It’s a rare gift, particularly when young, to be able to see into the future and anticipate the consequences of a reversal, but this Sophia, despite the determined fawning of the hangers-on around her, was able to do. “All these circumstances combined proved to me that my friends’ plan [to marry her to Charles II] would come to nothing, and that, were I to remain in Holland, I should doubtless be subjected to the mortification of losing the esteem in which I was held; for those persons who paid court to me would do so no longer when they came to perceive that I was powerless to reward them,” she worried. Luckily, due to the Treaty of Westphalia, she now had somewhere to go—back to the ancestral castle of Heidelberg, where Karl Ludwig had taken up permanent residence. To distance herself from the potential for scandal or notoriety that were the inevitable by-products of failed marital hopes, “it was agreed that I should go to the Palatinate on a visit to my brother the Elector Palatine, who had always favored me with his affection, even to the extent of calling me his daughter, for he was thirteen years older than I. Hearing that he had married a princess of Hesse Cassel, and knowing him to be a prince of great powers of mind, I felt sure that in so important a matter he would not have allowed inclination to overrule judgment, and that in the young and beautiful princess of his choice I was certain to find a delightful companion,” she rejoiced.
And so, over her mother’s objections (who was still hoping for a wedding with Charles), off Sophia went in the summer of 1650, escorted by two English ladies-in-waiting and the ever-useful Lord Craven, who footed the bill for the entire journey. She even sweet-talked the government of Holland into providing her the necessary transportation to Germany. “As I had never during my whole life stirred from The Hague—except once, when I went to Rhenen, and now and then in a canal-boat to Leyden or Delft—I dreaded the fatigue of a carriage, and therefore begged from the States General the loan of a pinnace, in which I was able with great comfort to sail up the Rhine,” she admitted. Her journey took her through Dusseldorf, Cologne, and Rheinfels and finally to Mannheim, where Karl Ludwig and his new young wife, Charlotte of Hesse-Cassel, were waiting to escort her to nearby Heidelberg, her new home.
THE HEIDELBERG TO WHICH Karl Ludwig had returned after a thirty-year absence bore very little resemblance to the charming city he had been forced to flee with his grandmother at the age of three. Everywhere he looked he saw destruction: the houses burned and looted, the fields fallow, the much-reduced population poverty-stricken and starving. The beautiful castle he remembered from childhood had been hit particularly hard, its towers demolished and the roof caved in. “There is hardly a corner fit for habitation,” he had written grimly to his mother upon his arrival in October the year before.
To recover from such ruin was a Herculean task, but it was a job he had been waiting to tackle all his life. To his very great credit, Karl Ludwig put his subjects’ welfare ahead of his own and sought to rebuild the town itself before attempting to renovate his own property. The economic revival program the Elector Palatine put into place upon his arrival was astonishingly enlightened. Restore a house or farm in Heidelberg, and Karl Ludwig guaranteed the owner a two-year tax break; build a new home from scratch, and the tempting tax-free offer rose to three years. Anyone wishing to open a business or conduct trade was welcome in Karl Ludwig’s domains, be they Calvinist, Lutheran, or Catholic; even Jews were tolerated and encouraged to settle in the city, as long as they brought along money to spend. Nor did the Elector Palatine omit the public sector from his agenda but made the reopening and staffing of the prestigious University of Heidelberg, which had been forced to shut down during the war, one of his top priorities.
The salutary effect of these new, pragmatically inclusive policies was remarkable. The town recovered so dramatically even within the first year that Karl Ludwig was able to begin renovations on the castle itself. Again, he proceeded cautiously, in stages, so as not to prove a burden to his subjects, and occupied a much less impressive house in town while his home was under construction.
Altogether, Karl Ludwig demonstrated a concern for his dependents, a commitment to financial responsibility, and a talent for leadership that won him the hearts of his people. The years of exile and struggle in Holland when he himself had known poverty and humiliation and perhaps also the example of his uncle’s experience in England had not been wasted, but instead had clearly taught him the importance of thrift, moderation, and compromise. With such skills, he was on track to regain not only Heidelberg’s former prosperity but also his family’s prominent political position within Germany.
And then he got married.
HER NAME WAS CHARLOTTE, and she was the daughter of the landgrave (the German name for a count) of Hesse-Cassel. Karl Ludwig must have had his eye on her for some time, as it was the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel who had died and left the Protestant army that Karl Ludwig had wanted and tried to get to by crossing France in disguise (only to be captured and thrown into prison by Cardinal Richelieu) years before. Charlotte was a decade younger than her husband; he consulted no one in the family about his choice. They were married on February 22, 1650, four months after his arrival at Heidelberg.
They were still newlyweds when the queen of Bohemia’s youngest daughter, away from home for the first time in her life, arrived at Mannheim later that summer and found them waiting for her. Eager to meet this new sister-in-law, Sophia left an indelible portrait of her in her memoirs. “The Elector, with his hearty manner, seemed delighted to see me,” she recalled, “but Madame [Charlotte] assumed a doleful air, and hardly spoke during the whole day, thereby giving me the better opportunity of inspecting her at my leisure. She was very tall, with an admirable complexion and most beautiful bust. Her features were irregular, and her eyebrows, which were dyed black, struck me as forming too violent a contrast with her beautiful flaxen hair… she had beautiful sparkling eyes, full pouting lips, and very fine teeth; altogether she would be called a handsome woman.” There can be little doubt from this description that Karl Ludwig, otherwise so prudent with money and public affairs, had splurged and gotten himself the seventeenth-century version of a trophy wife.
Despite her sister-in-law’s unhelpful attitude, Sophia exerted herself to be pleasant. She even complimented the mode of transportation by which she was to be conveyed to Heidelberg—“I was so pleased to see in Germany a carriage which was assuredly much better built than any that I had yet encountered during my travels, that I praised its beauty,” she remembered—only to have even this innocent comment fall flat. “A grimace on the part of Madame showed me to my surprise that my praise displeased her. I was not then aware that this, her wedding carriage, had excited her wrath, because she thought it inferior to the one with which her sister, the Princess of Tarentum, had been presented, and that Madame had therein considered her mother to show greater affection for her sister than for herself,” Sophia explained. That evening, after they had arrived in Heidelberg, when she was alone in her room, Sophia could not help exclaiming in astonishment: “My sister-in-law is very stupid!”
Still, Sophia persisted. The next day being a Sunday, she sought out Charlotte in her room—the castle was still being repaired and they were all living at the house in town—when she was preparing to go to church. Charlotte was in a better mood and had evidently decided to be gracious to her houseguest by engaging her in conversation. “I found her with all her fine clothes spread out on a table, enumerating whence they came and how long she had had them. I took all this as a joke, it being the fashion then to have few dresses at a time, and to renew them frequently. When the catalogue of her clothes was completed we went to church,” Sophia reported. This cozy tête-à-tête was picked up again after services. “On our return my sister-in-law confided to me that she had married the Elector against her will; that she had been sought in marriage by several other princes; but that her mother had chosen to make her marry a jealous old man [Karl Ludwig, age thirty-three]; that a duke of Würtemberg, named Frederick, had sighe
d for her, as had two dukes of Brunswick [Hanover], George William and Ernst Augustus, a prince, Philip Palsgrave of Sulzbach, and several counts. This conversation quite took me aback,” Sophia revealed.
It soon became very clear that Karl Ludwig also wished to unburden himself to his sister and that one of the reasons he had acceded so quickly to Sophia’s request to visit was that he expected her to act as a sort of marriage counselor. “The Elector on his part had matrimonial grievances to confide with regard to his wife’s temper,” a disconcerted Sophia continued. “He said that she possessed sterling worth, and many good qualities, but had been badly brought up; and he entreated me to cure her of all her affectation, and point out how unsuitable it was to a person of her rank.” This state of affairs, which could hardly have been anticipated, was perhaps not the most comfortable way to begin an extended stay. “I wished myself a thousand times again at The Hague!” Sophia confessed.
Nor did the situation improve with time, as Charlotte and Karl Ludwig seesawed between love and hate with disturbing rapidity. “I could see that he idolized her, and I often felt ashamed to see him kiss her in public,” admitted the poor put-upon houseguest. “There was continual embracing going on, and I have often seen him kneeling to her, or her to him. At that time one would have said that their love was likely to be of lifelong duration, but jealousy, the troublesome child of love, soon disturbed their peace. The Elector, believing that Madame could not look at anyone without lessening her affection for himself, often made accusations which she received with great indignation, and which were, indeed, very ill founded.” But Sophia could not help but note that the fault was not all on the side of her brother, as Charlotte “loved to attract attention. There was more folly than evil in her; but the Elector, having great delicacy of feeling, wished her to be all in all to himself and nothing to others. The slightest word from him on this subject put her into a frightful rage, which usually lasted the whole day,” Sophia reported. “I leave it to be imagined whether I was very happy at that time,” she added drily.
She was just twenty years old and clearly out of her depth; what was needed were reinforcements. There was only one thing to do. “I wrote for my sister Elizabeth,” said Sophia.
Princess Elizabeth
Queen Christina of Sweden
15
A Lesson on the Passions
THROUGH ALL THE YEARS OF turmoil—the murder of d’Epinay and the flight of her brother Philip; the seemingly endless up-and-down negotiations for the partial restoration of the Palatinate by the Treaty of Westphalia; the sudden, horrific execution of her uncle Charles I—Princess Elizabeth had clung to her special friendship with the philosopher René Descartes as her one refuge of joy and stability in an otherwise brutally unkind world. Even before she left for Berlin in the summer of 1646, she had turned to him time and again for strength and solace, and these he unfailingly attempted to provide through regular, affectionately reassuring correspondence. Princess Elizabeth was frequently ill and unhappy (who can blame her) and attributed her physical ailments, at least in part, to her emotional state. “Know then that I have a body imbued with a large share of the weakness of my sex, quick to feel the afflictions of the soul and without strength to rally from them, being of a temperament subject to depression,” she observed in a letter to the philosopher. “I will go on to confess to you that even now, when I do not place my happiness in things which depend on fortune or on the will of others, and do not esteem myself absolutely miserable though I should never see my House restored nor my family out of poverty, I cannot but consider the injurious accidents that befall them as an evil nor the useless efforts which I make to help them without an anxiety that is no sooner calmed by reason than a fresh disaster provokes fresh trouble,” she concluded despairingly.
But Descartes, refreshingly, would have none of it. “The difference between great souls and those which are low and vulgar consist principally in this: that the vulgar give way to their passions, and are happy or miserable according to whether the things that happen are to them agreeable or displeasing; while the others have reasoning powers so firm and so elevated that, though they also have passions and often stranger ones than the common herd, yet reason remains always the mistress and makes their afflictions serve them,” he replied firmly. “I remark always in your letters thoughts so clever and reasoning so cogent that I can hardly persuade myself that the mind capable of receiving them is lodged in a body so feeble and sick… Consider all the advantages which may be drawn from the thing which yesterday appeared so irremediable a disaster, and turn your attention from all the evils which have been imagined or forecast,” he suggested sensibly. “And your Highness may draw this general consolation from the buffets of fortune, that they perhaps contributed to make you cultivate your mind to the point which you have attained, and that is a good which might outweigh an empire.” And to help distract her and keep her from fretting, he proposed that they start their own private book group, just the two of them, beginning with the Roman philosopher Seneca’s De Vita Beata [On the Good Life], a work that attempted to provide a rational framework to emotions and the achievement of happiness.
If he had discovered penicillin, he could not have provided a more effective tonic for the ailing princess. They went back and forth in letters, first on Seneca, then Epicurus, and later Zeno and Aristotle (Elizabeth often quoting in Latin). “Monsieur Descartes,” she wrote. “Your letters always serve as an antidote against melancholy, even when they do not instruct me, turning my mind from the disagreeable subjects which occur every day to make it contemplate the happiness which I possess in the friendship of a person of your merit, to whose counsel I can confide the conduct of my life.” His answers to her questions about Seneca’s thesis were so penetrating and helpful to her that she encouraged him to publish his own work on the subject. So, in the spring of 1646, just before she left for Berlin, he summarized his thoughts in an essay entitled On the Passions, inscribing it “For the special use of the Princess Elizabeth.”
Happily, Elizabeth’s abrupt departure from Holland in the wake of d’Epinay’s murder and her subsequent quarrel with her mother did not sever this connection. If anything, she relied on her relationship with Descartes even more once she had established herself in Berlin. “I only try to put in practice the rule you laid down at the end of your [last] letter, trying to take pleasure in present things, as much as I can,” she wrote to Descartes on September 30, 1646, soon after her arrival. “Here I find little difficulty, being in a house where I have been cherished from my childhood, where everyone conspires to caress me, although they sometimes distract me from more useful occupations. I easily bear with this inconvenience for the pleasure of being beloved by my relations,” she informed him, evidently a comparison to the manner in which she had been treated by the queen of Bohemia at The Hague. But if her relatives were warmer and more inviting, the town itself was not what she had hoped for, particularly in terms of education. “The people of this country and especially the learned… are even more pedantic and superstitious than any of those I knew in Holland, because the whole population is so poor and no one studies except to make a living by it,” she complained. “I employ the little time that remains to me after the letters I must write… in rereading your works… But there is no one here with sense enough to understand them, though I have promised them to the old Duke of Brunswick to adorn his library. I doubt they will much adorn his rheumy old brains, already stuffed with pedantry,” she observed drily.
But she did not feel the absence of the intellectual stimulus associated with her old life at The Hague so keenly as long as she had Descartes’s letters to look forward to, and these continued to appear with a satisfying regularity. Soon after her arrival, they began the study of a new book, Machiavelli’s The Prince, for, as Descartes wrote to her, “Happiness is dependent on the right use of reason; the study to acquire it is the most useful occupation one can have, as it is the sweetest and the best.”
&n
bsp; But the use of reason could be controversial in the seventeenth century, and there were signs of trouble for Descartes in Holland. The religious climate, reflecting the influence of the victorious Puritan movement in England, was becoming more repressive, especially against Catholics. The new rector at the University of Utrecht, a strict Calvinist, took issue with some of Descartes’s writings and denounced him; the controversy spread to the University of Leiden, where his ideas were banned. Descartes was nervous enough about being subjected to a public trial and punishment that he suggested to Elizabeth that they write to each other in cipher, just in case their letters should go astray and be used as fodder against him. Elizabeth, whose entire family had been communicating in this manner for decades (in order that their various plans and political strategies not fall into the hands of the enemy, be they imperial, Spanish, Puritan, or French) had no problem with this, although ironically she did have to point out gently to the world-famous mathematician that the system he proposed was unwieldy. “I examined the number code you sent me and find it very good, but too prolix for writing all the meaning, and if one only writes a few words, one can find them by the quantity of the letters. It would be better to make a key of words by the alphabet, and then mark some distinction between the numbers which signify letters and the ones which signify words,” she recommended diplomatically.
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