14

Royal Sense and Sensibility

IN THE PERIOD IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING the execution of Charles I in January 1649, while her sister Henrietta was yet alive and the negotiations for the disastrous Transylvanian marriage had barely commenced, clever eighteen-year-old Sophia, still at her mother’s court at The Hague, found herself at the center of an unaccustomed swirl of political activity. The presence of the royal fleet had lured her penniless first cousin the Prince of Wales—now, in the aftermath of his father’s death, designated King Charles II—to Holland to take advantage of his sister Mary’s and her husband, William, prince of Orange’s hospitality, and with Charles II came an entire court of some 300 dispossessed followers, as well as loyal champions who hurried to pay homage to the young monarch. Happily for Sophia, this swarm of visitors for a time also included her eldest brother, Karl Ludwig, whom she, like Henrietta, adored.

But Karl Ludwig was eager to reclaim his property under the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia, and all of her other brothers were away. Charles II had named Rupert lord high admiral (an impressive title for a very small navy, as by this time the royal fleet was down to five seaworthy vessels) and sent him to pirate ships along the Spanish coast to capture loot for the royal treasury. Maurice, considered too experienced a warrior in these troubled times to stay home and chaperone his mother’s court, had been named vice admiral, under Rupert, and was out accompanying him on this fund-raising expedition. Edward was of course still in France living the life of a privileged married aristocrat, and Philip was by now in Italy under disgruntled contract to the Venetians. (“Unworthy pantaloons” was how he had contemptuously described his employers to his brother Rupert in a letter of the previous fall.) And so, in the summer of 1649, Sophia found herself alone at The Hague with her mother and elder sister Louisa, once again without the fond but stern protection of a male member of the family.

In fact, Karl Ludwig had no sooner climbed on his horse and trotted out of town in the direction of Heidelberg than rumors and intrigues began swirling around the Winter Queen’s youngest daughter. The chief plot, sponsored by her mother’s close friend William, earl of Craven^*—an extremely wealthy admirer upon whom the queen of Bohemia was financially dependent—involved Charles II and had been in the works even before his father’s execution. (This was the same Lord Craven who had participated in and helped fund Karl Ludwig’s one disastrous military campaign during which the youthful Rupert had been captured.) “An old Englishman [he was forty-one at the time], Lord Craven took an interest in me,” Sophia volunteered later in her memoirs. “There was an idea that I might some day marry the Prince of Wales [Charles II], who was a year my senior. My friends hoped for success, because the English desired for their prince a wife of his own religion, and at that time there were no Protestant princesses of birth superior to mine for him to choose amongst.”

For most young women in Sophia’s position, the prospect of being wed to Charles II, by right of birth the king of England, would have been irresistible. At twenty, Charles, with his long, coal-black hair and strong, lean body, made for an extremely attractive marital candidate; he was described by a courtier who knew him as “very well made; his swarthy complexion agreed well with his large bright eyes… his figure extremely fine.” He was also exceedingly tall—just over six feet—and energetic, particularly, apparently, when it came to lovemaking, as he had already fathered two children by two different women, out of wedlock.

But having lived through the scandal associated with d’Epinay and watched Princess Elizabeth’s and Louisa’s various engagements fall by the wayside, Sophia had the benefit of their experience and had learned to be prudent. “My manners and behavior had been so carefully watched over by my two elder sisters that I was even more commended for conduct than for beauty,” she recalled. Shrewdly, Sophia sized Charles up as “a prince richly endowed by nature, but not sufficiently so by fortune to allow him to think of marriage.” Despite being “much courted by the English nation [the Royalists who had fled with Charles II to The Hague], who took endless trouble to please me,” Sophia also could not help but “notice other signs of weakness on the King’s part.” For example, “he and I had always been on the best of terms, as cousins and friends, and he had shown a liking for me with which I was much gratified,” she reported. “One day, however, his friends Lord Gerit and Somerset Fox, being in want of money, persuaded him to pay me compliments on the promenade. Among other things he told me that I was handsomer than Mrs. Berlo [one of the women with whom he had fathered an illegitimate child; now there’s a flattering comparison], and that he hoped to see me in England. I was surprised by this speech, and learned afterwards that Somerset Fox’s object was to induce me to ask Lord Craven for money for the King, which he meant to share with his comrade, Lord Gerit. I was highly offended; but the Queen [of Bohemia, her mother], who had noticed his Majesty’s marked attentions, was just as much delighted, and blamed me for not going to the promenade on the following evening. I made the excuse of a corn on my foot, which prevented me from walking. My real reason, however, was to avoid the King, having sense enough to know that the marriages of great kings are not made up by such means,” she concluded sagely.

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 sighed 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.