1740 and All That

Sophie, the Queen England never had and one of the grand dames of the Baroque, wrote these memoirs in 1680, going through a midlife crisis, to put it mildly - her favourite sister and brother both died that year, she turned 50, and her husband took off for the half year debauchery in Venice, and like her great granddaughter, she chose memoir writing as a method to cope and vent. She had more than thirty years more to live - she only died in 1714, just a few weeks before thirtyfive years younger Cousin Anne in Britain, so missed out being Queen of England by said weeks - , and they were very eventful indeed, for her and others, but Sophie writing these memoirs doesn't know this yet. There's nothing about Prussia in them; her daughter's marriage and all this is still ahead. The memoirs' big climax therefore is the visit to Versailles Sophie and young Sophie Charlotte undertook, which does deliver on various fronts - it's an entertaining look at Versailles at that time, a big spectacle, and lots of snark (though not, interestingly enough, about Monsieur; Philippe d'Orleans, husband to Sophie's niece Liselotte, has rarely been described as sympathetic in any other contemporary document I've read. Now you could argue this is because he is her niece's husband, but Sophie is pretty sharp tongued about lots of other people she's related to. She didn't write for publication. The memoirs' existence wasn't known until the mid 19th century. The only manuscript still in existence is a hand written copy Leipniz made for himself, who was given the memoirs when getting the official job of writing the history of the Welfs in 1685. (We don't just know he got the manuscript from her because he says so, there's also a letter in existence.) Sophie's memoirs are much shorter than Wilhelmine's memoirs (not even 200 pages in the edition I have), and that has a preface and afterword, and covers a lot of people not in our focus, but here are a few highlights that would indicate that not just the intellectual streak but also the snark in her great grandson might hail from her.

Kontext for the first quote: Sophie was born the twelfth child of Elizabeth Stuart the Winter Queen and her husband Friedrich the Winter King. These poetic names were actually meant as mocking taunts of these two, supposed to ridicule her parents for having ruled only for a winter, enough to kick start the 30 Years War by accepting the crown of Bohemia. Her parents spent their remaining years in exile, with her father dying relatively young and tragically of the plague after siring 13 kids (the only one younger than Sophie died as a child), and her mother living in the Netherlands in exile for 40 years until the Restoration; Elizabeth returned to England to die (and be buried in Westminster Abbey) then. Now, Elizabeth, who was the daughter of James VI. and I. and the sister of Charles I., did with her children what not just British monarchs, but expecially them, had been doing for eons - have them raised not just by other people, but in a different place altogether, and only seeing them on special occasions until they were teenagers. (See Elizabeth I. famously spending much of her childhood and youth at Hatfield, for example.) But Elizabeth Stuart was a Queen in name only (and for the Catholics not even that - in Catholic documents, she's the Countess of the Palatinate only), and Sophie wasn't impressed by this distant raising when they all lived on a tiny budget with the Dutch anyway. Therefore, the memoirs open with parents snark:

( On Winter Queens, boring teachers and sponging British relations )

( That time my brother's wife tried to bite off the finger of his mistress )

( How my brother-in-law got syphilis )

( Visiting Versailles: Liselotte, Philippe and his boyfriend )

( Visiting Versailles: Louis, his Queen and the Dauphin )

( Saint-Cloud, or: Why I kissed the Chevalier de Lorraine )