#lisselotte

[gabbyp09]

[skittlesskittycat]

[ravenekrops]

@thicc-pirate​

I love this fucking gif so much. Violence and killing and destruction

[acrossthewavesoftime]

Be careful what you say around your kids...

Recently, I stumbled across this sad parallel between Sophie of Hannover and her niece Liselotte, Princess Palatine.

This first excerpt is from Sophie's autobiography. The following exchange happened at her mother's court in The Hague when she was between 9 and 11 years old and being compared to her little brother Gustavus Adolphus of the Palatinate (1632 – 1641):

Adolf Köcher [ed.], Sophie, Hannover, Kurfürstin: Memoiren der Herzogin Sophie nachmals Kurfürstin von Hannover, Leipzig 1879, p. 35.

[...] that Madame Gorin said, mustering us both, my little brother and I: "He is very handsome, but she is scrawny and ugly: I hope she does not understand English." But I only understood it too well to be agrieved, and I was quite sad, since I thought my deficiency to be without remedy.

From around 1640, let's skip to the winter of 1659/1660, when Sophie, then in her late 20s and pregnant with her first child, was back in The Hague visiting her mother, this time with her little niece Liselotte (1652 – 1722) in tow.

The following is an excerpt from a letter written by Elizabeth Stuart, ex-Queen of Bohemia, Sophie's mother and Liselotte's grandmother to her son Karl Ludwig, Elector Palatine, Liselotte's fater:

There was last night a sad business betwixt your sister [Sophie] and Lisselotte. She saide in English, that her brother [Karl, 1651 – 1685] had a better face than she had, which she vnderstood and manie a teare was shed for it, but I maintained that she had the better face, which must [most] ioyed her.

In: Dirk Van der Cruysse, "Madame sein ist ein ellendes Handwerck." Liselotte von der Pfalz – eine deutsche Prinzessin am Hof des Sonnenkönigs, Munich 1997 (4th ed.), p. 77f.

It's sad and quite telling to think that Sophie committed the same error as the adults of her own childhood, although perhaps Madame Gorin was more foolish in assuming that Sophie, whose mother was a Stuart and appears at least in private to have conversed with her children exclusively in English, could not speak English than the grown Sophie when she supposed that Liselotte did not know the language, seeing as she never received any formal instruction and had only been around her grandmother for a few weeks at this point.

It is however interesting to note that Liselotte appears to have at least had a working basic understanding of English and was a passable passive speaker, at least when a child visiting her English grandmother in The Hague.

This may have come in handy if she had not been married to the Duke of Orléans, since, had she remained a Protestant, Liselotte would have taken precedence over Sophie and her heirs in the Act of Settlement, seeing as she had one more male ancestor in the direct line.

Liselotte might even have been happy to accept a crown, seeing as she professed that she would rather have been born a boy, so she could succeed her father as Elector. ...And why be just a measly Elector if you could be Queen?

Elisabeth Charlotte I, the best Queen England never had-- and who at age 16 together with her aunt Sophie tried to convince her father that she really should be permitted to marry a certain young Dutchman by the name of William of Orange.

One wonders how history would have turned out had the Elector Palatine given in to Liselotte's wishes...

[emmanuelcastillo]

#HappyBirthDay #lisselotte And #Yatna las quiero mucho :) (en Autopista Duarte)

[gabbyp09]

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[gabbyp09]

[skittlesskittycat]

[skittlesskittycat]

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