K. Hauck, _Elizabeth, Königin von Böhmen_ (Heidelberg, 1905).

The career of Prince Rupert, whose personal attractions had eclipsed those of his elder brother during their former joint visit to England, was widely to diverge from Charles Lewis’, now that they both found themselves once more in the land of their maternal ancestry. In those earlier days, Sir Thomas Roe had informed Elizabeth how the King took pleasure in the sprightliness of her second son, from whom, in her fondness for his senior, she had expected so little; and Charles Lewis himself reported to his mother his dismay that _Rupert le Diable_ was always in the company of Queen Henrietta Maria, her ladies, and the Papists. At the same time, Prince Rupert was understood to be engaged in discussing with his uncle the King wild schemes for the foundation of a colony in Madagascar. The Princes were recalled home; the Madagascar scheme collapsed; and Rupert’s Protestantism henceforth stood firm. It has been already seen how he was taken prisoner in the fight at Vlotho (1638). The offer of Lord Craven, who had paid £20,000 for his own ransom, to increase this sum, were he allowed to share Prince Rupert’s captivity, was refused, and the Prince was lodged in captivity at Linz under the care of Count Kufstein. He came forth from it, having resisted all attempts to lure him from his religious belief and into the Emperor’s service; neither, however, was he inclined to avail himself of the prospects of a wealthy Huguenot marriage held out to him in Paris. With his faithful brother Maurice, he hereupon betook himself to England, where they devoted themselves to the cause of the King in his struggle against Parliament, and became the very types and exemplars of the Cavaliers. Across the seas, in New England, the good old Puritan minister Nathaniel Ward, who had held Rupert in his arms as a child, ‘when, if I mistake not, he promised to be a good Prince,’ prayed that even now he might be turned into ‘a right Roundhead, a wise-hearted Palatine, a thankful man to the English,’ and that his soul might be saved, ‘notwithstanding all his God-damn-me’s.’ But the ordinary picture of Prince Rupert as general of the horse, impetuous even to foolhardiness, and as a passionate partisan who could not restrain his vehemence even in the presence of the King himself, conveys no complete view either of his services in the Civil War, or of his character. As to the former, neither the calamity of Marston Moor, for which he was not responsible, as he certainly was for that of Naseby, nor perhaps even the surrender of Bristol, should have been allowed to obscure their lustre. As to his character, he was not less humane than resolute, and self-reliance was combined in him with the nobler kind of self-respect. His intellectual curiosity was a genuine family characteristic, though it happened in him to take a peculiar turn towards applied science and the technicalities of art.[31] After the fall of Oxford, in 1646, the Princes Rupert and Maurice left England, the former to hold a command in France; but, in the year before the execution of King Charles, he once more came forward to serve the sinking cause of the English monarchy, and took charge of the royal fleet. Maurice was, of course, once more found by his side, and, after the King’s death, they engaged in those remote maritime adventures in the course of which the younger brother met his death. Rupert’s earlier naval—or buccaneering—career continued till 1653, when he returned to France, creating a considerable sensation by his entry into Paris ‘like an old Spanish _conquistador_, with Indians, apes and parrots.’[32]

Footnote 31:

The honour of having discovered the art of engraving in mezzotint, frequently claimed for Prince Rupert, seems due to a Hessian officer named Ludwig von Siegen, who, meeting the Prince at Brussels about 1654, taught him the new process. See Cyril Davenport, _Mezzotints_ (‘The Connoisseur’s Library,’) pp. 52-65.

Footnote 32:

See K. Hauck, _Karl Ludwig, Kurfürst von der Pfalz_ (Leipzig, 1903), p. 252.

Sophia’s third brother Maurice was, as has been seen, an all but inseparable follower of his elder Rupert, whose equal he can have been neither in military genius nor in general intellectual ability and personal charm—‘he never,’ says Clarendon, who resented the pride of the Palatines, ‘sacrificed to the Graces, nor conversed amongst men of quality, but had most used the company of ordinary and inferior men, with whom he loved to be very familiar.’ Sophia writes to him as to one little interested in intrigues of State, and his preference through life seems to have been for the camp rather than the Court.[33] But, whatever other abatement should be made from the censures with which, like the brother of his heart, he was visited by both Puritan animosity and Royalist spite, he most certainly possessed in a rare degree the soldier’s cardinal virtue of fidelity. Thus we may fain hope that, in accordance with the most trustworthy account, his fate overtook him, whelmed beneath the deep gulf of the Atlantic, and that he was not, as a different tradition would have it, carried off by corsairs to Algiers, there to linger out a forgotten existence.

Footnote 33:

His mother’s coolness towards him is curious. She communicated the news of his disappearance to Charles Lewis without a word of sympathy, and advised that, should he really be at Algiers, no ‘great inquierie’ should be made, lest his ransom should be fixed at a quite inordinate height, or Cromwell should purchase him from the corsairs. _Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 43.

The sixth and seventh brothers, Edward and Philip, had been brought up in common; but in their later lives they were much divided. About 1637, they had, with their brother Maurice, been sent to school in Paris, whither, as has been seen, the Palatine family long looked for political succour; and here they remained after Maurice had taken his departure, with a view to beginning his military career. In 1645 the elder of the pair took a step which estranged him not only from his brother Philip, but from the whole of the Palatine family, and which, together with a similar proceeding at a later date on the part of Princess Louisa Hollandina, stands in direct contrast to the general tenour of the family history. Anne of Gonzaga, second daughter of the Duke Charles of Gonzaga-Nevers, afterwards Duke of Mantua, was already a celebrity in French society, when, her amour with Henry of Guise having come to an end which wounded her self-esteem, she in 1645 secretly gave her hand to the Prince Palatine Edward, and henceforth became the ‘_Princesse Palatine_,’ under which name she plays a conspicuous part in the literature of contemporary French memoirs. We have, however, no concern here with her share in public affairs at a rather later time, when (in 1650) she effected a union between the two branches of the Fronde and thus drove Mazarin into temporary exile, and when, after being herself persuaded by the Cardinal to ‘rally’ to Anne of Austria, she (in 1651-2) succeeded in bringing over to the same side the Duke of Bouillon and the great general Turenne.[34] Mazarin, when indicating the price (a great Court office) at which her support might be gained, described her as a _femme intéressée_; but, as M. Chéruel observes, it was not this aspect of her character which was in the mind of Bossuet when, in a funeral discourse, he dwelt on her great qualities of head and heart. In an age of confessional propaganda she was a great proselytiser in high places; and it was a signal instance of her activity in this direction, that she should have exacted Prince Edward’s conversion to the Church of Rome as the condition of her acceptance of his hand. For she thus secured to herself a claim for direct interference in the affairs of the Palatine House, which still possessed a certain importance and might again acquire a greater. Her foresight was justified; for, in course of time, there can be no doubt that she contrived to have a hand in the conversion of Princess Louisa Hollandina, as well as in yet another conversion, which made it possible for Charles Lewis’ daughter Elizabeth Charlotte to become the wife of Louis XIV’s brother, Philip Duke of Orleans. Although the new Princess Palatine had retained her share of the wealth of the Gonzaga, notwithstanding the efforts of her father to accumulate the whole for bestowal on his eldest daughter Marie, who in this same year 1645 became Queen of Poland, the agitation of Edward’s mother at the news of his change of religion was extreme, and was shared by most of her children. Charles Lewis besought his mother ‘with her blessings to lay her curse’ upon Prince Philip, who was about to quit Paris for the Netherlands, should he too ‘change the religion he had been bred in.’ As for Prince Edward, his fortunes were henceforth more or less severed from those of the family, though we find him, in 1651, at the Hague, as he passed the ambassadors of the English Commonwealth in the streets, calling them ‘rogues’ to their faces, and thus doing his best to embroil the United Provinces with the enemies of the House of Stewart.[35] With Edward’s daughter, Benedicta Henrietta, born in 1652, we shall meet again as the wife of John Frederick, Duke of Hanover, Sophia’s brother-in-law. In her the Palatine type, of which Sophia herself and her niece Elizabeth Charlotte were such striking examples, was well-nigh effaced; but it will not be overlooked that by descent she stood nearer to the English Succession than her father’s youngest sister.

Footnote 34:

See A. Chéruel, _Le rôle politique de la Princesse Palatine pendant la Fronde en 1651_. (_Séances de L’Acad. des Sc. Mor. et Pol._, January-February, 1888.)

Footnote 35:

His mother seems to have been pleased with this outburst, and to have testified to her gratification by presenting to Edward certain family articles of value—more in number than was agreeable to Charles Lewis. Edward, who certainly seems to have had in most things an eye to the main chance, had a cynical vein in him, like some of his brothers and sisters. When he came to Heidelberg in 1658, accompanied by a facetious M. de Jambonneau, Charles Lewis writes to his ‘second’ wife: ‘He turns everything into a joke, so that I cannot bring him on with me.’

Of Prince Philip’s fateful conduct at the Hague immediately. While, before his return to her mother’s little Court, Sophia had necessarily seen little of him or of her brothers there or at Rheenen, she was, as a matter of course, much thrown into the society of her three sisters. At first, as she tells us, she was by no means troubled to find them handsomer and more accomplished than herself, and admired by everybody; and she was perfectly contented that her juvenile gaiety and _railleries_ should help to amuse them. ‘Even the Queen took pleasure in my fun’; for she was gratified to see the child tormented, so that her wits might be sharpened by the process of being put on her defence. It became the established practice for her to ‘rally’ any and everybody; the clever people were delighted by it, and the others were made afraid of her. Gradually, however, Sophia’s quick ears heard the ‘milords’ at her mother’s Court say to one another that, when she had finished growing, she would surpass all her sisters. And the remark inspired her with an affection for the whole English nation; ‘so greatly is one pleased, when young, to be thought good-looking.’

Elizabeth, the eldest of the Palatine Princesses, though by no means indifferent to the family interests, or without sympathy at any time of her life with the troubles either of her father’s or her mother’s House, was of an introspective turn of mind, grave and thoughtful, and little inclined by nature to the levity inborn in most of her brothers and sisters. Both as imbued with the Calvinism in which she had been so carefully nurtured by her grandmother amidst the congenial Brandenburg surroundings, and perhaps also because, though an accomplished linguist, she alone of the sisterhood had no occasion to learn to speak Dutch, she already as a girl fell into a way of leading much of her life to herself. At the same time, she was always interested in public affairs, and more especially in marriage projects, which in those times formed an important part in politics; and it is noticeable that she continued fond of match-making even after she had herself settled down to a single life. Among the suitors for her hand was the young King Wladislaw IV of Poland, a tolerant and liberal-minded Prince.[36] But the marriage fell through, because the Diet would not hear of their King marrying an ‘English’ Protestant; and Elizabeth, of whose noble character perfect veracity formed one of the noblest traits, refused in her turn to listen to a diplomatic suggestion that she should become a convert to Rome. In January, 1639, there was a notion of making a match between her and Bernhard of Weimar. We are not told that the Electoral Prince Frederick William of Brandenburg—afterwards known as the Great Elector—between whom and Princess Louisa Hollandina a marriage was at one time projected, had ever thought of asking the hand of her elder sister. But he may have met Elizabeth in 1638 at Königsberg, when, after the Peace of Prague, George William was induced by troubles in his Margravate to send his whole family into Prussia, whither some of their Palatine kinsfolk also came; and he was in these years much at Rheenen, where he cannot but have been attracted by the Princess Elizabeth, whose unflinching Protestant sentiment resembled his own, which formed a constant factor in his shifting system of policy. She was afterwards a visitor to Berlin, where, in 1646, Princess Louisa Henrietta of Orange, whose spirit was akin to hers, held her entry as Electress, and at Krossen, where the Dowager Electress (Frederick V’s sister) kept a Court of her own, and where Elizabeth is said to have specially interested herself in the instruction of the Elector Frederick William’s sister Hedwig Sophia, afterwards Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel. We shall see in what fashion the Great Elector ultimately succeeded in providing for the peace and comfort of his kinswoman. Before this time, owing chiefly to her friendship with Descartes, by which she is probably now chiefly remembered, Elizabeth’s mental horizon had unmistakably widened; and, though she retained to the last a sincere piety and (a trace or so of pride of birth apart) a touching modesty of spirit, her growing familiarity with broader philosophical principles gradually freed her from some of the narrowing influences of Calvinism. Descartes’ intimacy with the Princess Palatine, against whose family he had, curiously enough, in former days borne arms in Bohemia, was during her absence from the Hague maintained by an exchange of letters between them, of which the artless Sophia contrived the conveyance.[37] Although the relations between the great thinker and his matchless pupil were not in the least of a kind to suggest clandestine methods, Elizabeth was not, like Queen Christina, independent of control; and Sophia’s services in screening the correspondence from her mother’s unsympathetic notice, while they earned her the gratitude of the first philosopher with whom she was brought into personal relations, show that, notwithstanding her raillery and ridicule of her eldest sister’s moments of distraction, kindly feelings prevailed between them. Elizabeth’s refined beauty, though it was hardly in reference to this that her sisters nicknamed her _la Grecque_, is described by Sophia in her _Memoirs_ very vividly, but not without an admixture of spite.

Footnote 36:

This was at the time (1636) when Charles I was very active in his negotiations on behalf of the Palatine House, sending Lord Arundel on a special mission to Vienna, projecting an alliance with the States-General and France, and scheming the Polish match mentioned in the text. Everything failed.

Footnote 37:

The correspondence of the Princess Elizabeth and Descartes extends over the years 1643 to 1649. Comte Foucher de Careil, after publishing his _Descartes et la Princesse Palatine_ in 1862, was enabled to supplement the letters of Descartes by those of the Princess in a second volume, published in 1879. A most interesting summary is furnished by V. de Swarte’s attractive _Descartes Directeur Spirituel: Correspondance avec la Princesse Palatine et la Reine Cristine de Suède_ (Paris, 1904).

The second of the sisterhood, Louisa Hollandina, is stated by Sophia not to have been so beautiful in the days of the Hague and Rheenen as Elizabeth, but, as it seemed to the young critic, of a more pleasing disposition. ‘She applied herself entirely to painting, and her love of this art was so strong, that she made likenesses of people without having ever cast her eyes upon them.’ This master-passion possessed her to the last, although, perhaps, it was only when Honthorst touched up her pictures that they did full justice to his teaching. Some of her handiwork is to be found in the galleries containing portraits of her family; an Annunciation was painted by her at the age of seventy-three, and several other pictures from her hands were bestowed by her upon the parish churches in the vicinity of Maubuisson during the period of her rule there as an Abbess. In her younger days, as we learn from the observant Sophia, Louisa Hollandina, while intent upon painting the portraits of her friends and acquaintances, was too neglectful of her own personal appearance. On the other hand, it seems wholly unjust to infer from the ripple of unaffected gaiety which overspread the calm of her maturer years, that her nature was essentially frivolous. While her life, as we shall see, was one of piety and unselfishness, we may conclude her to have possessed in her youth what she preserved in her old age—much of her youngest sister’s intellectual alertness and vivacity, and perhaps also something of her humorous turn of mind, without attaining to the depth of thought, any more than she had passed through the intellectual training, that distinguished their elder, Elizabeth.