It is not easy to determine what part William of Orange had in the recall of George Louis from England, but the suddenness of that recall was an object of some admiring perplexity to a lover, who left a lady who was by no means inconsolable, and who, two years afterwards, was gaily married at St. James’s to the Prince of Denmark, on the first leisure day between the executions of Russell and of Sidney.
George Louis, however, obeyed the summons of his sovereign and father, but it was not until his arrival in Hanover that he found himself called upon to transfer the prosecution of his matrimonial suit from one object to another. The riding idea in the mind of Ernest Augustus was, that however he might have provided to secure his succession to the dominion of Zell, the marriage of his son with the duke’s only child would add many broad acres to his possessions in Hanover.
Sophia Dorothea was still little more than a child; but that very circumstance was made use of in order to procure the postponement of her marriage with Augustus of Wolfenbüttel. The Duke of Zell did not stand in need of much argument from his brother to understand that the union of the young lovers might more properly be celebrated when the bride was sixteen than a year earlier. The duke was ready to accept any reasoning, the object of which was to enable him to retain his daughter another year at his side.
The sixteenth birthday of Sophia Dorothea had arrived, and George Louis had made no impression on her heart—the image of the absent Augustus still lived there; and the whole plot would have failed, but for the sudden, and active, and efficient energy of one who seemed as if she had allowed matters to proceed to extremity, in order to exhibit the better her own powers when she condescended to interfere personally and remedy the ill-success of others by a triumph of her own. That person was Sophia, the wife of Ernest, a lady who rivalled Griselda in one point of her patience—that which she felt for her husband’s infidelities. In other respects she was crafty, philosophical, and free-thinking; but she was as ambitious as any of her family, and as she had resolved on the marriage of her son, George Louis, with Sophia Dorothea, she at once proceeded to accomplish that upon which she had resolved.
It had suddenly come to her knowledge that Augustus of Wolfenbüttel had made his reappearance at the Court of Zell. Coupling the knowledge of this fact with the remembrance that Sophia Dorothea was now sixteen years of age, and that at such a period her marriage had been fixed, the mother of George Louis addressed herself at once to the task of putting her son in the place of the favoured lover. She ordered out the heavy coach and heavier Mecklenburg horses, by which German potentates were wont to travel stately and leisurely by post some two centuries ago. It was night when she left Hanover; and although she had not further to travel than an ordinary train could now accomplish in an hour, it was broad daylight before this match-making and match-breaking lady reached the portals of the ducal palace of Zell.
There was something delightfully primitive in the method of her proceeding. She did not despise state, except on occasions when serious business was on hand. The present was such an occasion, and she therefore waited for no usher to marshal her way and announce her coming to the duke. She descended from her ponderous coach, pushed aside the sleepy sentinel, who appeared disposed to question her before he made way, and, entering the hall of the mansion, loudly demanded of the few servants who came hurrying to meet her, to be conducted to the duke. It was intimated to her that he was then dressing, but that his Highness would soon be in a condition to descend and wait upon her.
Too impatient to tarry, and too eager to care for ceremony, she mounted the stairs, bade a groom of the chamber point out to her the door of the duke’s room; and, her order having been obeyed, she forthwith pushed open the door, entered the apartment, and discovered the dismayed duke in the most negligé of déshabilles. She neither made apology nor would receive any; but, intimating that she came upon business, at once asked, ‘Where is your wife?’ The flurried Duke of Zell pointed through an open door to a capacious bed in the adjacent room, wherein lay the wondering duchess, lost in eider-down and deep amazement.
The ‘old Sophia’ could have wished, it would seem, that she had been further off. She was not quite rude enough to close the door, and so cut off all communication and listening; but, remembering that the Duchess of Zell was but very indifferently acquainted with German, she ceased to speak in the language then common to the German courts—French—and immediately addressed the duke in hard Teutonic phrase, which was unintelligible to the vexed and suspecting duchess.
Half undressed, the duke occupied a chair close to his toilet-table, while the astute wife of Ernest Augustus, seated near him, unfolded a narrative to which he listened with every moment an increase of complacency and conviction. The Duchess Eleanora, from her bed in the adjacent room, could see the actors, but could not comprehend the dialogue. But, if the narrative was unintelligible to her, she could understand the drift of the argument, as the names of her daughter and lover were being constantly pronounced with that of George Louis.
The case was forcibly put by the mother of George. She showed how union makes strength, how little profit could arise from a match between Sophia Dorothea and Augustus of Wolfenbüttel, and how advantageous must be an union between the heir of Hanover and the heiress of the domains which her provident father had added to Zell, and had bequeathed to his daughter. She spoke of the certainty of Ernest Augustus being created arch-standard-bearer of the empire of Germany, and therewith Elector of Hanover. She hinted at the possibility even of Sophia Dorothea one day sharing with her son the throne of Great Britain. The hint was something premature, but the astute lady may have strengthened her case by reminding her hearer that the crown of England would most probably be reserved only for a Protestant succession, and that her son was, if a distant, yet not a very distant, and certainly a possible heir.