Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  But the wretchedness of the outside world likely mattered little to Louise Hollandine, who died on February 11, 1709, beloved by those who knew her.* “I have received the sad news that our aunt, Princesse Louise de Maubuisson, has at length died after a long illness,” Liselotte wrote to a family member five days later. “She had reached an age beyond which it is difficult to go much further, because she was eighty-six years and nine months old. Nevertheless, her death has stricken me to the heart. The dear princess was fonder of me than of her other nieces, and I also fear that her death will upset our dear aunt, the Electress [Sophia], very much.” The abbess maintained her eyesight and so was able to paint well into her eighties, but it was her laughing, teasing manner that her niece would most miss. This she kept to the very end.

  Ironically, it would be Louisa’s irrepressible sense of humor that would cause a postmortem scandal. Years later, almost as an afterthought, Liselotte, who had met her aunt for the first time only after she had come to Paris when Louisa was already in her forties and knew nothing about her life growing up at The Hague, reminisced in a letter to a friend that “the Abbesse de Maubuisson, Louise Hollandine, daughter of Frederick V., Elector Palatine in the days of Henry IV, has had so many bastards that she always used to swear by ‘This body which has borne fourteen children.’” It was obviously a statement Madame had puzzled over at the time but had refrained from asking her aunt about out of delicacy. Nonetheless, because it came from a member of the French royal family, the quote was picked up and repeated with gusto over the centuries—the abbess with fourteen bastards!—until it acquired the heavy authority of fact.

  Except that there is absolutely no evidence to corroborate this statement. Her mother’s court at The Hague had been under constant surveillance by Parliamentarian spies looking for propaganda against the Royalists, and every movement the family made was picked up by gossips such as the chatty French doctor, or the Dutch papers. In over two decades, there is no mention whatsoever of an unwed princess scandalously giving birth to multiple infants. It might have been possible—just—to hide one illegitimate pregnancy, but fourteen? It is far more likely, given Louisa’s way of always turning everything into a joke (as Liselotte herself related more than once) that this statement was meant facetiously, that this was in fact something she had heard the Winter Queen, whose body had borne that many children, say during all those years when Louisa was the only one of her siblings still living at home.

  No, the cross that Louise Hollandine has to bear through history is not that of a beautiful young woman, artistic and full of promise, who had fallen into sinful ways before becoming an abbess. It is the intolerance and lack of compassion she displayed for the sufferings of others after her conversion that is the real tragedy.

  Sophia

  … with her daughter, Figuelotte

  20

  A Scandal in Hanover

  WHILE BOTH HER OLDER SISTERS were yet alive and were embarking on their separate careers in the Church—Princess Elizabeth to Herford, Louisa to Maubuisson—Sophia, conscious always of her good fortune in having secured a position of material comfort and safety in society, was relishing her early married life in Hanover. Even the jealousy and strife caused by Duke George William’s unwanted attentions could not mar the contentment she enjoyed with Duke Ernst Augustus and their two small sons, George Louis, the elder, and Frederick Augustus, born October 2, 1661. Even better, her husband’s prospects and income were substantially improved in December of that year when the old bishop of Osnabrück died and Ernst Augustus was named bishop in his place.

  It might seem odd that a Lutheran duke would be nominated to replace a Catholic bishop, but Osnabrück was one of those territories, like Herford, that had come in for special treatment in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War.* By the terms of the Peace of Westphalia, in an attempt at fairness, it had been agreed that Protestants and Catholics would alternate ministering to the flock of Osnabrück. Since the previous bishop had been Catholic, this meant that the Lutherans, who held the majority in the surrounding area, would now have their turn. As the bishopric, eighty-five miles west of Hanover, fell within Duke George William’s province, he decided to give it to his youngest brother, to help Ernst out with his growing family expenses. “Three days ago I arrived here… and I find myself in a very pretty house which charmed me when I first saw it,” Sophia wrote to Karl Ludwig on September 29, 1662. She was referring to an estate in Iburg, ten miles south of Osnabrück, which was included as part of the extremely generous compensation package provided by the grateful parishioners to their new bishop. “Everything that strikes the sight is magnificent: plate, furniture, liveries, guards… All these things are trifles compared with the seventy thousand thalers the bishopric gave its Bishop on his arrival,” she exulted.

  The years Sophia spent at Iburg were among the happiest of her life. Finally removed from the attentions and constant presence of her husband’s elder brother, she was wealthy enough to support a life of ease and even boasted a prestigious new title: “the Bishopess.” Her duties, which involved attending church regularly, taking the lead in charitable giving, and visiting the sick and the poor, were light and certainly did not intrude greatly on her leisure time. “One cannot live more than once,” she observed to Karl Ludwig in a letter of 1663. “Why vex one’s soul, if one can eat, drink and sleep, sleep, drink and eat?… Tranquility of the spirit is lovely, since from it springs our bodily health… We play at nine-pins, breed young ducks, amuse ourselves with running at a ring or backgammon, talk every year of paying a visit to Italy; and in the meantime things go quite as well as is to be expected for a petty bishop, who is able to live in peace and, in case of war, can depend upon the help of his brothers.”*

  Sophia’s easygoing, fundamentally optimistic temperament, so like her mother’s, was not the only characteristic she had inherited from the Winter Queen. She was an avid letter writer (noted for dashing off pages and pages during church sermons, a commendable time-saver, no doubt) and used her voluminous correspondence not simply to keep in touch with relatives and friends but also to promote her family’s political aims. In common with her sister Louisa, Sophia also had her mother’s mischievous sense of humor, bestowing nicknames and employing her considerable wit. A courtier upon whom she had once played a prank noted dolefully that the bishopess “was much addicted to laughing at people to their faces, only her skill in raillery was such that they never found out.” But the great trait she had received from the queen of Bohemia was her fortitude. “Ma tante [my aunt], courageous as a man, is not easily frightened,” Liselotte reported later. “I saw her once, at Klagenberg, issue coolly out of a conflagration, saving herself in a nightgown from the flames which had nearly closed round her in her sleeping chamber, and she then was far advanced in pregnancy; but she only laughed, not being the least frightened. Another time I was with her out in a carriage to which young horses had been harnessed; they of course ran away with us, the coachman thrown off and was much hurt… There was great danger, but ma tante cared not a whit.”

  At first glance, Sophia’s circumstances might seem idyllic compared to that of her two older sisters. But married life, particularly within her husband’s family, presented its own challenges. She had barely been wed five years when Ernst Augustus, like his brothers, began openly to take mistresses. “The bonds of holy matrimony had not changed the Duke’s gay nature,” Sophia explained this development delicately in her memoirs. “He wearied of always possessing the same thing.” Not only that, but he expected his wife to facilitate his and his brothers’ infidelities. To this end, in 1664 he invited her to come with him to Italy, where he had a mistress waiting for him in Rome, so that she could respectably bring along two young, very attractive women as ladies-in-waiting to keep his brothers happy.

  Sophia dutifully left her children at Heidelberg with Karl Ludwig and started out for Italy on April 24 with one of the ladies in tow (the other went to Holland, where Duke George Willi
am followed her) for what would turn out to be a year’s absence. Although she enjoyed sightseeing, the bishopess was not quite so enamored of the charms of Italy as her husband. She had a long sojourn in Venice, which did not impress her (“The Duke asked me if I did not think the town beautiful, and I did not dare to say ‘No,’ though in reality it appeared to me extremely melancholy,” she observed). When she went out in society, her husband, busy with his own pleasures, assigned her an escort to serve as his surrogate. (“As I should have been mortified to remain the only lady unattended by a cavalier in a place where it is the fashion to have one, the Duke chose for me the procurator Soranzo, a very unimportant person.”) In Rome, where she met the pope and an attempt was made to convert her, her husband left her alone every evening to go “play basset” (an Italian game) with his mistress. “I should have been very dull but for the enjoyment of walking in exquisite gardens and the diversion of cards,” she admitted. “It may be imagined how strange I, a German, felt in a country where nothing is thought of but love, and where a lady would consider herself disgraced were she without admirers. I had always learned to look on coquetry as a crime, but according to Italian morality it was esteemed as a virtue.”* When she finally left Rome to begin the journey home, in the early spring of 1665, Ernst Augustus chivalrously escorted her to the gates of the city in the company of his paramour and then left her to travel back to Germany on her own, the mistress “returning alone in the carriage with my husband” to Rome, having arranged “a party to go to the country” to which Sophia had not been invited.

  The bishop of Osnabrück would have done well to forgo this last taste of the delights of Italy in order to accompany his wife home on schedule. For on March 15, 1665, the eldest of the four brothers, the duke of Celle, died unexpectedly, and Duke John Frederick, the heavyset middle brother, who had come home from Italy in time to be at his older brother’s deathbed, seized all of his property. Faced with this emergency, Ernst Augustus hurried to Hanover, where he found his brother George William (not the strongest personality) “in a state of utter consternation, the tears standing in his eyes,” Sophia reported. “My husband not only reassured him with advice, but also raised troops to support his claim.” Under the circumstances, Duke John Frederick, “reflecting that a civil war would utterly ruin the country,” backed down and ceded the duchy of Celle, by far the largest and most profitable property in the inheritance, to George William, the eldest surviving brother, contenting himself with the second-best territory, the duchy of Hanover. Ernst Augustus remained bishop of Osnabrück but also received the county of Diepholz, thirty-five miles to the north, as a reward from George William for standing loyally by him in the conflict.

  They patched it up that time, but thus began a period when all the carefully constructed legal contracts guaranteeing Sophia’s rights and those of her children to inherit turned out to be so many sheets of parchment that could be rewritten or superseded altogether by new compacts made with other interested parties. Such are the vagaries of lines of succession: no matter how firm the legality of the claimant or how seemingly ironclad the agreement, life has a way of interfering.

  NO SOONER HAD ERNST Augustus and Sophia resolved their difficulties with John Frederick than they were confronted with a new, subtler—and ultimately more dangerous—problem. Duke George William had fallen in love.

  Her name was Eléonore d’Olbreuse, and she was the lady-in-waiting he had followed to Holland when she refused to go to Italy with Sophia. Eléonore came from an undistinguished family of French Huguenots, but what she lacked in birth she more than made up for in charm. “She was grave and dignified in manner,” Sophia recalled when she first met her. “Her face was beautiful, her figure tall and commanding. She spoke little but expressed herself well.” Forty-one-year-old George William was utterly smitten with twenty-four-year-old Eléonore, but she was holding out for marriage, and this, of course, he had sworn never to do as part of the written contract by which his brother had taken his place as Sophia’s bridegroom.

  To help him out, Sophia and Ernst Augustus agreed to what was known as an “anti-contract of marriage,” whereby George William gave Eléonore a monetary settlement and promised never to leave her or wed anyone else, basically recognizing her as his official mistress. “Hoping to touch the Duke, the lady began to weep, saying that, had she married a simple gentleman, she would at least have borne the title of Madame, and ended by entreating to be called Duchess of Celle,” Sophia recalled. This, however, was out of the question, as neither by birth nor lawful marriage could Eléonore claim such a prestigious title. But Duke George William, used to creative thinking when it came to affairs of the heart, came up with the ingenious solution that she should be called Madame de Harburg (after the piece of property he had settled on her). This compromise was accepted, and the legalities were concluded in November 1665. “Though it will be said that I have dispensed with standing in a church before a priest, I can feel no regret, because I am the happiest of women… The Duke has plighted his troth to me before his whole family, who also signed the contract in which he binds himself to take no wife but me,” Eléonore observed in a letter of March 14, 1666. The newly anti-married couple’s joy was enhanced on September 15, 1666, by the birth of a daughter, whom they christened Sophie Dorothea out of respect and gratitude to Sophia, who had helped make this arrangement possible.

  However, the next year appeared yet a new romantic entanglement that could not be dismissed so easily—the marriage of John Frederick (now duke of Hanover) to Edward and Anna de Gonzaga’s daughter Bénédicte, on November 25, 1667. Bénédicte, as a descendant of the same family as Sophia herself, was of higher birth than her husband and was married to the duke of Hanover by a priest in a church. Since John Frederick was older than Ernst Augustus, if Bénédicte, his legitimate wife, had a son, that child would take priority over Sophia’s offspring as heir to Duke George William’s property, despite the existence of a previous contract.

  Duke George William and his anti-wife, Eléonore

  Thus began the race for a son. Sophia already had three—the third, Maximilian, had been born on December 13, 1666, but children died frequently in the seventeenth century, so she kept going. On October 2, 1668, she had a daughter, Sophia Charlotte, known as Figuelotte, followed on October 9, 1669, by a fourth son, Karl Philipp. Bénédicte struck back in 1671 with a daughter. Sophia retaliated with her fifth boy, Christian Henreich, on September 29. In 1672 and 1673, two more daughters were born to Bénédicte. It was clearly only a matter of time before she produced a boy. For good measure, Sophia gave birth to her sixth son, Ernst Augustus, on September 17, 1674, and held her breath.

  And then nature intervened definitively in the bishopess’s favor. On December 18, 1679, the male-heir-producing contest ended abruptly when the overweight John Frederick succumbed at the age of fifty-four to the excesses of his lifestyle. (“He died as a true German should, glass in hand,” Sophia noted by way of a eulogy.) As John Frederick had failed to produce a son, all of his property went to Ernst Augustus.

  Sophia was suddenly duchess of Hanover.

  AND SO SHE, ERNST Augustus, and their large brood moved back to the house that Sophia and her husband had first shared with George William as newlyweds. It was much too cramped for them now, and Ernst Augustus began at once to renovate the old castle into a much grander residence. They had also to make improvements to the town to accommodate a much larger court, as many of the members of John Frederick’s government and household wished to stay on and serve the new duke of Hanover. It was in this way that Sophia made the acquaintance of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had been in charge of John Frederick’s library and literary correspondence, among other duties. She and Ernst Augustus kind of inherited him along with the books.

  Like Descartes, Leibniz is a towering figure in mathematics and philosophy, and the similarities do not end there. Both men were essentially self-taught. True, Leibniz did not get to lie in bed all morning reading; h
e had to get up and attend extremely mediocre classes (“At school I… should, without doubt, have made the usually slow progress,” he noted), but his father had been a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and Leibniz had gained access to his library. By his own account, while still a child, Leibniz was able to puzzle out the words from the engravings in a book of history by Livy, which he read and reread until he understood it in full. In this way, by the age of twelve, he was fluent in Latin and was well on his way to mastering Greek.

  He entered the University of Leipsic intending to study history, which he loved, when (thanks to Princess Elizabeth, who had made it her mission in life to introduce her friend’s books to Berlin and the surrounding communities) he came across Descartes’s work and was immediately hooked. Although he would later have problems with many of Descartes’s conclusions, it was by these books that Leibniz first came to the study of mathematics, a field to which he had never before been exposed. Overwhelmed by the power and beauty of the subject, just as Descartes had been, and with it the potential of logic to remake philosophical thought, he instantly switched his major. But being of a more practical bent than Descartes, he also attended lectures in jurisprudence, and at the age of twenty-one, he graduated with a doctorate in law.*

  He would spend the next decade in Frankfort-on-the-Main and then Paris, supporting himself as a sort of journeyman lawyer and scholar. Again like Descartes, everywhere he went, he exchanged ideas and inventions with the most accomplished scholars of the period, who were in turn impressed by his brilliance. “Having experienced the good fortune, wherever I came, that persons of gentility wished to make my acquaintance and enjoy my society, I have had… not so much a deficiency as a super-abundance of distinguished friends,” he reported. He visited London in 1673, met the chemist Robert Boyle, and was nominated to the Royal Society. He corresponded with Spinoza about lenses; made improvements to Pascal’s adding machine that allowed the device to multiply, divide, and perform square-root functions; and invented the binary system, which three centuries later would allow for the development of the computer. In 1677, he shared a detailed explanation of his discovery of calculus in a letter to Isaac Newton (a favor the English scientist did not return), predating the publication of Newton’s Principia by several years. “I suspect that what Newton wished to conceal respecting the method of drawing tangents, is not very different from these discoveries of my own,” Leibniz would later observe.