Here was a conclusion with which she utterly confounded the sages. They could not gainsay it, nor refute the logic by which it was arrived at, and which gave it force. They were ‘perplexed in the extreme,’ but neither social experience, nor scriptural reading, nor legal knowledge afforded them weapons wherewith to beat down the simple defences behind which the princess had entrenched herself. They tried repeatedly, but tried in vain. At the end of every trial she slowly and calmly enunciated the same reply:—‘If I am guilty I am unworthy of him: if I am innocent, he is unworthy of me!’
From this text she would not depart; nor could all the chicanery of all the courts of Germany move her. ‘At least,’ said the luminaries of the law, as they took their way homewards, re infecta, ‘at least this woman may, of a surety, be convicted of obstinacy.’ We always stigmatise as obstinate those whom we cannot convince. It is the only, and the poor, triumph of the vanquished.
This triumph was achieved by the Consistory Court, the members of which, unable to prove the princess guilty of crime, were angry because she would not even confess to the commission of a fault; that is, of such a fault as should authorise her husband, covered with guilt triple-piled, to separate from her person, yet maintain present and future property over her estates.
In point of fact, George Louis did not wish to be separated from his wife. His counsel, Rath Livius, accused her, in her husband’s name, of lack of both love and obedience towards him; of having falsely charged him with infidelity, to his parents and her own; and of having repeatedly refused to again live with him; for this act of disobedience, and for no other reason, he asked the judgment of the court. Sophia Dorothea’s own counsellors, Rudolph Thies and Joachin von Bulow, put it to her whether she would return to her husband or abide judgment for disobeying his repeated desire. Nothing could move her. She despised her husband, and would never again live under the same roof with him. Her own desire was to live, henceforward, in seclusion—to pass the remainder of her unhappy life in peace and humiliation.
The court came to a decision on the 28th of December, 1694. Their judgment was, that as she refused to live with her husband, she was guilty of desertion, and on that ground alone a decree of separation, or divorce, was recorded. When told that she had a right to appeal, she contemptuously refused to avail herself of it. The terms of the sentence were extraordinary, for they amounted to a decree of divorce without expressly mentioning the fact. The judgment, wherein nothing was judged, conferred on the prince, George Louis, the right of marrying again, if he should be so minded and could find a lady willing to be won. It, however, explicitly debarred his wife from entering into a second union. Not a word was written down against her, alleging that she was criminal. The name of Königsmark was not even alluded to. Notwithstanding these facts, and that the husband was the really guilty party, while the utmost which can be said against the princess was that she may have been indiscreet—notwithstanding this, not only was he declared to be an exceedingly injured individual, but the poor lady, whom he held in his heart’s hottest hate, was deprived of her property, possession of which was transferred to George Louis, in trust for the children; and the princess, endowed with an annual pension of some eight or ten thousand thalers, was condemned to close captivity in the castle of Ahlden, near Zell, with a retinue of domestics, whose office was to watch her actions, and a body of armed gaolers, whose only duty was to keep the captive secure in her bonds.
Sophia Dorothea entered on her imprisonment with a calm, if not with a cheerful heart: certainly with more placidity and true joy than George Louis felt, surrounded by his mistresses and all the pomp of the Electoral State. All Germany is said to have been scandalised by the judgment delivered by the court. The illegality and the incompetency of the court from which it emanated, were so manifest, that the sentence was looked upon as a mere wanton cruelty, carrying with it neither conviction nor lawful consequence. So satisfied was the princess’s advocate on this point that he requested her to give him a letter declaring him non-responsible for having so far recognised the authority of the court as to have pleaded her cause before it! What is perhaps more singular still is the doubt which long existed whether this court ever sat at all; and whether decree of separation or divorce was ever pronounced in the cause of Sophia Dorothea of Zell and George Louis, Electoral Prince of Hanover.
Horace Walpole says, on this subject: ‘I am not acquainted with the laws of Germany relative to divorce or separation, nor do I know or suppose that despotism and pride allow the law to insist on much formality when a sovereign has reason or mind to get rid of his wife. Perhaps too much difficulty in untying the Gordian knot of matrimony, thrown in the way of an absolute prince, would be no kindness to the ladies, but might prompt him to use a sharper weapon, like that butchering husband, our Henry VIII. Sovereigns who narrow or let out the law of God according to their prejudices and passions mould their own laws, no doubt, to the standard of their convenience. Genealogic purity of blood is the predominant folly of Germany; and the Code of Malta seems to have more force in the empire than the Ten Commandments. Thence was introduced that most absurd evasion of the indissolubility of marriage, espousals with the left hand, as if the Almighty had restrained his ordinance to one half of a man’s person, and allowed a greater latitude to his left side than to his right, or pronounced the former more ignoble than the latter. The consciences both of princely and noble persons in Germany are quieted if the more plebeian side is married to one who would degrade the more illustrious moiety; but, as if the laws of matrimony had no reference to the children to be thence propagated, the children of a left-handed alliance are not entitled to inherit. Shocking consequence of a senseless equivocation, which only satisfies pride, not justice, and is calculated for an acquittal at the herald’s office, not at the last tribunal.
‘Separated the Princess (Sophia) Dorothea certainly was, and never admitted even to the nominal honours of her rank, being thenceforward always styled the Duchess of Halle (Ahlden). Whether divorced is problematic, at least to me; nor can I pronounce—as, though it was generally believed, I am not certain—that George espoused the Duchess of Kendal (Mdlle. von der Schulenburg) with his left hand. But though German casuistry might allow a husband to take another wife with his left hand because his legal wife had suffered her right hand to be kissed by a gallant, even Westphalian or Aulic counsellors could not have pronounced that such a momentary adieu constituted adultery; and, therefore, of a formal divorce I must doubt; and there I must leave that case of conscience undecided until future search into the Hanoverian Chancery shall clear up a point of little real importance.’ Coxe, in his Memoirs of Walpole, says, on the other hand, very decidedly:—‘George I., who never loved his wife, gave implicit credit to the account of her infidelity, as related by his father; consented to her imprisonment, and obtained from the ecclesiastical consistory a divorce, which was passed on the 20th of December 1694.’
The researches into the Chancery of Hanover, which Walpole left to posterity, appear to have been made, and the decree of the Consistorial Court which condemned Sophia Dorothea has been copied and published. It is quoted in the ‘Life of the Princess,’ published anonymously in 1845, and it is inserted below for the benefit of those who like to read history by the light of documents.
It has been said that such a decree could only have been purchased by rank bribery, which is likely enough; for the courts of Germany were so utterly corrupt that nothing could equal them in infamy—except the corruption which prevailed in England.