Sophia of the Palatinate and Hanover, Almost Queen of England

Sophia of the Palatinate, the 12th of 13 children born to Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart, missed becoming Queen of Great Britain by just a few weeks.

Her parents were called the “Winter King and Queen of Bohemia” because they only ruled Bohemia for one short season. They fled to the Dutch Republic after the Battle of White Mountain, when the Catholic forces of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II conquered Bohemia. Since Frederick and his wife were related to the Dutch royal family, they were given the Wassenaer Hof, a palatial home confiscated from Jan van Oldenbarneveldt and given to the once-monarchs of Bohemia when they arrived in The Hague. Sophia, their youngest daughter and last child to survive infancy, was born there on 14 October 1630 (Old Style).

Through her father, Sophia was a member of the House of Orange-Nassau, and as such was was granted an annuity of 40 thalers by the Estates of Friesland from her birth. On her mother’s side, Sophia was the granddaughter of King James VI and I, and the first cousin of the future King Charles II of England. Before the restoration of the British monarchy, Charles courted the teenage Sophia, but she chose to marry Ernest Augustus, Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg, instead in 1568. Ernest Augusts was the younger son of a duke, and one of the many minor royals in the House of Hanover, so he had no great prospects, but like Sophia, he was a great-grandchild of Christian III of Denmark and a protestant.

Sophia — now known as Sophia of Hanover — and Ernest Augustus were reasonably happy together, even though she was much smarter than her husband. She was so intelligent that she won the friendship and esteem of Gottfried Leibniz, the German polymath and philosopher who developed differential and integral calculus independently of Isaac Newton. The electress and the philosopher/mathematician shared a “substantial correspondence”, and their letters show that Sophia had a brilliant mind.

Sophia was also an affectionate and devoted mother to her seven children – six sons and a daughter. Luckily for her eldest son, George, in 1682 Ernest Augustus instituted primogeniture in his duchy, so that George would inherit everything rather than sharing the lands and titles with his brothers, as his own father had done. To secure this inheritance, Ernest Augustus intended his son to marry Sophia Dorothea of Celle, George’s only surviving paternal first cousin.

The electress was against the marriage at first, considering Sophia Dorthea’s blood to be tainted by her commoner mother, Éléonore Marie Desmier d’Olbreuse, the mistress and later wife of George William, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. She referred to her son marrying such a girl to be akin to “mixing mouse dirt in with the pepper.” However, to secure his succession, Sophia eventually came around to the idea of her little boy marrying a woman she thought of as rat’s shit.

Unsurprisingly, George and his wife were unhappy together. After the birth of their two children, George left his wife and began living openly with his mistress, Melusine von der Schulenburg. Nevertheless, when it became known that Sophia Dorothea was romantically involved with Swedish Count Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, George and his parents went after her with hob-nailed boots. Königsmarck was probably murdered, and sophia Dorthea was imprisoned in Ahlden House in her native Celle. George then had the chutzpah to divorce her for ‘abandonment’. She was imprisoned for 30 years, dying without ever seeing her son or daughter again.

On 30 July 1700, Sophia of Hanover’s cousin and the heir to the British throne, 11 year old Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, only child of Queen Anne of Great Britain, died unexpectedly and threw the UK into a crisis of succession. There was a multitude of heirs that could have taken the crown after Anne’s death, including the queen’s legitimate half-brother, James Francis Edward Stuart, but they were all Catholic. Protestant England was determined to avoid ‘Popish’ nonsense, so the dowager Electress Sophia was invited to come to Britain and be considered as Anne’s heir apparent.

That September, the 70 year old Sophia met King William III of England and II of Scotland, at Loo. He was her cousin, and they had been friends while they were both living in the Netherlands. His fondness for Sophia was part of the reason he pushed Parliament to pass the Act of Settlement in 1701 prohibiting Catholics from ever inheriting the crown, skipping over 56 Catholic heirs in favor of Electress Sophia. Later, the Sophia Naturalization Act 1705 gave British citizenship to any of Sophia’s descendants who were never baptized into the Roman Catholic Church.

Even though Sophia was 35 years older than Queen Anne, it was thought that she would outlive the ailing monarch. However, on 28 May 1714 (Old Style), Sophia was walking in the gardens of Herrenhausen when she was caught in a sudden rainstorm. She ran to the nearest shelter  where she collapsed, apparently having suffered a stroke. She died, aged 83, only 62 days before Queen Anne would also pass away.

After Sophia’s death her son became the new heir apparent to the British monarch, and on 1 August 1714 (Old Style) he was declared King George I of the Kingdom of Great Britain.

The Georgian Era had begun.