Sophia of Hanover: From Winter Princess to Heiress of Great Britain, 1630–1714

SOPHIA OF HANOVER

Sophia, Electress of Hanover (1630–1714), granddaughter of James I of England and mother of George I, is best remembered in the English-speaking world as the connection between the Houses of Stuart and Hanover, and she would have succeeded Anne as Queen of England had she lived long enough. This new biography, however, reveals how Sophia – daughter of Frederick and Elizabeth of the Palatinate, known as the Winter King and Queen of Bohemia – was much more than a crucial link in the lineage of the English throne. Her memoirs, which she wrote at the age of fifty, and her correspondence, which dates from 1658 until the time of her death – extensively quoted for the first time here – reveal a gifted and prolific chronicler of her times. These offer readers a fascinating insider’s view of life for the top echelons of society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at The Hague, where she spent her childhood, the Castle of Heidelberg, where her brother ruled as Elector of the Palatinate, and the Leine Schloss in Hanover, and of politics, intrigue and daily life in the royal houses of Western Europe, to many of which she was related by blood or marriage.

Sophia spoke English, French, German, Dutch and Italian fluently and was remarkably open-minded, sophisticated and intellectually curious. Her writings cover an astonishing variety of subjects: from politics, religion and philosophy to international gossip and household tips, as well as intimate details of the lives of her illustrious family. J.N. Duggan, who has long been fascinated by Sophia, has translated a considerable proportion of the princess’s memoir from the German as well as a number of letters to paint a remarkable portrait of a remarkable woman.

J.N. DUGGAN was born in Sheffield, England, in 1938 but raised in Ireland, returning to Sheffield to train as a nurse. She later completed a B.Sc. at University College Dublin. She worked in a hospital laboratory until her marriage, after which she devoted herself to children, husband, dogs, gardening, crosswords and reading, in that order. She now lives in Galway. www.booksbyjnduggan.com

To Tony, who opened so many doors for me

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all I have to thank my family: Fursey, Sorcha, Oscar and Malachy for putting their various expertises at my disposal and for their encouragement and interest, in spite of not sharing their mother’s obsession with the monarchy! Also thanks to my grandson Tadhg just for being there. I hope he will be proud of his granny.

Thanks, too, to Anna White, who suggested that I should write a book; to Nuala Smith for help and encouragement that went far beyond the call of friendship; to Dorothy Brown and her late husband, Garland Gill, for their hospitality in Edinburgh and their constant interest; and to my friends the Kiltoom Ladies who, for more years than any of us would like to admit to, listened to the unfolding of Sophia’s story.

Among others whose help is greatly appreciated are the staff of the county library in Athlone who went out of their way to procure the volumes of Sophia’s letters and spent many hours photocopying them without complaint; Dr Cordula Politis of St Andrew’s University, who translated the more important of the German letters; Carrie Budds, who very kindly dealt with my German correspondence, and Sheila Walker and Wally Braun, who were my intermediaries in Germany.

A special thanks to my agent Ita O’Driscoll who has acted as a buffer between me and the harsh realities of the publishing world, to Peter Owen for liking my book and to my editor, James Ryan. I am also very grateful to Patsy Dale, who read the proofs with extraordinary care and attention; to Nick Pearson, who went to great lengths to satisfy all my whims picture-wise; and to Antonia Owen, who kept the whole enterprise together.

I can’t finish without mentioning Mother Marguerite of the Convent of the Sacred Heart of Mary in Waterford who taught me English, let me loose on the school library, told me to finish the book and died too soon to see it published. And, lastly, I am grateful to my English Protestant mother and my Irish Catholic father, who made my sisters and me aware from a very early age that there are at least two sides to any question, and also for having reared us in a home that was always full of books.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1   The King My Father and the Queen My Mother

2   The Queen of the Monkeys

3   The Elector, the Electress, the Raugravine and Finally – the Dukes

4   The Bishop’s Wife

5   The Italian Journey

6   Snakes and Ladders

7   The French Voyage

8   The Duchess of Hanover

9   Family Affairs

10  Anni Horribiles: Deaths, Dissensions and a Divorce

11  Expectations of an Earthly Crown

12  Krakende Wagens Gaan Lang

13  A Heavenly Crown After All

Notes

Appendix 1: Selected Letters

Appendix 2: Family Members

Family Trees of the Winters, the Line of Ernst August, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians

Map of Sophie’s Travels

Bibliography

Index of Names

Hail Bishop Valentine, whose day this is,

All the air is thy diocese,

And all the chirping choristers

And other birds are thy parishioners,

Thou marriest every year

The lyric lark, and the grave whispering dove,

The sparrow that neglects his life for love,

The household bird, with the red stomacher,

Thou mak’st the blackbird speed as soon,

As doth the goldfinch, or the halcyon;

The husband cock looks out, and straight is sped,

And meets his wife, which brings her feather bed.

This day more cheerfully than ever shine,

This day, which might enflame thyself, old Valentine.

Till now, thou warmed’st with multiplying loves

Two larks, two sparrows, or two doves,

All that is nothing unto this,

For thou this day couplest two phoenixes,

Thou mak’st a taper see

What the sun never saw, and what the Ark

(Which was of fowls, and beasts, the cage, and park,)

Did not contain, one bed contains, through thee,

Two phoenixes, whose joined breasts

Are unto one another mutual nests,

Where motion kindles such fires, as shall give

Young phoenixes, and yet the old shall live.

Whose love and courage never shall decline,

But make the whole year through, thy day, O Valentine.

From John Donne, ‘An Epithalamion, or Marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine being Married on St Valentine’s Day’

INTRODUCTION

If Sophia is remembered at all nowadays it is as a granddaughter of James I of England and VI of Scotland, a sister of Rupert of the Rhine or the mother of George I, but she was an exceptional woman in her own right, remarkable both for her open-minded and down-to-earth character and for her writings, which have been sadly neglected. It is high time for her to emerge from the shadow of her illustrious forebears, her tempestuous siblings and her numerous progeny to be appreciated for her own worth. It is to be hoped that this biography will allow her to do that.

She was a gifted and prolific writer. Professor Dirk van der Cruysse, who edited a modern edition of her memoirs in 1990, places her alongside Madame de Sévigné and the Cardinal de Retz as a chronicler of the royal and princely courts of the seventeenth century. The letters date from the time of her marriage in 1658 until her death in 1714, and the memoirs were written in 1680 when she was fifty. A large number of the letters were carefully preserved, and at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century they were edited and published in Germany. She might have become a household name, but the events of 1914 made any German connection anathema to the English-speaking world and she was quietly forgotten.

Because she was related by blood or marriage to many of the ruling houses of Europe, for most of her life she occupied a ringside seat at the cockpit of continental politics and gives us an insider’s view of many of the main military and political events of her time. War and dynastic marriages were the chief instruments used to bring about change, and Sophia took a lively interest in both, though she abhorred the former and mostly approved of the latter, unless they came too near home!

Apart from matters of state she gives us a wonderful glimpse of life as it was for the ruling classes of her time. We would find it very inconvenient and uncomfortable. She paints a picture of freezing castles and smoking chimneys at home; rickety carriages and muddy roads when travelling and, harshest of all, the demands of etiquette, which kept her standing for over an hour listening to her brother, the Elector, while she was in labour with her fourth son.

It was not all hardship, however. There were pleasures to be enjoyed on a princely scale. Casks of Moselle wine and bunches of grapes travelled, in season, from her brother’s domains in Heidelberg to the ducal schloss in Hanover and were met by cartloads of the finest Westphalian hams travelling in the opposite direction. Palaces were built and gardens laid out in imitation of Versailles, clothes were ordered from Paris and diamonds from Amsterdam, and every year there were carnivals to which people of all ranks were invited.

Sophia was a woman for all times and all seasons; with her flexible approach to life and fund of common sense she would have survived and prospered in any age. She lived quite comfortably with the constraints under which women laboured in her day, dutifully supporting her husband Ernst August in all his projects and playing her part as ‘Bishopess’, Duchess and Electress to perfection but always managing to find time to follow her own intellectual interests. In Germany she never questioned the restrictions of the Salic law, which barred women from ruling positions, but had no qualms at all about accepting the crown of Great Britain. As she told her son Friedrich August in 1685: ‘I have for a long time observed the rule which says that one must accommodate oneself to the world, because the world will never accommodate itself to us.’

She said of herself that she ‘did not act like the heroine of a novel’. This was probably true in the case of the heroines of the novels of her own time, but had she lived 150 years later she would have found herself quite at ease with Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Elliot or Elinor Dashwood. Like them she considered that a good husband was desirable but that an adequate income was essential. When jilted by Georg Wilhelm, the Duke of Hanover, she accepted the consolation prize of his brother, Ernst August, with equanimity, saying that all she had ever desired was a good establishment and if that could be provided by the younger man she would have no difficulty in changing one brother for the other. Her remark, apropos her wedding night, that she ‘was delighted to find that her husband was lovable because she was determined to love him’, could have come from the pen of Jane Austen herself.

Wherever possible I have allowed the protagonists of this biography to speak for themselves. They did it so well! Sophia was not the only capable writer in her circle, and luckily for us many of the letters of the time have been preserved. The jewel in the crown is, arguably, the letter to Karl Ludwig describing her brother Edward’s death, which was written in French by his German valet; a close second is Karl Ludwig’s last letter to Sophia; but the most fun of all were the letters between Sophie Dorothée and Count Königsmarck. I had dreaded dealing with this episode until I read their letters and realized that they had told their own story far better than I could have hoped to do.

It has taken me fifteen years to sift through all the letters at my disposal, partly because I was in no hurry to take leave of such good company. One of the hardest tasks was to decide which of the letters to include, and one of the greatest pleasures was the translating of them. Adding an appendix allowed me not only to include a few more letters but also gives readers a taste of them in their original languages as well as a chance to anyone so inclined to try their own hand at translating them. I hope that I have succeeded in transmitting some of that pleasure to my readers.

CHAPTER 1

THE KING MY FATHER AND THE QUEEN MY MOTHER

In the winter of 1680, when she was fifty years old, Sophia sat down to write her memoirs. They were not for publication; they were a form of therapy. The past year had been what one of her descendants might have called her ‘annus horribilis’: her eldest brother, Karl Ludwig – who had been like a father to her – had died, as had her eldest sister Elisabeth; her husband Ernst August was passing the winter in Venice and availing himself of all the pleasures on offer there. Left behind to pass the dreary Westphalian winter in the family schloss in Hanover, with her usual good sense Sophia settled down to combat her depression and loneliness by looking back and writing about her life. ‘I hope only to divert myself during the absence of the Duke, my husband’, she tells us, ‘and to keep myself in good humour [conserver mon humeur dans une bonne assiette] because I am persuaded that that preserves both life and health, which are very dear to me.’

Whatever her humour, the memoirs are far from gloomy. They are funny, witty and perceptive and, above all, astonishingly candid. To read them is to walk through an open door into the highest echelons of seventeenth-century society – English, French, German and Dutch – in the company of a knowledgeable and entertaining guide. Drawn by Sophia’s very capable pen, Louis XIV, Henrietta Maria and Elizabeth of Bohemia, among others, step down from their gilded frames to be seen as they appeared to a sharp-eyed and unflattering contemporary.

On the therapeutic level the memoirs seem to have done their job. They start off sourly enough, but one can soon sense her spirits rising as she remembers some of the funnier events of her bizarre childhood. They begin in typically unsentimental fashion with her own birth: ‘I am told that I was born on 14 October in the year 1630, and as I was the twelfth fruit of the King my father and the Queen my mother I believe that my birth did not cause them any great joy other than that I no longer occupied the post that I had held.’

In 1680 there would have been no need to explain to her audience who ‘the King my father’ or ‘the Queen my mother’ were, even though he had died in 1632 and she in 1662; they were Friedrich, Elector of the Palatinate (in south-west Germany), and Elizabeth Stuart – otherwise known as the Winter King and Queen of Bohemia – probably the most notorious couple of the seventeenth century.

Elizabeth was the eldest and only surviving daughter of James vi/i of Scotland and England and his wife, Anne of Denmark. She was born in Scotland in 1596 and was seven years old when her father succeeded Elizabeth I to the English throne. She was named after the old queen, who was godmother not only to the princess but to her father and her older brother, Henry. Her childhood in England was passed at Coombe Abbey, near Coventry, under the guardianship of Sir John Harrington of Exton and his wife. Sir John was an affectionate and conscientious guardian who strove to make a good Protestant of her, in which he succeeded admirably, but he also taught her to live in a manner far above her means, a habit that she was never able to overcome.

In 1608, still under the guardianship of Sir John, she joined her father’s court in London. By all accounts she was a delightful young girl: high-spirited, outgoing, warm-hearted, loyal and generous to a fault. She could never refuse a request, either then or for the rest of her life. She was considered a great beauty, being tall and slim with fair auburn hair and green eyes.

Her favourite companion at court was her brother Henry, the Prince of Wales. He was two years older than her, and they were devoted to each other. Though they lived in separate households they exchanged letters and gifts if they could not manage to meet. Beneath the courtly language of their letters one can sense the delight they took in each other’s company. One of her letters to him reads:

Worthy Prince and my dearest brother,

I received your most welcome letter and kind token by Mr Hopkins, highly esteeming them as delightful tokens of your brotherly love, in which assuredly (whatever I may fail) I will ever endeavour to equal you; esteeming that time happiest when I enjoyed your company, and desiring nothing more than the fruition of it again; that as nature has made us nearest in love to one another, so accident might not separate us from living together. Neither do I account it the least part of my present comfort, that though I was deprived of your happy presence, yet I can make these lines deliver this true message, that I will ever be, during my life,

Your most kind and loving sister, Elizabeth

To my most dear brother, the Prince

They both loved outdoor pursuits, going hunting and picnicking together, and also shared an interest in books and the stage. Elizabeth was often the guest of honour at her brother’s formal entertainments.

The only other surviving child of James and Anne was the future Charles I, who was small and sickly and not expected to reach adulthood. A daughter Sophia – named for her maternal grandmother – had died after only one day. She is commemorated with an impressive tomb – an alabaster cradle with a wax doll inside – in Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, where Elizabeth herself was laid to rest in 1662.

Almost as soon as Elizabeth joined the court James started negotiations to marry her off to his own best advantage. Various suitors were considered: Gustavus Adolphus, the heir to the Swedish throne; Prince Maurice of Orange-Nassau, Stadtholder of the United Provinces; and even the recently widowed and Catholic Philip III of Spain; but from the start the favourite candidate had been the German prince, Friedrich von Wittelsbach, Elector of the Palatinate.

Some – especially her mother, who said that Elizabeth would be known as ‘Goody Palsgrave’ – thought that this match was not good enough for the Princess Royal of England, but on a personal level Friedrich seemed the ideal choice. Only four days older than Elizabeth, he was handsome and athletic with black curly hair, a dark complexion and brown eyes. He was refined and cultured and shared a love of reading and outdoor pursuits with the princess. Educated at the Protestant Academy of Sedan under the eye of his uncle, the Duke of Bouillon, he spoke fluent French, as did Elizabeth. His mother had also seen to it that he had a crash course in dancing before he set off for England to do his wooing.

Politically the match confirmed James as the leader of the Protestant cause in Europe. Friedrich had inherited not only the premier lay Electorship of the Holy Roman Empire on the death of his father in 1610 but also the leadership of the Protestant Union, which had been founded in 1608 to defend the rights of the Protestant princes against the Catholic Habsburg emperors. He was also tied by blood to the leaders of the United Provinces, the family of Orange-Nassau: his mother was Louise Juliane of Orange-Nassau, a daughter of William the Silent and a half-sister of Princes Maurice and Frederick.¹

Friedrich arrived in London on 16 October 1612. It was love at first sight for the young couple, and they remained in love for the rest of their lives. Tragedy, however, soon overshadowed them. On 29 October the Prince of Wales fell ill, suffering from ‘a tertian fever’, characterized by diarrhoea, restlessness and insomnia. Elizabeth was forbidden to visit him for fear of infection, and tried unsuccessfully to gain admittance to his rooms disguised as a page. He died on 16 November; his last coherent words were said to be ‘Where is my dear sister?’

In the nineteenth century Henry’s illness was diagnosed as typhoid fever, but a diagnosis of an acute attack of porphyria was made in 1966 by Ida McAlpine and Richard Hunter.² If this is correct, the doctors might as well have allowed Elizabeth to visit her brother as not only is porphyria not contagious but she herself carried the porphyria gene, which she transmitted to Sophia, who in turn passed it on to her descendants in the royal houses of both Great Britain and Germany, the most famous sufferer being, of course, George III.

James was devastated by the death of the prince, but after three days he rallied and sent for Friedrich, telling him that henceforth he must take Henry’s place in his heart. On 7 December Henry was buried in Westminster Abbey; on the 15th Friedrich was invested as a Knight of the Garter, and on the 27th the official betrothal took place in Inigo Jones’s newly built Banqueting House, with Elizabeth wearing cloth of silver over black satin to signify her mourning.

The marriage took place on St Valentine’s Day of 1613 in the Chapel of Whitehall Palace. No expense was spared; it was, after all, the first royal wedding in England since Mary Tudor’s wedding to Philip of Spain in 1544. The festivities lasted for weeks. Many poems were written to celebrate the event, one of which called Friedrich ‘th’amourous Palatine’, a name that stuck and proved to be particularly apt.³

The young couple finally arrived in Heidelberg, Friedrich’s capital, on 7 June 1613, having been fêted by rulers and common folk alike all the way from London to Holland and down the Rhine. Elizabeth must have been delighted at the sight of her new home. The castle of Heidelberg, built of red sandstone, was set high up on the hill known as the Königstuhl facing north across the river Neckar to the Heiligenberg opposite. The town, with its beautiful Renaissance buildings and Gothic Church of the Holy Ghost, nestled on the south bank of the river below the castle.

The Lower or Rhine Palatinate stretched out on either side of the Rhine from the borders of Alsace to Wurtemburg. Its chief towns were Heidelberg, Mannheim, Worms and Frankenthal. The countryside was rich and fertile, with an abundance of game-filled forests where Elizabeth could hunt to her heart’s content. Vineyards flourished on the slopes of the hills, providing grapes for the famous wines of the region.

Further east, north of the Danube and bordering on the Kingdom of Bohemia, Friedrich also ruled over the Upper Palatinate, the chief towns of which were Ratisbon and Amsberg, but the couple seldom visited this part of their domains.

The first few years of the marriage were almost idyllic. Heidelberg was already fit for a princess: the castle, for instance, was far grander than Holyrood Palace, but Friedrich set himself to making it fit for a queen. He had already added the ‘English wing’ to the two Renaissance wings, the Otto Heinrichbau and the Friedrichbau, before the wedding, and he now turned his attention to the gardens.

The architect and engineer Salomon de Caus, a French Huguenot who had worked for Henry, the late Prince of Wales, in England, was brought over to make new gardens for the castle. The results were the talk and envy of Europe, filled as they were with musical fountains, mechanical