The Bishop of Osnaburgh was harder to treat with than the emperor. He bound down his brother by stringent engagements, solemnly engrossed in lengthy phrases, guarding against all mistake by horribly technical tautology, to agree that the encircling his wife with the coronet of a countess bestowed upon her no legal rights, and conferred no shadow of legitimacy, in the eye of the law, on the children of the marriage, actual or prospective. For such children, modest yet sufficient provision was secured; but they were never to dream of claiming cousinship with the alleged better-born descendants of Henry the Dog, or Magnus the Irascible.
Duke George William, however, was resolved not to rest until his wife should also be his duchess. He appealed to the Estates of Germany. The Estates thought long and adjourned often before they came to a tardy and reluctant conclusion, by which the boon sought was at length conceded. The emperor added his consent. The concession made by the Estates, and the sanction superadded by the emperor, were, however, only obtained upon the military bishop withholding all opposition.
The princely prelate was, in fact, bought off. Again his muniment-box was unlocked; once more he and his staff of lawyers were deep in parchments, and curious in the geography of territorial maps and plans. The result of much dry labour and heavy speculation was an agreement entered into by the two brothers. The Duke of Zell contracted that the children of his marriage with the daughter of the Poitevin seigneur should inherit only his private property, and the empty title of Counts, or Countesses, of Wilhelmsburg. The territory of Zell with other estates added to the sovereign dukedom were to pass to the prince-bishop or his heirs. On these terms Eleanora of Olbreuse, Lady of Harburg, and Countess of Wilhelmsburg, became Duchess of Zell.
‘Ah!’ exclaimed the very apostolic bishop to the dissolute disciples at his court, on the night that the family compact was made an accomplished fact, ‘my brother’s French Madame is not a jot the more his wife for being duchess’—which was true, for married is married, and there is no comparative degree of intensity which can be applied to the circumstance. ‘But she has a dignity the more, and therewith may Madame rest content’—which was not true, for no new title could add dignity to a woman like the wife of Duke George William.
When Sophia Dorothea was but seven years old, she had for an occasional playfellow in the galleries and gardens of Zell and Calenberg, a handsome lad, Swedish by birth, but German by descent, whose name was Philip Christopher von Königsmark. He was a few years older than Sophia Dorothea (some accounts say ten years older), and he was in Zell for the purpose of education, and he fulfilled the office of page. Many of his vacation hours were spent with the child of George William, who was his father’s friend. When gossips saw the two handsome children, buoyant of spirit, beaming with health, and ignorant of care, playing hand in hand at sports natural to their age, those gossips prophesied of future marriage. But their speculation had soon no food whereon to live, for the young Königsmark was speedily withdrawn from Zell, and Sophia bloomed on alone, or with other companions, good, graceful, fair, accomplished, and supremely happy.
But, even daughter as she was of a left-handed marriage, there was hanging to her name a dower sufficiently costly to dazzle and allure even princely suitors. To one of these she was betrothed before she was ten years old. The suitor was a soldier and a prince. Augustus Frederick, Crown Prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was allured by the ‘beaux yeux de la casette’ of the little heiress, which contained, after all, only one hundred thousand thalers, fifteen thousand pounds sterling; but an humble dower for a duke’s only daughter. In the meantime the affianced lover had to prove himself, by force of arms, worthy of his lady and her fortune. To the siege of Philipsburg, in the year 1676, repaired the chivalrous Augustus of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. He bore himself with a dignity and daring which entitled him to respect, but a fatal bullet slew him suddenly: a brief notice in a despatch was his soldierly requiem, and when the affianced child-bride was solemnly informed by circumstance of Hof-Marshal that her lord was slain and her heart was free, she was too young to be sorry, and too unconscious to be glad.
Meanwhile, the two courts of the Bishop of Osnaburgh and the Duke of Zell continued to present a striking contrast. The bishop was one of those men who think themselves nothing unless they are imitating some greater man, not in his virtues but his vices. There was one man in Europe whom Ernest Augustus described as a ‘paragon,’ and that distinguished personage was Louis XIV. The vices, extravagance, the pomposity of the great king, were the dear delights of the little prince. As Louis neglected his wife, so Ernest Augustus disregarded his. Fortunately, Sophia, the wife of the latter, had resources in her mind, which made her consider with exemplary indifference the faithlessness of her lord.
At this court of Hanover, two sisters, Catherine and Elizabeth von Meisenbuch, had, for some time, set the fashion of a witchery of costume, remarkable for its taste, and sometimes for outraging it. They possessed, too, the great talent of Madame de Sillery Genlis, and were inimitable in their ability and success in getting up little fêtes, at home or abroad, in the salon or al fresco—formal and full-dressed, or rustic and easy—where major-generals were costumed as agricultural swains, and ladies of honour as nymphs or dairymaids, with costumes rural of fashioning, but as resplendent and costly as silkman and jeweller could make them. At a sort of Masque, invented by the sisters von Meisenbuch, one appeared as Diana, the other as Bellona, and they captivated all hearts, from those of the prince-bishop and his son to that of the humblest aspirant in the court circle.
These young ladies came to court to push their fortunes. They hoped in some way to serve the sovereign bishop; or, failing him, to be agreeable to his heir, George Louis (afterwards George I. of England). But even this prince, a little and not an attractive person, to say nothing of the bishop, seemed for a time a flight above them. They could wait a new opportunity; for as for defeat in their aspirations, they would not think of it. They had the immense power of those persons who are possessed by one single idea, and who are under irresistible compulsion to carry it out to reality. They could not all at once reach the prince-bishop or his heir, and accordingly they directed the full force of their enchantments at two very unromantic-looking personages, the private tutors of the young princes of Hanover. The ladies were soon mighty at Greek particles, learned in the aorists, fluent on the digamma, and familiar with the mysteries of the differential calculus.
Catherine and Elizabeth von Meisenbuch opened a new grammar before their learned pundits, the Herrn von Busche and von Platen (the latter was of a noble and ancient house); and truth to tell, the philosophers were nothing loth to pursue the new study taught by such professors. When this educational course had come to a close, the public recognised at once its aim, quality, and effects, by learning that the sage preceptors had actually married two of the liveliest and lightest-footed of girls who had ever danced a branle at the balls in Brunswick. The wives, on first appearing in public after their marriage, looked radiant with joy. The tutors wore about them an air of constraint, as if they thought the world needed an apology, by way of explaining how two Elders had permitted themselves to be vanquished by a brace of Susannas. Their ideas were evidently confused, but they took courage as people cheerfully laughed, though they may have lost it again on discovering that they had been drawn into matrimony by two gracefully-graceless nymphs, whose sole object was to use their spouses as stepping-stones to a higher greatness.