And so began a hard-fought contest between the ambitious father, who had spent his life accumulating wealth and influence, and the principled son, who had experienced a spiritual awakening that he could not ignore. The admiral tried both carrot and stick. He raged and threw his son out of the house; relented and sent him to Paris for sophistication and then brought him back home to a London law school for expertise; introduced him into society and even managed to secure him, for a very brief period, a plum naval appointment on board ship as his aide under Charles II’s younger brother James, duke of York. For a short time this seemed to work, and William tried dutifully to be a fashionable society gentleman for his father’s sake. But when he was sent to Ireland to administer the family’s properties near Cork in the spring of 1666, he ran into the same Quaker preacher who had so impressed him as a teenager at Oxford, and all the old feelings came rushing back. From this point on, he renounced his father’s way of life and openly espoused the doctrine of the Friends, even going so far as to preach at meetings.
His embrace of the Quakers of course put him at odds with the authorities, who saw it as their duty to squelch the sect, while his father’s high position made him an easy target for the admiral’s many enemies at court. The result was that William Penn very quickly found himself one of the public faces of the movement, not a particularly pleasant position to occupy, as it meant that he was often singled out for arrest. As he refused to recant, he spent the majority of the next few years in prison, where he used his time productively, writing books and pamphlets staunchly defending his religious views and promoting liberty of conscience. “Tell the King that the Tower is the worst argument in the world,” William Penn flatly told the chaplain Charles II sent to reform him.
His fortitude under the twin pressures of deprivation and confinement—for conditions in the Tower were grim—combined with his reliance on firm but peaceful resistance (William Penn understood the power of nonviolent protest centuries before Gandhi) made him a force to be reckoned with. Even his father came to respect him and when he died in 1670 left him his entire estate, which included £16,000 in back pay and loans owed to him by the Crown, along with Charles II’s promise of a promotion to peer of the realm. Two years later, William Penn, now a leading voice for the Quakers and liberty of conscience in England and interested in uniting with other similarly persecuted Protestant sects in Europe, heard of Elizabeth’s protection of the Labadists at Herford.
He knew the family, of course, through her brother Rupert. After his mother’s death, Rupert had stayed in England and been made a member of the Privy Council by Charles II, who valued his uncle’s experience and advice. He was further appointed commander of the fleet under the duke of York, and he had fought with his customary ferocity alongside William Penn’s own father in a brief skirmish against the Dutch. “I did indeed discover so extraordinary courage, conduct and presence of mind in the midst of all the showers of cannon bullet, that higher I think cannot be imagined of any man ever fought. I observed him [Rupert] with astonishment all that day,” his second in command reported.
When an old head wound reopened and forced him to retire from active service, Rupert simply broadened the scope of his interests. An early fellow of the Royal Society, he spent his spare time in a laboratory he set up, experimenting mostly with ways to improve the effectiveness of guns and powder. Among his patented inventions was a new alloy of copper and zinc, appropriately named “Prince’s metal.” He put his naval experience to good commercial use by getting himself appointed the first president of the Hudson Bay Company, which had exclusive rights to trade in Canada. He still rode like a wild man, loved animals (this time, it was a “faithful great black dog” who padded after him), and, according to Samuel Pepys, was recognized as one of “the best players at tennis in the nation.” Throughout, and despite his many injuries and the advance of age, he was still recognizably Rupert: “He is as merry, and swears, and laughs, and curses, and do all the things of a man in health as ever he did in his life,” Pepys marveled after Rupert survived yet another head injury.
William Penn was especially interested in Rupert’s sister Princess Elizabeth because the Quakers were in need of influential allies. In 1673, Parliament passed the Test Act, which prohibited anyone from holding office, either religious or civil, unless he was willing to swear an “Oath of Allegiance” to the Church of England. Although the measure was aimed primarily at Catholics (of whom Charles II’s brother James was the most conspicuous), Quakers and other nonconformist Protestant sects also fell under the vague, catchall category of “worshipping God after another manner than that of the Church of England,” as William Penn put it, and so found themselves persecuted anew. When a prominent Quaker was imprisoned for refusing to take the required oath, Penn thought of Elizabeth. He appealed to her for help and found in the fifty-five-year-old abbess a passion for liberty of conscience and the courage to fight for it that was a match for his own. “I have received your two letters,” she wrote to him, “and your good wishes that I may attain to those virtues which shall enable me to follow in the blessed steps of our Lord and Savior. What I did for his true disciples [the Labadists] weighs not so much as a glass of water, for, alas! it helped them not. Neither… could [I] leave undone one single thing that [was] deemed likely to further his [the imprisoned Quaker’s] freedom, although the doing of it should expose me to the mockeries of the whole world,” she assured him with spirit.
And with this response, for the second time in her life, Elizabeth attracted the attention and admiration of one of the most progressive minds of her era. When four years later, Penn, after a futile campaign for religious freedom that included the publication of many compelling treatises, reluctantly gave up on England and went on a recruitment tour of Holland and Germany to float the idea of a Quaker settlement in the New World, he made a point of visiting her.
BY THE TIME WILLIAM Penn came to Herford in the summer of 1677, tensions between Elizabeth and her subjects had substantially eased. It had been fifteen years since she had first come to the area and a decade since she had become abbess. After the Labadists, there had been no further incidents and the townspeople had clearly come to trust her. “She would constantly, every last day in the week, sit in judgment, and hear and determine causes herself, where her patience, justice and mercy were admirable, frequently remitting her forfeitures where the party was poor, or otherwise meritorious,” Penn later observed. “And, which was excellent, though unusual, she would… strangely draw unconcerned parties to submission and agreement; exercising not so much the rigor of her power, as the power of her persuasion.” In many ways, Elizabeth hadn’t changed at all; she was as economical as ever, reserving as much of her income as possible for charity, as befitted her position. “Though she kept no sumptuous table in her own Court, she spread the tables of the poor in their solitary cells, breaking bread to virtuous pilgrims, according to their wants and her ability; abstemious in herself, and in apparel void of all vain ornaments,” Penn confirmed.
William Penn
But physically, she was failing, and in her awareness of her mortality Elizabeth sought a spiritual peace that she just couldn’t seem to find. True to her intellect, rather than relying on dogma, she opened herself to new ideas. During his visit, she invited Penn—at thirty-two young enough to have been the son she never had—to dinner and made him tell her his story. “I related… the bitter mockings and scornings that fell upon me, the displeasure of my parents, the invectiveness and cruelty of the priests, the strangeness of all my companions; what a sign and wonder they made of me, but, above all, that great cross of resisting and watching against mine own inward vain affections and thoughts,” he recounted simply. His words touched her, and the next day after a meeting at which he preached, she broke down in tears, took his hand in hers, and tried to tell him “the sense she had of the power and presence of God,” he remembered. “‘I cannot speak to you,’” she managed. “‘My heart is full.’”
Elizabeth was also perturbed at this time by the estrangement that still persisted between herself and Karl Ludwig, who had never forgiven her for siding with Charlotte and had gone so far as to try to wriggle out of a financial commitment to her. “I must wait till God send you better feeling towards me… And I hope my patience will show how much I value the honor of being on good terms with you. If I had been guided by my legal advisers I should have acted quite differently,” she wrote to him. But their relationship pained her and when his second wife, sweet-tempered Louise von Degenfeldt, died in 1677, Elizabeth tried to demonstrate her goodwill and desire for reconciliation by helping him.
Although Charlotte had moved out of the castle of Heidelberg by this time and was currently living with relatives in Hesse-Cassel, she had never recognized the divorce. This meant that, in the eyes of the world, Karl Ludwig’s second family was illegitimate, which in turn meant that none of the sons he’d had with Louise—and she had borne him thirteen children, eight of whom survived, four of whom were boys—could legally inherit his property. His one legitimate son, Karl, was therefore his only heir—and in 1671 Karl had married a Danish princess who had yet to bear a child. If that situation continued, as it appeared likely it would, there was a very real chance that the Lower Palatine, including the beloved ancestral castle of Heidelberg that Karl Ludwig had fought so long and hard to reclaim, would pass out of the family.
Karl Ludwig had two choices: convince Charlotte to recognize the divorce and then marry a third wife in the hopes of siring a legitimate heir, or persuade Rupert to return to the Palatinate, marry, and produce sons. On both these fronts, Elizabeth now did her best to help him. She sent an appeal to Charlotte, and when this was rejected flatly, turned to Rupert in England, sending a message through William Penn. “I will execute thy commission with all diligence and all possible discretion, and give thee notice thereof in my earliest letters, if the Lord be pleased to let me reach London in safety,” Penn had promised before he left.
But Rupert, who had fallen in love with the Irish daughter of an old comrade in arms and had married her but kept the nuptials secret, probably because his wife was Catholic, was having none of it.* He wrote back “that he was quite comfortable at Windsor, and had no intention of moving; that Karl Ludwig had insulted him and might do what he pleased for an heir, he should not have him.”
It was a disappointing answer, but Elizabeth’s efforts on Karl Ludwig’s behalf softened him toward her, and just in time. In October of 1679, Elizabeth sent for Sophia. When she arrived, Sophia found “my sister was in bed, all her body, legs, arms, and throat like a skeleton, only her stomach frightfully swollen with dropsy [probably cancer]… She spoke of death with smiles. ‘I shall not leave much goods nor gear,’ she said. ‘I should wish to be buried without ceremony and without a funeral oration, which is but flattery.’ She is pleased when those she loves ask news of her,” Sophia added.
Elizabeth’s last thoughts and letters were directed to her family. “It is a great consolation to me, dear brother, that you testify so tender a sympathy for my sufferings, and that you still remember the old friendship between us, the interruption of which caused me so much grief… I have never failed to preserve my affection for our country, and it would have been a great joy to me to have been permitted to return thither and pay you my respects but it was not God’s will,” she observed sadly to Karl Ludwig. And to Louise Hollandine, whom she had not seen in over three decades, she wrote, “I am still alive, my dear sister, but it is to prepare for death… Adieu, dear sister, I hope that we shall prepare us so well in this transitory life, that we may see His Face eternally in the future.”
“Elizabeth fails more and more, and they do not think she will suffer more in dying than she does now,” Sophia wrote poignantly to Karl Ludwig at the end of November, just after Elizabeth’s sixty-first birthday. “It seems she will go out like a candle.”
The candle flickered out on February 12, 1680.
ELIZABETH, PRINCESS PALATINE AND Prelatess of the Holy Roman Empire, was buried in the Abbey Church of Herford. She was so distinguished by the standards of her day that it took fifteen lines in Latin to inscribe her many titles and accomplishments, both religious and scholarly, on her tomb. William Penn was so affected by the news of her death that he composed a long memorial to her and appended it to his best-known work, No Cross, No Crown. “The late blessed Princess Elizabeth, the Countess Palatine, as a right, claimeth a memorial in this discourse, her virtue giving greater luster to her name than her quality, which yet was of the greatest in the German Empire,” he wrote. “She had a small territory, which she governed so well that she showed herself fit for a greater… I cannot forget her last words, when I took my leave of her. She said: ‘Let me desire you to remember me, though I live at this distance, and though you should never see me more… know and be assured, though my condition subjects me to diverse temptations, yet my soul hath strong desires after the best things.’”
Almost exactly one year after her death, on February 24, 1681, Charles II, pressed to repay the £16,000 in loans (plus the peerage) still owing to William Penn’s father’s estate and presented with the alternative of giving away uncleared wilderness rather than hard-to-come-by cash and a valuable estate in England, leaped at the chance to grant Penn acreage in America instead. Although William had requested that the property be named Sylvania (forest), Charles overruled him and signed the charter as Pennsylvania—ostensibly as a tribute to the admiral (but coincidentally as a way of tagging the bequest directly to the liquidation of the loans, so there could be no coming back for more if under all that lichen and brushwood it turned out to be swampland). Despite being somewhat embarrassed by the name, William Penn was euphoric. “God hath given it to me in the face of the world… He will bless and make it the seed of a nation,” he proclaimed after the charter was signed.
And so, a century later at a convention in Philadelphia, it turned out to be.
And the next year, on November 29, 1682, just three days after his sixty-third birthday, the irrepressible Rupert, the exuberant, valiant soul of the Royalist cause, died of fever and complications from an old wound. The intrepid warrior who as a boy had once hoped to break his neck so that he might leave his bones in England got his wish, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Louise Hollandine
… self-portrait at the abbey of Maubuisson (Private collection, by courtesy of the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation)
19
Abbess of Maubuisson
BACK IN 1660, WHEN PRINCESS Elizabeth was still alive and deep into her negotiations to enter the abbey of Herford, her sister Louisa, having fled her mother’s court at The Hague, was taking her vows at the Catholic abbey of Maubuisson, about twenty miles northwest of Paris. In terms of prestige and antiquity, Louisa’s new home was every bit a match for Herford. The abbey of Maubuisson had been founded in 1241 by the indomitable Blanche of Castile, queen of France and mother of Louis IX, who, alone among the French kings, was revered for having achieved the much-to-be-desired distinction of sainthood. The similarities between the two religious institutions ended there, however. At the abbey of Maubuisson, there were no farms to manage or annoying townspeople to govern, no seat on an international assembly or overtly political role within the kingdom or Church hierarchy. There were only the other nuns and a convent school that attracted the cream of French society. In fact, her brother Edward had chosen this abb
ey for Louisa because he had sent his own daughters there to be educated.
Although she lived at the convent and followed the rule of her order strictly, Louisa was far from isolated. She was allowed visitors and was warmly embraced by Edward and the other members of her extended family. She met Edward’s three daughters and her sister-in-law Anna de Gonzaga for the first time, and renewed her acquaintance with her aunt Queen Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I and mother of Charles II, who still lived in exile in France. Louisa was even greeted upon her arrival by the French royal family, an act that secured her acceptance into the upper echelon of the aristocracy.
This was important because her entrance into the abbey of Maubuisson coincided with the beginning of the reign of one of the most famous rulers of France. On March 9, 1661, exactly one year after Louisa took her vows, the wily Cardinal Mazarin, who had run the kingdom since the days of Richelieu, died, and twenty-two-year-old Louis XIV took the reins of government into his own hands by calling his dumbfounded council together and announcing: “L’État, c’est moi”—“I am the state.” Thus was the stage set for the Sun King, whose appetite for ostentation, as evidenced by his most famous housing project, the palace at Versailles, was matched only by his global territorial ambitions, the pursuit of which would earn him the respect and fear of Europe and cause the music to stop and all the dancers to change partners yet again. And no one was more attuned to this political reality or more practiced in the art of acquiring royal favor than Louisa’s formidable sister-in-law Anna de Gonzaga.
Daughters of the Winter Queen Page 33
