18
Abbess of Herford
FOR PRINCESS ELIZABETH, THE RESTORATION of her cousin Charles II to the throne and even the death of her mother (whom she seems never to have forgiven for the d’Epinay affair) had very little impact on her life. Of much greater moment was the highly unseemly public disintegration of Karl Ludwig’s relationship with his wife, Charlotte, and his subsequent somewhat-less-than-official remarriage to Louise von Degenfeldt. When she discovered that her older brother not only expected her to recognize Louise as his legitimate spouse but had every intention of moving his new family into the castle at Heidelberg despite the fact that his former wife was still living there, Princess Elizabeth, who had taken Charlotte’s side from the beginning, was appalled. There was an argument, and in 1659, soon after Sophia’s marriage and removal to Hanover, Elizabeth too packed up her few belongings and went to live with her relatives in Berlin.
But this could in no way be viewed as a long-term solution. Elizabeth was a forty-year-old spinster without financial resources. She was too proud and of too high birth to accept charity from her relations; she needed a position where she could settle into old age with honor and dignity. In the century in which she lived, this meant the Church.
Luckily, thanks to the Peace of Westphalia, there was now a Protestant women’s order more or less in the family: the abbey of Herford (about fifty miles west of Hanover, where Sophia now lived). Herford was one of the consolation prizes that the elector of Brandenburg (still Frederick William, Louisa’s former suitor) had received from the emperor in exchange for the surrender of territory to Sweden at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Elizabeth had formerly tried to place Louisa at this institution before her sister’s unexpected flight from The Hague and conversion to Catholicism.
This time, it was a position for herself that she sought when she wrote to her cousin the abbess. But because of her royal title, she desired not simply to join the order but also to run it after the death of her relative. She must have anticipated some resistance to this blatant nepotism because she made an effort to preempt any doubts the abbess might have as to her motives or qualifications. “If I came to the Institution I should never have the presumption to think of reforming anything which your Grace could not do, nor of keeping a greater state than you have done so as to bring the Abbey into debt,” she rushed to assure her cousin. “I have no desire to make great banquets which is not fitting for any Abbess; I can add 1000 thalers yearly, and if God grants me more (from the claims I have on the English and Imperial Courts) I will use it to secure my favor,” she wheedled outright.*
But the cousin, who had never met Elizabeth, had no wish to be hurried to the grave or second-guessed in administration by some haughty distant relation. She stalled, raising doubts as to the fitness of a princess for the humble retirement of religious life. “If you knew me aright you would know that I have no ambition and ask no more than a retreat for my old age, which I may perhaps find at Herford,” Elizabeth rejoined in frustration in the fall of 1659.
Finally, after over a year of correspondence, she managed to convince her cousin to consent to the plan—“As your Grace has assured me in your honored letter of March 22 that you will accept me as Canoness, I have sent… 300 thalers,” Elizabeth confirmed quickly in a letter dated April 17, 1660, making sure to secure the position with a down payment—only to discover that her nomination could not proceed without the vote of the order itself. Alas, the results of a preliminary caucus of this august body were not encouraging. Many of the other women in the order shared the suspicions of the abbess and moved to reject this well-connected interloper. “I am heartily sorry for the disagreement with the Chapter, and cannot but blame the Canonesses who fomented it,” Elizabeth fumed to her cousin. “It is a bad trade to stir up strife, but to restore peace and order is the part of wisdom that brings the best repute,” she admonished virtuously.
Unfortunately, the sisters of the abbey—particularly one Fraulein Lisgen, who until Elizabeth’s sudden appearance had clearly been expecting to take over—continued to protest her appointment, necessitating more drastic measures. In October 1660, Elizabeth undertook the trouble and expense to travel to Herford and stay for ten days at the abbey, as a sort of extended employment interview. She also urged the elector of Brandenburg (whom she saw regularly in Berlin) and other distinguished acquaintances to write to the chapter on her behalf. As this only served to confirm the order’s fears that a decision in her favor would be forced upon them, these maneuvers did not have the desired effect. “If your Grace would listen to your memory rather than to the false reports… you would not suppose that the loss of Fr. Lisgen’s vote would drive me to such extremities as should do injury to the Institution,” Elizabeth was forced to defend herself in a letter of December 8. “If the Elector or other good friends could be helpful to me… it could not possibly be any prejudice to your Grace… It robs the Institution of no freedom… and why should it not be permitted me to employ my friends to influence the sisters to carry out your wishes, as for Fr. Lisgen to induce hers to work against them to return an unfavorable answer?”
In the end, of course, Fraulein Lisgen’s connections were no match for the princess’s. Her patience exhausted, Elizabeth simply had Frederick William, who as overlord of Herford held the ultimate authority, threaten to withdraw his financial and military support from the abbey unless Elizabeth was accepted as successor to the abbess. “The Elector is very docile and she very free with him,” Sophia observed of her sister by way of explaining this transaction.
It had taken more than two years, but by the summer of 1661 Elizabeth had succeeded in her quest and was installed at the abbey of Herford, having traveled to her new home in a coach and six horses thoughtfully provided by her benefactor the elector. She seems to have lost no time in reorganizing the order to her taste, as her brother Edward in Paris mentioned in a letter to Karl Ludwig at this time that she had been in recent communication with their sister Louisa. “La Grecque [‘the Greek,’ the family nickname for Elizabeth] has written to ask her [Louisa] for the Rule of the Convent and for a pattern of the habit. I don’t know whether it is to make a similar foundation in the place where she is but I doubt if they could live in such harmony as ours do,” he remarked.
He knew his eldest sister’s character well. After this inauspicious beginning, upon the death of the old abbess from consumption in 1667, Princess Elizabeth took over at Herford and within two years found herself at the center of a political firestorm.
IT’S EASY TO SEE why she had fought so hard to be named her cousin’s successor. The venerable abbey of Herford, founded in the eighth century, was perhaps the most prestigious—and certainly the most ancient—women’s institution in Germany. In recognition of the importance of its mission and its influence on the surrounding community, in the twelfth century the abbey had been raised to the status of an independent principality within the empire, which put it somewhat on the level of a duchy, albeit a very, very small one. Practically, this meant that, as abbess, Elizabeth was responsible not simply for the welfare of the other women in her order but also for the administration of the neighboring farms and mills that fell within her religious jurisdiction. More important, she had authority over the town of Herford itself, which numbered approximately 7,000 inhabitants at the time she assumed control. As a result, she had her own seat at the governing imperial diet and was officially accorded the satisfyingly impressive title “Princess and Prelatess of the Holy Roman Empire.”
There is no question that Elizabeth was prodigiously qualified for her position. She was by far the best-educated and most intelligent candidate, and her high birth had accustomed her to decision-making. Like Karl Ludwig, her impoverished upbringing had made her careful with money, which added to her skills as an administrator, and she was conscientious, organized, and responsible. She brought experience and knowledge of the outside world to the provincial community at Herford.
The one small drawback was that she was a Calvinist, and those who fell under her jurisdiction were decidedly Lutheran. Even so, this need not have been a problem; the former abbess had also been a Calvinist and had gotten along well enough with her subjects. But the difference in religion meant that the townspeople were somewhat wary of Elizabeth, at least at the beginning of her tenure, and less likely to give her the benefit of the doubt. Nor were their suspicions entirely misplaced, for the evidence suggests that Elizabeth did find her Lutheran charges to be a little less pious than might be hoped for, and regarded it as part of her job to help them along the path to righteousness.
And so, when her old friend Anna Maria van Schurman (the internationally renowned intellectual prodigy and author of the paper defending the right of women to pursue higher education) wrote to her asking for sanctuary for herself and a band of young women who sought to devote themselves to God but had found themselves persecuted for it in Holland, Elizabeth leaped at the entreaty. “An opportunity occurs, without doing injury to anyone, of much benefiting this Abbey and Your Grace’s state,” Elizabeth wrote excitedly to Frederick William, whose approval she required for decisions on larger issues. “Your Grace will have surely heard how the learned Anna Schurman, with certain Dutch ladies, commenced the foundation of a convent in Amsterdam,” she observed. “Two preachers, however, are with them whom the people of Holland hate, and pursue with calumnies… They therefore wish to put themselves under my protection and establish a house on my land,” she explained. “In all this, we can desire only to work for the glory of God… increasing the number of our Calvinist subjects, of who we have too few,” she continued, giving it away, before hurrying to add, “It is likewise much to be wished that so many waste lands in our dominions should have the advantage of being built upon, and that by the establishment of small colonies in these various spots trade may be activated,” she concluded firmly.
Faced with so reasonable a request, in his return letter of September 6, 1670, the elector (also a Calvinist) granted his permission, “so long as the sectaries showed themselves conformable to the worship of the Reformed Church and caused no scandal.” Having followed procedure and obtained the elector’s approval, Elizabeth lost no time in inviting Anna Maria and her entire congregation to Herford. “The Princess wrote to me direct, informing me that she was well acquainted with my intention of freeing myself from the world in order to devote myself entirely to the practices of the true Christian religion, and to end my days calmly and happily in communion with pious spirits,” Anna Maria recorded in her diary. “She was good enough to say she recalled our former friendship, and therefore offered to me and our whole community the free and public exercise of our religion throughout the whole of her little state of Herford… It was evident to us all that this was a special manifestation of Providence in our favor, and we immediately set about profiting by it,” Anna Maria marveled.
And so, in the fall of 1670, sixty-three-year-old Anna Maria and her young female companions—all fifty of them, plus five male pastors—packed up their belongings, embarked from Amsterdam, and descended en masse upon the little, walled, out-of-the-way Lutheran municipality of Herford.
EVEN HAD THE VISITORS’ reputation not preceded them, the citizens of Herford would have taken one look at this band of eccentric, hymn-singing, ragtag refugees and understood right away that these were not Calvinists, or at least not any variety of Calvinist they’d ever seen before. As it was, though, even before they landed, Herford had heard plenty about the group, whom the locals derisively nicknamed “the Hollanders” but who were in fact Labadists.
Labadists were the followers of a renegade pastor named Jean de Labadie. Originally a Catholic trained by Jesuits, Labadie had converted to Protestantism in 1650 at the age of forty after reading John Calvin’s bestselling work Institutes of the Christian Religion. But over the years Labadie had begun to see visions and hear voices. There being no psychiatric medication available in the seventeenth century, he naturally attributed his hallucinations to God and worked them into his religious philosophy.
The Labadist sect, scandalously for the period, eschewed personal property and instead lived communally, men and women all together in the same house (although not on the same floors and certainly not in the same rooms or beds). They didn’t care what they wore or what they ate; they prayed only when the spirit moved them, and then only silently. Conversely, they were given to much frantic dancing and singing as a means of precipitating the sort of personal, one-on-one, mystical revelations from God that Labadie insisted was the only real form of spiritual enlightenment. (“All made merry, not in eating and drinking, but in the Holy Ghost,” Anna Maria noted.) In Holland, Labadie had acquired a small but devoted following, particularly among well-born women, with Anna Maria representing his most famous convert. But the vast majority of the Dutch considered the sect offensive and persecuted its members as disreputable. “We learned quickly enough how far our age had fallen from truth, for so few were willing to give themselves to Christ and to forego earthly comfort,” Anna Maria observed sadly.
Unfortunately, the Lutheran citizens of Herford felt every bit as threatened by the Labadists as had their Dutch counterparts. The town council complained vociferously about this throng of dangerous foreigners to the elector of Brandenburg, other Protestant princes, and even the imperial tribunal. Worried that the presence of religious radicals in these numbers could undermine their traditionally homogenous society, the town officials closed their borders to further immigration by shutting the gates, while local merchants refused to serve the Hollanders at their shops or allow them to drink from the public wells. The Labadists were harassed in public and someone even threw a rock through the window of the house where they had found temporary lodging.
Elizabeth was mortified. These people were her invited guests! Although she must have known that the eccentric lifestyle of the sect did not conform to traditional Protestantism, she nonetheless dug in her heels and insisted that its members were Calvinists at heart. “Although much has been spread against them by their enemies, yet have many persons… at our desire, conversed lengthily with these people, and all admit that their creed and doctrines are those of… the ‘Institutions’ of Calvin, and the Catechism of Heidelberg,” she affirmed indignantly to Frederick William on November 6 in response to an official complaint sent by the Herford town council. When the controversy did not die down, and the elector of Brandenburg announced he would send his own ministers to examine the members of the sect, Elizabeth made the highly questionable move of soliciting the help of a local army commander and a troop of soldiers from a neighboring citadel to keep the peace while the city awaited the arrival of the Berlin envoys and their decision.
Although Elizabeth was correct in her assessment that the Labadists were peaceful and meant no harm, beginning one’s term in office by high-handedly calling in an outside military force was perhaps not the optimal way to make this point to the local population. In fact, this escalation only confirmed her subjects’ worst fears that their new abbess intended to impose her religious views on them. Within two weeks of their arrival, the refugees found themselves at the center of a political tug-of-war, the result being that on November 20, Elizabeth found it necessary to appeal once again to the elector. “I hear that all manner of things have been reported to Your Grace touching my ‘Hollanders,’ and to me so much has been written on the subject, that, had I them not under my own eyes, did I not daily see the proofs of their exemplary conduct, I should myself be the first to drive them from my dominions,” she began. Then, to justify the presence of the troops, she reported in dismay that “already, when any of the ‘Hollanders’ walk in the streets, they are shouted at by the populace, and mud and dirt are flung at them.”
News of the standoff over the Labadists and Elizabeth’s support of them reached Sophia in nearby Hanover, and she could not resist going to see for herself. In a spirit of mischievous good humor, she brought along her own minister as a reliable religious expert to quiz her sister’s visitors so she could hear their unorthodox replies. She arrived just as her twenty-year-old nephew Karl (Karl Ludwig’s eldest son by his first wife, Charlotte), who was going around Europe accompanied by his tutor, was also paying a visit to the abbey. Karl, too, was curious about the Labadists and asked to meet them. His tutor, who was responsible to Karl Ludwig for his young charge, penned a detailed description of this interesting educational opportunity to his employer.
“Next morning, as soon as we were dressed, we all marched off to Labadie’s abode,” the tutor reported. “On the threshold almost we stumbled on Mademoiselle Schurman, in marvelous strange habiliments. She greeted the intruders with but indifferent courtesy. We were led to her room… [where there were] paintings done by the erudite virgin herself, which rivaled Nature; statues in wood and wax, extraordinary from their expression, and commanding our wondering admiration. Meanwhile, there glided slowly into the chamber an old man, with a busy and preoccupied air, not good-looking or imposing, but seemingly taken up with I-know-not-what pious speculations… this man was Labadie,” he affirmed.
They listened to him pontificate for a while—“As though he had been the Delphian Oracle,” the tutor observed drolly—before Sophia’s minister pounced. There commenced a spirited debate on the temptations of “earthly love” (that would be sex) that continued for so long that Elizabeth tried to intervene by offering everyone breakfast. This attempt at distraction did not work, however, for no sooner had they all sat down at the table than they went right back at each other. “Here things got worse, and words ran high,” admitted the tutor. To try to settle the argument, Sophia’s nephew Karl suggested that Labadie preach a sermon so that they could “judge of his eloquence in the pulpit.” This was immediately arranged.
“So forth we repaired to Labadie’s own house, and quickly the congregation assembled—women and young girls, a goodly lot—the prettiest little dolls imaginable!” the tutor exclaimed. “Then came a collection of tailors, boatmen, and furriers, covered with dirt; for it is to be remarked, that amongst this brilliant circle of women, not one well-dressed or apparently respectable man was to be seen.” A psalm was sung, a verse read, and a sermon full of hellfire and sin commenced. “Whilst he delivered all this with a loud voice and the affectation of holy inspiration, the most devout attention reigned throughout the assembly; some raised their eyes to Heaven, some smote their breasts and groaned, and some soft-hearted maidens dissolved in tears,” the tutor related. “During dinner, we talked of nothing else but of this absurd and quaking sort of piety to which people are sometimes brought; and our astonishment could scarcely find words when alluding to the number of young women of the best families, richly-dowered, brilliant with beauty and youth, who were insane enough to give up the conduct of their souls to this worst of men and most powerless of priests (only to be laughed at too by him in secret), and who were so riveted to their delusions that neither the prayers of their parents, nor the pleadings of their betrothed, nor the prospect of maternal joys, could tear them away!”
Elizabeth, who had also rejected court life as frivolous and who, like Anna Maria, had not found spiritual peace in scholarship alone, was highly annoyed by the table conversation and continued passionately to defend the sect. In her frustration, the abbess lashed out angrily at her family. “But to this the Electress Sophia, a lady of extraordinary cleverness, found an answer which turned all bitterness into general mirth,” the tutor related with evident relief, “by asserting, with mock gravity, that her sister’s sole reason for holding to the Labadists was that they were stingy housekeepers, and cost little or nothing to keep!”
Despite her determined sponsorship, which included a personal journey to the elector of Brandenburg to plead for her guests, the battle over the Labadists was not one the new abbess would win. No sooner had Elizabeth left Herford for Berlin than the townspeople renewed their persecution of the outsiders, and Labadie and his followers decided it was best after all to move on. By the time she returned, they were already established in Altona, nearly a hundred and fifty miles to the north.
Elizabeth may have lost the contest with her subjects, but as a result of her generous treatment of the Labadists, she earned herself a reputation for religious tolerance and enlightenment that spread as far away as England, where it caught the attention of an idealistic young Quaker named William Penn.
THE QUAKERS—OR THE Society of Friends, as they called themselves—were a much more thoughtful and considered sect than the Labadists. The movement had taken root in England as a reaction to what was considered to be the impious dissipation of Charles II’s Restoration court (which was itself a reaction to the pious austerity of the Cromwell years). Like the Labadists, Quakers were spiritualists who believed that God spoke directly to the individual, but they did not seek revelation through wild dancing and singing. Rather, they convened long, serious meetings where members preached as the spirit moved them. Quakers rejected ornamentation but not all material comforts; they lived quiet, industrious lives and certainly did not approve of unmarried men and women sharing property. But where the Quakers were truly revolutionary was in their pacifism and unshakable belief in equality, which took the tangible form of addressing everyone they met as thee or thou (rather than, for example, sir or Your Ladyship) and refusing to take off their hats to those of higher rank, as was then the fashion at court.
Declining to doff one’s headgear might seem insignificant, but by taking direct aim at the entrenched class system, the practice turned out to be a potent symbol against social injustice. It infuriated the governing aristocracy, who interpreted the inaction as a challenge to its prestige and authority. Accordingly, being a Quaker took courage, a quiet but nonetheless steely courage, and no one had more of that quality than the Society of Friends’ most famous adherent, William Penn.
William Penn was born on October 14, 1644, smack in the middle of the English civil war. His father, an admiral in the navy, became rich under Cromwell but hedged his bets and reached out secretly to Charles II, who much appreciated this unlooked-for (if covert) expression of loyalty. Consequently, the elder Penn found himself in favor upon the king’s restoration and was given a high position in the royal navy. Admiral Penn, who had great hopes for his outgoing, obviously bright eldest son and heir, sent him to Oxford (where John Locke was a fellow schoolmate) to prepare him for a life at court, only to have sixteen-year-old William fall under the influence of a Quaker preacher and get himself expelled for going to meetings of the Friends instead of attending the required university church services.
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.’”
He came back for a second visit at her urging before he left for England, and upon his return had this letter, written on October 29, 1677, from her. “Dear Friend—Your tender care of my eternal well-being doth oblige me much, and I will weigh every article of your counsel to follow as much as lies in me; but God’s grace must be assistant… Let me feel him first governing in my heart, then do what he requires me… Do not think I go from what I spoke to you the last evening; I only stay to do it in a way that is answerable before God and man… Your true friend, Elizabeth.”
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.