The marriage contract between two great Protestant powers had been signed in May 1612. In October, Prince Frederick, the sixteen-year-old Elector Palatine, arrived in London to meet his fresh-faced future bride, Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I. A month later, King James’s beloved eldest son, Prince Henry, died, plunging the court into mourning. It was decided, nevertheless, that the wedding celebrations should go forward, and – appropriately for a young couple so evidently in love – that the nuptials should take place on Valentine’s Day. Celebrating what one masque named as The Marriage of the Thames and the Rhine, John Donne wrote in his ‘Epithalamion’ of the lovers as two phoenixes: ‘Whose love and courage never shall decline / But make the whole year through, thy day, O Valentine.’
Elizabeth, having added seventeen pairs of silk stockings to her trousseau and received assurance that she could take along a cargo of favourite pets to her new home in Germany, gave orders for the performance of six Shakespeare plays at Whitehall. The decision to include among them The Winter’s Tale would prove both apt and prescient.
In June 1613, Elizabeth arrived at her new home in what was then a Germany comprised of many small duchies and principalities. Seeking to make his bride at home in the great fortress of Heidelberg, set high above the River Neckar and looking out towards the distant Rhine, the young Elector ordered the creation of an English suite of rooms. Salomon de Caus, the great architect and hydraulic engineer who had laid out the gardens at Wilton in England, was summoned to create a Renaissance garden from a barren hillside. By 1620, when Heidelberg was sacked and the garden abandoned, de Caus had already created what was being described as the eighth Wonder of the World, an exercise in elegant playfulness that included a water organ, an animated statue, clockwork-driven singing birds, a ‘Venus Fountain’ and a magnificently dramatic double stairway.
Elizabeth loved the theatre. In England, she possessed her own troupe of actors. Today, plays are staged in the well of Heidelberg’s grass moat; back then, actors surely made use of the wonderful new garden, strutting towards its highest terraced length through the new ‘Elizabeth’ arch (a nineteenth-birthday surprise from a loving husband, this ruddy, four-columned gateway featured ivy-entwined pillars thronged with little stone animals of the kinds Elizabeth loved best).
In 1613, the year of Elizabeth’s marriage, London’s famous Globe Theatre burnt down and was not rebuilt for a year. Possibly, the young Electress made use of London’s loss that year to invite the actors out to Heidelberg. More probably still, a performance of The Winter’s Tale was put on in Heidelberg in 1618, when talk of Bohemia was in the air. A Protestant ruler was being urgently sought for a country situated far away on the eastern borders of the German principalities, in what is now the Czech Republic. Bohemia was best known to Elizabeth from Shakespeare’s play, written in 1610, as the birthplace of Prince Florizel and the haven of lost Perdita, the Sicilian Princess who, by marrying Florizel, will become Bohemia’s happy queen.
Elizabeth and Frederick were themselves less fortunate. Offered the Bohemian throne, they were crowned in Prague on 7 November 1619. Losing both their Palatine lands and their new kingdom to the evidently superior Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Emperor within a single tragic year of their coronation, the defeated couple were forced to seek refuge at the Protestant court of The Hague. There, the formidable but desolate Elizabeth – best known today as the Winter Queen – lived out her lengthy widowhood in exile. Returning to England at last in 1661, when her nephew had been restored to the English throne as King Charles II, Elizabeth died the following year.
In England, Elizabeth’s most loyal admirer, the Earl of Craven, had built a home in her honour: Ashdown House, an exquisite dolls’ house of a Dutch mansion, fashioned from chalk and standing high on the windswept Berkshire Downs. Elizabeth never saw Lord Craven’s shrine. Chalk, when wet, crumbles and dissolves; today, the windows of Ashdown are thinly veiled in white moisture, as if in mourning for the Queen who never took possession of this, the graceful tribute of a devoted cavalier.
Rupert of the Rhine, the dashing cavalry general who led the troops for his doomed uncle, Charles I, remains Elizabeth’s best-known child. But it was Rupert’s spirited sister Sophia, the Electress of Hanover, who provided England with its first German king.
The Royal Act of Succession of 1701 had granted England’s throne to Sophia and her heirs in order to protect it from recapture by a deposed Catholic monarch (James II) at the time when William of Orange had no heirs and Anne, the queen-in-waiting, had lost her one surviving child. When the lively and intelligent Sophia died of a chill in 1714, just two months before the death of Queen Anne, the English throne was handed to the Electress’s son, George, a German-speaking monarch who made no secret of his desire to remain comfortably ensconced at the Herrenhausen Palace, his family home in Hanover.
Visiting the Herrenhausen two years later, on her way to Constantinople, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who thought England’s stout new king an amiable fool), was startled to find the town of Hanover thronging with English visitors. The rosy cheeks and jet-black brows of the local girls put Lady Mary in mind of a Fleet Street waxwork display, but she informed her sister, back in England, that the palace gardens were very fine, the opera house superb (‘much finer than that of Vienna’) and that words could not do justice to the glory of German stoves, a heating system that permitted the consumption of oranges and lemons in deepest winter, ‘and even pineapples, like Brazil’.1 A hit with the King, Lady Mary left Hanover with the sense of having regained the ground she had lost the previous year with Roxana, a rashly witty skit that made fun of a royal court filled with untrustworthy foreigners.
James Boswell, passing through Hanover fifty years later, admired the palace and a spectacular avenue of limes (but not, for once in his amorous career, the local beauties). Travelling east from Leipzig (where he enjoyed a dish of larks), Boswell praised the castles perched above the River Elbe for their Scottish appearance, and – on arriving at Dresden – voiced his disgust with Frederick the Great for shelling the Saxon city during the recent Seven Years War: ‘It was from mere spite that he did it.’2
Dresden apart, Boswell was desperate to meet a monarch who was revered almost as a deity in eighteenth-century England. Newly arrived in Berlin, the young Scot caught a glimpse of Frederick strolling in the palace garden at Charlottenburg and restrained himself, with difficulty, from performing an act of complete prostration before this figure of ‘iron confidence’. A month later, however, poor Boswell was still only known to his hero as the wearer of a peculiar ‘little cap’. Boswell’s bright blue Ayrshire bonnet had caught Frederick’s attention – but not, alas, his fancy – as he surveyed the eager onlookers at a royal parade.
Visiting England from his small principality beside the Elbe in the same year that Boswell made his tour of German courts, ayouthful German prince, travelling in the company of an architect friend, inspected the artfully naturalistic gardens of Stourhead, Stowe, Wilton and Kew. Back in Anhalt-Dessau, Prince Franz created the Wörlitzer Gartenreich, a kingdom in miniature that included – in the English style – temples, bridges and a pagoda. Offering a discreet home to the Prince’s mistress, Luise Schock, Germany’s first Gothic garden building had been copied from Stowe. Luise’s father, taking advantage of his role as Prince Franz’s resident landscape designer, added a sly touch of his own: a phallus-shaped flowerbed, thrusting forward from the nearby Temple of Venus at the chaste doorway of the Gothic House. Goethe, visiting the Garden Kingdom in 1778, when he was twenty-nine years old, informed a friend that he had walked into a perfect fairy tale, set in the Elysian Fields. More than this, the Wörlitzer Gartenreich represented Prince Franz’s faith in England as the home of enlightenment and reform.
Visiting England in 1782, Karl Philipp Moritz, a teacher from Berlin, set off on a two-month walking tour in search of the England he had encountered from reading Milton, The Vicar of Wakefield and – inevitably – Shakespeare. ‘Shakespeare, my friend, if you were among us, I could live only with you,’ the 22-year-old Goethe had announced, to loud applause, at a 1771 German celebration of the playwright’s birthday.3 Moritz, arrived at Stratford and clasping the mandatory souvenir, a chip of wood allegedly hacked from the bard’s own chair, thrilled to the thought that here, in the tranquil Warwickshire landscape, ‘a soul like Shakespeare had been first awakened by the spirit of nature’.4
Moritz, sharing with Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau a keen admiration for England’s political system, was entranced by the spectacle of democracy in action in a country where, so one mischievous innkeeper persuaded him, even a chimney sweep burdened his dining table with silver candelabra, and where the appearance of Charles Fox to give an impromptu speech to cheering crowds on election day surely had nothing to do with the wily politician’s desire to assist the chances of a favoured crony. Disappointed, while in London, to find that no public street or park had been named in honour of his compatriot Handel, Moritz was doubtless comforted to find that a handsome new Lutheran church, St George-in-the-East, regally ornamented with the coat-of-arms of King George III himself, was serving the hard-pressed and underpaid German population who lived in the grim area known as ‘Little Germany’ that lay between Smithfield and the docks.*
Charmed by the spirit of patriotism that he encountered in even the smallest, navy-mad child and impressed to find that his London landlady, a tailor’s widow, was sufficiently educated to quote Milton by the yard, Moritz’s only real objection to the English was that they showed so little interest in his own country. Looking about him for any evidence of German literature, the only works he saw were the philosophical writings of Jacob Boehme, much admired in the circle of William Blake, and a sugary pastoral epic by one Salomon Gessner that he despised as thoroughly mediocre.
This was galling. The Sturm und Drang generation of Germans, to which Moritz himself belonged, were besotted by English writing. They revelled in the Gothic terrors of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts; they quoted from Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Richardson; they dreamed of travelling to the remote Scottish island on which the mysterious James Macpherson had discovered Ossian’s Lays, read aloud to his beloved Charlotte by Goethe’s tortured young Werther.
England, it was true, had already begun to respond with enthusiasm to Goethe’s heart-rending novel, which ran into twenty-six English editions in the twenty years following its first appearance in translation, in 1779. But where, Moritz wondered, was the corresponding trumpet call in England for Herder, Lessing, Schiller and Kant? And why was it not resounding, when the University of Göttingen, founded by George II and richly endowed by his successor, offered such a splendid opportunity for young Englishmen to gain an education in Germany, and to enrich their minds with German culture?
Studying an English newspaper one day, Moritz found his worst suspicions confirmed when, in an advertisement for foreign novels, he found, tersely appended, the words: ‘even German’.
England, despite her conspicuous lack of interest in German literature, had not disappointed Moritz. Setting off home for Hamburg and bidding farewell to a kindly Lutheran pastor who had befriended him during his final days in London, the German visitor wrote that he had said farewell to an island that he still regarded as the home of true democracy ‘with a very heavy heart’.
Footnote
* Moritz did find a – rather horrid – marble statue of Handel, by Roubiliac, at Vauxhall; he was understandably disappointed to find no other tributes to the great court composer who had given England thirty-four operas and its first oratorio. Despite the absence of public memorials, Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.