Leibniz's Endgame and the Ladies of the Courts

Gregory Brown

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 65, Number 1, January 2004, pp. 75-100
(Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2004.0013

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/168331

Access provided by Australian National University (14 Dec 2018 08:52 GMT)
 Leibniz’s Endgame and
the Ladies of the Courts

Gregory Brown

It is symptomatic of the neglect that Leibniz suffered following his death

on 14 November 1716 that neither the Royal Society of London, to which he
had been unanimously elected as a Fellow some forty-three years earlier in
1673, nor the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which he had helped to found in
1700—deigned to commemorate his death with an official publication or me-
morial address.1 But early in 1700 Leibniz had also been elected a foreign
member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris; and on 13 November
1717, nearly a year to the day after Leibniz’s death, the Academy’s secretary,
Bernard Fontenelle, read before that body a eulogy that he had prepared for
Leibniz. Very near the end of his long oration Fontenelle came at last to make
the following, remarkable observations: Leibniz, he told his audience,

conversed freely with persons of all sorts–people of the court, artisans,

laborers, soldiers. There are scarcely any among the uncultivated who
cannot teach something to the most learned man in the world, and in
every case the wise man is educated even more when he gives due
consideration to the uneducated. He also conversed often with women
and did not count the time as wasted that he gave to their conversation.
With them he completely shed the character of the savant and philoso-
pher; characters [that are] yet nearly indelible and whose slightest traces
they [i.e., women] perceive very clearly and with much disgust. This
ease of communicating made everyone love him.2

This is an extraordinary passage, especially when one considers that it was

presented as part of an official address to a body such as the Royal Academy of
1
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the New England Colloquium in Early
Modern Philosophy, Dartmouth College, June 2002.
2
Bernard Fontenelle, Choix d’éloges de savants (2 vols.; Paris, 1981), I, 187-88.
75
Copyright 2004 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

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 76 Gregory Brown

Sciences in Paris at the beginning of the eighteenth century, that is, exclusively
male, finely educated, and decidedly upper crust. It insinuates volumes about
the prejudices abroad in Leibniz’s and Fontenelle’s own day, but it also speaks
volumes both in favor of Leibniz for his behavior toward those whom Fontenelle
called “l’ignorant” and “les Dames,” and in favor of Fontenelle himself for
taking the pains to pass this information along to an audience that might not
have been expected to give it a very sympathetic hearing.
What Fontenelle reported was in any case true. Among male philosophers
of his day Leibniz did have many more than his share of female friends. Being
a familiar at the courts of the dukes of Brunswick and the imperial court in
Vienna, Leibniz no doubt had more opportunities than most to make the ac-
quaintance of highly-placed, talented, and well-educated women. But that can-
not be the whole story, given the sheer number of long-lasting personal and
intellectual liaisons that he forged with women. There had to be, one suspects,
a special and mutual attraction between Leibniz and the women of the courts
he frequented; and they had, one suspects, to have actively sought each other
out. Part of the explanation is doubtless to be found in the extreme cultural
dimorphism that existed between men and women of the courts in the seven-
teenth century, especially in the Germanic courts. The education of princes and
noblemen tilted heavily in the direction of the military arts and “real politik”
and that of princesses and ladies toward the fine arts—music, languages, and
literature, often including philosophy and theology. While princes and noble-
men road horses, hunted, planned and fought wars, negotiated terms of settle-
ment, and conducted their almost obligatory dalliances with mistresses, those
princesses and ladies who were of a serious turn of mind found more than
enough time to read, write, reflect, and converse—all of which Leibniz did
very well indeed. Common interests, while perhaps a necessary condition of
the friendships that Leibniz formed with the ladies of the courts, could not have
been sufficient for them. What must have been unusual about Leibniz, as
Fontenelle’s testimony suggests, is that unlike many of the men in the circles of
the courts, he actually listened to what the ladies had to say, took them seri-
ously, and willingly shared with them, without condescension, many of his
own most profound thoughts.

I. Leibniz and the Court in Hanover: Sophie

It must be said at the outset, however, that the first royal family that Leibniz
served in Hanover did not quite fit the picture I have just sketched. Johann
Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Calenberg, had first invited Leibniz
to visit Hanover at the end of 1669; but seven years would pass before Leibniz,
with no other prospects in sight, and having in desperation finally accepted the
position of counselor and librarian to the duke, made his way reluctantly to

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 77

Hanover from Paris. Among four brothers, Johann Friedrich was the only one
to have converted to Catholicism, and as such he had a genuine interest in
religious matters. Long before Leibniz had agreed to employment in Hanover
he had written a number of letters to the duke describing his work in various
areas, and he had sent him two of his theological writings.3 On the other hand
there is little evidence of much intellectual interaction between Leibniz and the
duke’s wife, Benedicte Henriette, even after Leibniz took up residence in
Hanover, although later, in the fall of 1693, he did enlist her in his efforts,
ultimately unsuccessful, to persuade Bishop Bossuet to support the reunion of
the Catholic and Protestant churches.4 But her youngest daughter, Wilhelmine
Amalie, who was just four years old when Leibniz first arrived on the scene,
would in 1705 become an empress of the empire, and in that capacity she played
a significant role in the plans that Leibniz would hatch during the last three
years of his life, which I have here called “Leibniz’s endgame.” Leibniz’s asso-
ciation with Johann Friedrich was brief, for the duke died in late December
1679, just three years after Leibniz’s arrival in Hanover. The Hanoverian duchy
then passed to the duke’s youngest brother, Ernst August, who at the time of his
brother’s death was the prince-bishop of Osnabrück. Unfortunately, Ernst Au-
gust shared none of his older brother’s interests in intellectual matters, but
fortunately for Leibniz the new duke was married to one of the several talented
daughters of Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I, king of Great Britain, and
Friedrich V of the Palatinate—among them, the eldest, Elisabeth, who became
Abbess of the Protestant convent at Herford in Westphalia and noted philo-
sophical correspondent of Descartes, and Louise Hollandine, a gifted painter
who became Abbess of the catholic convent of Maubuisson near Paris. But it
was the youngest of Elizabeth Stuart’s daughters that Ernst August had married
in 1658 and was now created the new duchess of Hanover. This was Sophie,
who henceforth became without doubt Leibniz’s closest and most enduring
friend. After her father Friedrich V had lost both the Palatinate and the king-
dom of Bohemia after only a single year’s reign, thus fulfilling “the Habsburg
prophecy that he would be but a winter king, gone with the melting snow,” he
and Elizabeth Stuart took refuge in The Hague.5 Friedrich died in 1632, only
two years after Sophie’s birth. Like her siblings she was raised during her de-
veloping years apart from her mother at an institution in Leiden, where she
received a rigorous education in languages, both modern and ancient, as well
as theology, history, mathematics, and law.6 It was doubtless this superb educa-

3
See E. J. Aiton, Leibniz: A Biography (Boston, 1985), 35-36, 46.
4
Ibid., 185.
5
Ragnhild Marie Hatton, George I: Elector and King (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 16.
6
Ibid., 17. Hatton points out that Sophie “was permitted to join her mother’s court in The
Hague at an earlier age than her sisters, since on the death in 1641 of the youngest brother, the
Leiden nursery was closed down” (ibid., 17-18).

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 78 Gregory Brown

tion that laid the foundation for her later and enduring friendship with Leibniz.
There is no greater testimony to the importance that Sophie would come to
play in Leibniz’s life than Leibniz’s own words in a letter he wrote from Hanover
in March of 1696 to his English correspondent, Thomas Burnett: “All that both-
ers me,” he confided,

is that I am not in a great city like Paris or London, which are full of
learned men from whom one can benefit and even be helped. For there
are many things that one cannot do by oneself. But here one finds
scarcely anyone with whom to talk; or rather, in this region a courtier
is not supposed to speak of learned matters, and without the electress
[Sophie] they would be spoken of even less.7

Sophie’s intelligence and interest in the world of letters was inherited by

her only daughter, Sophie Charlotte, who was born in 1668, some eight years
after her eldest brother, Georg Ludwig, who would eventually inherit the elec-
torate of Hanover and ascend the British throne as George I. Sophie had en-
trusted the education of her daughter to Anna Katharina von Harling, who had
been a servant, and later a mistress in charge, at the court of Sophie’s brother,
Karl Ludwig, who in 1648 had regained, as a provision of the treaty of
Westphalia, part of the family’s inheritance when he became elector of the
Rhenish Palatinate. Because of marital discord between Karl Ludwig and his
wife, Charlotte Hesse-Cassel, their daughter, Elisabeth Charlotte, known as
Liselotte, was sent to Hanover to stay with her aunt Sophie, and von Harling
went with her as her governess. Both Liselotte and von Harling accompanied
Sophie and her family to Osnabrück in 1661, when Ernst August became prince-
bishop; and when Liselotte was recalled to the Palatinate by her father in 1663,
von Harling remained behind in Osnabrück, where she became the chief mis-
tress in charge of Sophie’s household, later entrusted with the education of
Sophie Charlotte. When the household moved back to Hanover in 1680 follow-
ing the death of Johann Friedrich, von Harling moved with them and until her
death in 1702 remained there in charge of Sophie Charlotte’s upbringing until
the latter’s marriage in 1684, at the age of 16, to Friedrich, later elector of
Brandenburg.

7
C. I. Gerhardt (ed.), Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz (7 vols.; Berlin,
1875-90), III, 175 (hereafter abbreviated as G).

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 79

II. Leibniz and the Court in Berlin:

Sophie Charlotte and Henriette Charlotte von Pölnitz

During the four years that Leibniz and Sophie Charlotte were both in resi-
dence at the court in Hanover, there appears to have been little interaction be-
tween the two. It was not until the fall of 1697, thirteen years after her marriage
and nine years after becoming the electress of Brandenburg, that her continu-
ous correspondence with Leibniz began. In October of that year Leibniz re-
ceived a report that an observatory was to be constructed in Berlin at the sug-
gestion of the electress, and in a letter he wrote to her in November he seized
the opportunity to promote to her the establishment of a society of sciences in
Berlin.8 Then, after telling her that “the charms of an admirable princess have
in all matters more power than the strictest orders of the greatest prince in the
world,” he went on to say:

In fact I have often thought that women of elevated mind are more
suitable than men for advancing fine ideas. Men, constrained by their
affairs, think most often only of necessities, whereas women, whom
their station places above dreary and laborious concerns, are more un-
constrained and more capable of thinking about fine things. And if
instead of restricting their minds to the dressing table they were accus-
tomed early on to some more solid and durable beauties and ornaments
which are found in the wonders of God and nature, their curiosity and
refinement would be more useful to the human race and would con-
tribute more to the glory of God than all the plans of conquerors, if
they do nothing but confuse and destroy.9

These were thoughts out of season. Though his own philosophical theories
certainly left room to accommodate the not uncommon view of his age, that
women were by nature the intellectual inferiors of men, this was a mistake that
Leibniz himself was never tempted to make. If women as a rule had given
themselves over more to fashion than to science, this was due to what their
culture expected and extracted from them, not to how nature had formed them.
In August 1698, after having spent three weeks at the hunting lodge in Linsburg
with Leibniz and her mother, Sophie Charlotte personally invited Leibniz to
visit her in Berlin.10 Then, in a well-known letter to Leibniz of 1 September
1699, she wrote:

8
See Leibniz’s letter to Sophie Charlotte of November 1697, in G. W. Leibniz: Sämtliche
Schriften und Briefe, ed. by the Berlin Academy (Berlin, 1923-), Reihe I, Band xiv, 771-73
(hereafter abbreviated as A.).
9
A, I, xiv, 772-73.
10
Aiton, Leibniz: A Biography, 255.

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 80 Gregory Brown

In thanking you, Monsieur, for remembering me, I will tell you that
your letters are a great pleasure to me. I could not help having read out
to me the copy of what you wrote to the electress [Sophie] and to Mr.
Stepney, who was delighted by your sound and coherent reasoning
concerning the interconnection of things in the world. It has so per-
suaded me that you may henceforth report me as one of those who
esteems you and respects your merit. For some time I have been, and
shall always remain, devoted to serving you, of which I ask you to
remain assured.11

As good as her word, Sophie Charlotte henceforth remained, like her mother,
Leibniz’s trusted friend, and for the rest of her short life carried on an extensive
correspondence with him on a wide range of philosophical, theological, and
political issues. Less than six months after pledging her devotion to Leibniz,
she had prevailed upon her husband officially to approve, on 19 March 1700,
the foundation of an observatory and, following Leibniz’s suggestion, a society
of sciences in Berlin,12 of which he was shortly thereafter appointed presi-
dent.13 A year later, on 18 January, Sophie Charlotte was crowned the first
queen of Prussia. On 12 June the Parliament in England approved the Act of
Settlement, which, in default of issue from either William or Anne, designated
Sophie Charlotte’s mother, “the most excellent princess Sophia, Electress and
duchess-dowager of Hanover,” and “the heirs of her body being Protestants,”
successors to the throne in England in virtue of Sophie’s descent from James I
through his daughter Elizabeth Stuart.
There was another woman at Sophie Charlotte’s court in Berlin worth men-
tioning here. Henriette Charlotte von Pölnitz entered Sophie Charlotte’s ser-
vice in 1688 on the recommendation of Sophie, who was anticipating her
daughter’s need for an expanded household upon her elevation to electress of
Brandenburg. Like so much of her life before her anus mirabilis in 1697—
marking both the beginning of her continuous correspondence with Leibniz
and the dismissal of her political antagonist at the court in Brandenburg, the
minister Eberhard von Danckelmann—little is known of the early relationship
between Sophie Charlotte and Fräulein Pölnitz. By the time Sophie Charlotte’s
continuous correspondence with Leibniz began, Fräulein Pölnitz was clearly in
view at the center of Sophie Charlotte’s personal life as well as the cultural life
at the court in Berlin. There is evidence that she became the head of a salon that

11
O. Klopp (ed.), Die Werke von Leibniz. Erste Reihe (11 vols.; Berlin, 1864-84), X, 54
(hereafter abbreviated as K).
12
See K, X, 325-28.
13
Ibid., 328-30.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 81

Sophie Charlotte established there, after the French manner, for the edification
of women, perhaps as a result of Leibniz’s remarks concerning the potential
that women possessed to advance knowledge.14 She became the gatekeeper of
Sophie Charlotte’s correspondence and thus became intimately involved in the
exchanges between her mistress and Leibniz.
The first philosophical piece that Leibniz sent for Sophie Charlotte, which
concerned the real distinction between the mind and body, was in fact sent
through Fräulein Pölnitz, whom he warned in the following terms:

Although the mind of Her Electoral Serenity is marvelously penetrat-

ing, and although nothing escapes her when she undertakes to think
about it, nevertheless it seems that it is inappropriate to propose to her
some intricate thoughts which enter upon numbers and figures, at least
if she does not expressly command it.15

With a flair for theatrical productions, Fräulein Pölnitz orchestrated entertain-

ment for the court. One memorable moment came during the carnival season of
1702 in Hanover, when she directed a bawdy dinner play at Sophie’s court
based on Petronius’s farce, Satyricon, a play in which even Leibniz himself
was prevailed upon to act a part.16 Most intriguing of all was her interest and
talent in mathematics. At the beginning of a letter to Leibniz in the early spring
of 1702 Sophie Charlotte wrote “that by this note you will see, Monsieur, the
impatience that I have to see you here, and how I esteem your conversation,
seeking it again with all imaginable earnestness.” At the end, she wrote:

Enough of talking nonsense. What is not [nonsense], to finish, is the

esteem that I have for your merit; what ought again impel you to come
is an act of charity. For Pölnitz has bought a mathematics textbook that
she wants to study; and the terms and the sense of it are so difficult that
if you do not come to her aid, her head will spin. For my part, I am
content to see the figures and numbers without reading, for all that is
Greek to me. Only of unity do I have some small idea, thanks to the
pains you have taken.17

14
See Veronica Biermann, “ ‘Ma chère Pelnits’: Henriette Charlotte von Pölnitz (um 1670-
1722), ‘Erstes Kammerfräulein’ Sophie Charlottes,” Sophie Charlotte und Ihr Schloss: Ein
Musenhof des Barock in Brandenburg-Preußen, Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Ber-
lin Brandenburg (New York, 1999), 80.
15
K, X, 63.
16
Biermann, “Henriette Charlotte von Pölnitz...,” 78-79.
17
K, X, 136, 137.

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 82 Gregory Brown

In a letter of 22 April, Leibniz told Sophie Charlotte:

Mademoiselle Pölnitz not only has a penetrating mind, but she also
loves to exercise it on difficult matters. With this talent, mathematics
will be an entertainment for her. And I hope that she will contribute to
constructing the observatory of Lützenburg, or rather to furnishing it
with instruments. For the construction is done, and I would desire that
we make use of it. The unity of mathematicians and philosophers dif-
fers in this, that the first has parts and the other does not, because it is
a simple unity, without a mixture of multiplicity. If it were likewise
with the unity of the arithmeticians, we could do without fractions,
which would much appease the schools. One day I took pleasure in
inventing a pleasant kind of arithmetic, in which all the numbers are
expressed by 0 and 1 [i.e., the binary arithmetic]. I attach here an ex-
ample for Mademoiselle Pölnitz, which I myself will shortly explain.18

III. Leibniz and the Court in Berlin: Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach

A third woman quietly entered the sphere of the court in Berlin during the
last decade of the seventeenth century, and though no one could have guessed
it at the time, she would come to play a preeminent role in the endgame that
would occupy Leibniz during the final two years of his life. Wilhelmine Caroline
was an orphan princess from the minor margravate of Brandenburg-Ansbach,
daughter of the margrave Johann Friedrich by his second wife, Eleanor of Saxe-
Eisenach. Within two years of her birth, Caroline’s father was dead of the pox.
Seven years later Sophie Charlotte’s husband, Friedrich, the elector of
Brandenburg, arranged a marriage between Caroline’s mother and elector Johann
Georg IV of Saxony, with whom Friedrich wished to establish an alliance. This
turned out to be a tragic mistake, as Johann Georg was a brutal man who shunned
Eleanor and her children in favor of his mistress. Matters eventually became so
bad that, fearing for her own life and that of her children, Eleanor left the court
to live in a dower-house away from Dresden. In 1694 Johann Georg and his
mistress died of the pox within two weeks of each other, and two years later
Caroline’s mother herself was dead. Caroline at thirteen and her brother at
eleven were then left very nearly alone in the world. It was at this point that
Sophie Charlotte and Friedrich offered to become Caroline’s guardians and
hence began Caroline’s association with Sophie Charlotte and the court in Ber-
lin.19

18
K, X, 145.
19
R. L. Arkell, Caroline of Ansbach: George the Second’s Queen (New York, 1939), 6-7.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 83

It is unclear exactly when Leibniz and Caroline met for the first time; but
in the autumn of 1704 he was with her at the palace in Lützenburg, along with
Sophie and Sophie Charlotte, when Father Ferdinand Orban arrived with the
intention of converting Caroline to Catholicism in order to pave the way for her
marriage to archduke Karl of Austria. Orban was the Jesuit confessor of the
then elector Palatine, Johann Wilhelm, who was archduke Karl’s uncle on his
mother’s side. But archduke Karl himself was the younger brother of future
emperor Josef I and thus the brother-in-law of Wilhelmine Amalie, daughter of
Leibniz’s first master in Hanover, Duke Johann Friedrich. It had been an aston-
ishing turn of events for Caroline and her guardians at the court in Berlin when
this proposed marriage had been communicated to Caroline the previous year.
Although Sophie Charlotte chose to remain neutral in the matter, the Elector
was all for the union, thinking, not unreasonably, that it would be a great honor
for his ward. But being Lutheran, Caroline required to be converted before her
marriage to the Catholic prince, and in a letter of 21 October 1704 the electress
Sophie made no secret of her own feelings about Caroline and the proceedings
she was then being forced to endure:

I dare say that the dear princess of Ansbach is assailed, and she is not
at all resolved to do anything contrary to her conscience. But Father
Orban has more understanding and can easily get the better of the stu-
pid Lutheran priests (as they are described to me) such as those here.
Had things gone according to my wish, the dear princess would not
have undergone the impeachment and would have been able to make
our court happy. But it seems it has not pleased God to make me happy
with her in this way; we at Hanover shall not find any one better.20

To the same correspondent a few days later Sophie offered this description of
Caroline’s intellectual indecision and emotional distress during her trial at the
hands of Father Orban:

Sometimes the dear princess says “Yes,” and sometimes she says “No”;
sometimes she believes we [Protestants] have no priests, sometimes
that Catholics are idolatrous and accursed; sometimes she says our
religion may be the better. What the result will be ... I still do not know.
The dear princess, however, wishes to leave, so it must soon be either
“Yes” or “No.” When Orban comes to be with her the Bible lies on the
table, and they have a fine argument. Then the one who has studied
more is victorious, and afterwards the dear princess weeps.21

20
K, IX, 107.
21
K, IX, 108.

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 84 Gregory Brown

In the end, Caroline would not convert, and Leibniz, who had attended the
sessions between Caroline and Orban, was commissioned to compose a letter
to the elector Palatine to report Caroline’s decision. Caroline then left Lützenburg
to seek refuge in Ansbach with her brother, Wilhelm Friedrich, who was now
the margrave; but even there she continued to receive letters from Father Orban,
the elector Palatine, and others within the emperor’s party to pressure her to
reconsider.
In Protestant circles Caroline’s decision was regarded as heroic. Leibniz
himself sent her news of Hanover’s praise and told her that Anton Ulrich, Duke
of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was impressed enough to want to make her the
heroine of one of his romantic novels.22
On 28 December Caroline responded:

I believe that the king of Spain [i.e., archduke Karl] no longer troubles
himself about me. On the contrary, I am probably despised for not want-
ing to follow the good instructions of Mr. de St. Marie [i.e., Orban].
Every post I receive letters from that good gentleman. I believe that his
words contributed much to the discomfort that I felt during the three
weeks, from which I am perfectly recovered.... I am very much obliged
to duke Anton Ulrich for wanting to pass me off as a heroine in his
novel. You will see that with time they will show me on the stage with
Mr. St. Marie, where I will defend myself marvelously.23

The irony here is that duke Anton Ulrich would later help to arrange the mar-
riage in 1708 between Caroline’s one-time Habsburg suitor, then soon to be-
come emperor Karl VI in 1711, and his own granddaughter, Elisabeth Chris-
tine, who, unlike Caroline, would apparently be persuaded to accept Catholi-
cism on the assurance of Leibniz, among others, that she could always give an
Evangelical meaning to Catholic ceremonies.24 It was through this marriage
connection with the later emperor that Anton Ulrich was able to secure for
Leibniz the position of imperial privy counselor in 1713.
For her part the electress Sophie welcomed Caroline’s decision enthusias-
tically. She wrote from Hanover on 22 November to Leibniz, who was still in
Lützenburg, making quite clear her designs in relation to Caroline:

22
It is thought that Caroline was the model for the heroine in Anton Ulrich’s novel Octavia.
23
K, IX, 114.
24
This was asserted by the author of the article on Charles VI in the Thirteenth Edition of
The Encylopedia Britannica (see The Encyclopedia Britannica [32 vols.; New York, 192613], V,
905). The article in question was unsigned, and the author provided no reference to support his
assertion; but see Gerda Untermöhlen, “Leibniz im Briefwechsel mit Frauen,” Niedersächsisches
Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte, 52 (1980), 224 and the letters from Leibniz to Anton Ulrich that
she cites there in note 26.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 85

I find that most people here applaud the princess of Ansbach, and the
duke of Celle [father of Sophie Dorothea, who was the mother of Georg
Ludwig’s son, Georg August] wished her for his grandson. I find that
the prince [i.e., Georg August] also greatly delights in hearing talk of
her, and he told me, “I am very glad that you desire her for me.”25

Sophie’s hopes were realized less than a year later when Caroline and Georg
August were married at Herrenhausen on 2 September 1705, but eight months
before this happy event, and just two months after Caroline had made her deci-
sion to refuse the proposal of archduke Karl, tragedy had visited the House of
Hanover, when Queen Sophie Charlotte, at the age of thirty-seven, died sud-
denly, apparently of pneumonia, on 1 February in Hanover, whence she had
traveled for the carnival season.26 According to the well-known account of her
grandson, Friedrich the Great, these were her last words to the grieving Fräulein
Pölnitz, who attended her death:

Do not weep for me, for I now go to satisfy my curiosity about the
source of things, which Leibniz has never been able to clear up for me,
about space, the infinite, being and nothing, and for the king my hus-
band I provide the spectacle of a funeral, which gives him a new occa-
sion to increase his glory.27

Following Sophie Charlotte’s death, Sophie took the bereaved Fräulein Pölnitz
into her own household in Hanover, almost as a surrogate daughter. She later
reported that “although others laugh, the good Pölnitz and I cry often, but in
secret.”28 Leibniz, who had remained behind in Berlin to work on the organiza-
tion of the society of sciences, among other things, heard the crushing news the
following day and immediately wrote to Fräulein Pölnitz:

I judge that your feelings are the same as mine. I do not cry, I do not
complain, but I do not know where I am. The loss of the queen appears
as a dream to me, but upon awakening from my daze I find it only all
too real. Your misery in Hanover surpasses mine in nothing, except
that you have feelings more violent and have been struck close at hand

25
K, IX, 110.
26
Aiton, Leibniz: A Biography, 264, note 9.
27
Quoted in Biermann, 81, who notes that “Friedrich II does not speak of von Pölnitz;” but
given that “in the various account of the death one always encounters a stunned and weeping
Fräulein von Pölnitz,” “it appears more than probable that that these last words were directed to
Pölnitz” (ibid., 82, note 40).
28
Georg Schnath (ed.), Briefwechsel der Kurfürstin Sophie von Hannover mit dem
Preußischen Königshause (Berlin, Leipzig, 1927), 87 (quoted in Biermann, “Henriette Charlotte
von Pölnitz...,” 81).

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 86 Gregory Brown

by our common misfortune. This is what encourages me to write to

you and to endeavor to ask you to moderate your sorrow, if it is pos-
sible, in order that it not be harmful to you. It is not through extreme
sorrow that you will honor the memory of one of the most accom-
plished princesses in the world. It is by imitating her that we will be
able to do that, and the rational world will be shared by us. My letter is
more philosophical than my heart, but I am the master of my letter; and
I am not in a condition to follow my own advice precisely, but it is no
less reasonable for that.29

The queen’s death hit both Leibniz and Caroline especially hard, and their shared
grief and efforts to console one another undoubtedly drew them closer. In a
letter of 18 March to Caroline, Leibniz touched on themes that he had often
discussed with Sophie Charlotte and which would eventually find their way
into his Theodicy of 1710. He ended by saying:

I have often discussed this great principle of piety, of contentment, and

of beatitude with the queen. It seemed to me that she appreciated it and
even that her marvelous penetration made her understand it better than
I could express it. This resignation of a tranquil spirit, content with its
God, shone forth in her words, and also in her eyes and her actions to
the last moment of her life.30

Although Caroline would later come to describe the Theodicy as simply “in-
comparable” (K XI, 72), Leibniz’s words of consolation fell at the time on deaf
ears; the princess was beside herself in despair when she responded. “Heaven,”
she wrote,

jealous of our happiness, is come to carry away our adorable queen.

The terrible blow has plunged me into a grievous affliction, and noth-
ing can console me save the hope of following her soon. I am sorry for
you, sir, with all of my heart; this loss for you is irreparable. I pray the
Lord will add the years that the late queen would have been able to live
to those of the electress [Sophie], to whom I beg you to pay my re-
gards.31

Sophie did indeed manage to live another nine years, to the grand old age of
eighty-three. But on the evening of 8 June 1714 she collapsed and died in
Caroline’s arms while walking in her garden at Herrenhausen. One of Sophie’s
29
K, X, 264-65.
30
K, IX, 118.
31
K, IX, 120.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 87

attendants, another Sophie who was the Countess of Lippe-Bückenbourg and

who had accompanied the electress and the electoral princess on their walk,
later wrote a poignant account of the last moments in a letter to Sophie’s niece,
the Raugräfin Louise:

When we were in the middle of the garden, near those small painted
closets, and as we were going through the lane to the first fountain
which is across from the apartment of Mademoiselle Pölnitz, the
electress began to stagger and to walk as if she were very tired. The
princess who noticed it as well as I, asked her if she felt ill; but she
answered her with a great gasp, indicating her stomach.... It began to
rain very hard, which caused everyone to leave, so that the electoral
princess and I were of all the ladies the only ones who had the honor of
assisting this august princess to the end, which arrived a moment later.
For she was able to go scarcely ten steps toward the nearest closet
when Her Electoral Highness said: “I am very ill, give me your hand.”
I immediately sent Chiarafan (sic) [a footman] to look for help and
some gold dust. Madam Campen ran to call the porters. Mr. Wind who
alone remained with us, wished to do the same, but I prevented him
from doing so, seeing that the electress was done in and that she fell
totally unconscious between our arms. She became so heavy that we
were obliged to let her down gently to the ground, when Mr. Wind had
taken her under an arm. I took my knife and opened her stays with it
and everything that could bind her, but when I was about to remove her
hoods from her ... I perceived that she was all blackish, and when she
made a gasp with a certain tone that indicated the anguish of her heart,
I saw immediately that she was dying. I threw myself to the ground and
took her upon my knees. The princess assisted me in all of this, and we
combined our prayers to commend her soul to God. We observed a
moment later that a deathlike pallor covered her face, and although she
half opened her eyes, this only allowed us to see that their luster was
extinguished and that the spirit that had been able to animate them so
thoroughly had left its illustrious abode.... Our cries and tears filled the
whole garden, and little by little attracted the entire court.32

Leibniz, who was in Vienna at the time of Sophie’s death, wrote to Caroline a
month later:

Madam. The death of the electress has caused me great emotion. It

seems that I see her expiring in the arms of Your Serene Highness. This

32
K, IX, 460-61.

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 88 Gregory Brown

death was the one that she wished for. It is not she, it is Hanover, it is
England, it is I who have lost through it. The letter that Your Serene
Highness did the favor of writing me the day after the death of the
electress has been a great consolation to me. However, Madam, if you
do not wish to receive me like a poor piece of furniture inherited from
her, you will dismiss me from Hanover.... But let us not think too much
about her death, let us rather think about her happy and glorious life.
Your Serene Highness has to be, as it were, her metempsychosis [sa
metempsychose].33

The rest of Leibniz’s letter dwelt upon the English succession, and he told
Caroline:

You can scarcely have the succession of England more at heart than I
myself. For I consider it as the only way to save the reformed religion
and the public liberty.34

A little more than a month later, queen Anne died in England on 1/12 August,
thus triggering the provisions of the Settlement Act of 1701, whereby Sophie’s
son, Georg Ludwig, then became legal claimant to the English throne, and his
son and daughter-in-law became the prospective prince and princess of Wales.

IV. Leibniz and the Court in Vienna

Leibniz was then still in Vienna, where he had been for the previous year
and a half, moonlighting at the court of emperor Karl VI, where he had recently
received an appointment as imperial privy counselor, in part through the efforts
of the empress’s grandfather, Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.
Part of what had kept Leibniz in Vienna so long were his plans for establishing
an imperial society of sciences there, a project which the emperor had approved
at the beginning of Leibniz’s stay in January 1713. Leibniz was especially keen
on the project because without Sophie Charlotte’s protection the Society of
Sciences in Berlin had been languishing, and Leibniz was beginning to lose
control of the organization. But the death of queen Anne forced his hand, and
he arrived back in Hanover on 3/14 September, only to find that the king and
the electoral prince had already departed for England. Luckily, however, elec-
toral princess Caroline was still in Hanover when Leibniz arrived, presumably
to prepare herself and her children for the move to England. A week after his
arrival in Hanover Leibniz wrote a letter to count Bonneval35 in Vienna:
33
K, IX, 462-63.
34
K, IX, 464.
35
Count Bonneval was the adjutant to prince Eugène of Savoy.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 89

I came here in order to work during this winter on some things which
can free me from certain tasks36 that could delay my return to Vienna.
But I am at present distracted from them here as I was at Vienna since
the royal princess has wanted me to stay at Herrenhausen, where she
will be until her departure for England. But I am very pleased to enjoy
once more, as long as I can, the good graces of a princess so accom-
plished and so spiritual, who even wants to go over with me again
(would you believe it?) the Theodicy, which she has read more than
once. It seems to me that I intend you, sir, to accuse me of vanity, but I
intend what I have just said to be praise of the princess and not of my
work. For even if it be misguided, it is still a great thing that such a
princess, surrounded by everything that can dissipate the spirit, gives
so much attention to matters as elevated as those treated of in my work.
If I were in a position to obey Her Royal Highness, I would accompany
her to England.37

Although Leibniz did consider traveling to England with Caroline, it is

clear that by the time she left on 1/12 October 1714 he had resolved that his
interests really lay elsewhere, that is in Vienna. The prospect of founding and
directing an imperial academy of sciences, an institution that could draw on
talent from throughout the continent, was inducement enough; and the emperor
had already paid him the honor of issuing an official document, in August
1713, naming him president of the academy once it was established. During his
stay in Vienna, Leibniz had made a number of powerful friends, among them,
prince Eugène of Savoy, a legend in his own time, imperial field marshal and
statesman, who later became the teacher of Sophie Charlotte’s grandson,
Friedrich the Great. In his first letter to Caroline after her arrival in England,
Leibniz reported that count Bonneval had written from Vienna to say “that
prince Eugène asks why, not having gone to England, I do not return to Vienna,
where it is maintained that I ought not be badly off.”38
But as always women were among Leibniz’s most important friends in
Vienna. Although her grandfather and Leibniz’s friend, Duke Anton Ulrich of
Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, had died on 27 March 1714, three months before
Sophie, it is clear that Leibniz was by then independently on very good terms
with the empress Elisabeth Christine. But of apparently even greater impor-
tance was his relationship with the empress-dowager Wilhelmine Amalie, daugh-
ter of Leibniz’s first employer in Hanover, duke Johann Friedrich, and her mis-
tress of the robes, Fräulein Klenck, through whom all of the empress-dowager’s
correspondence passed, including that of Leibniz himself. On 17/28 June 1715
36
The allusion is to Leibniz’s history of the House of Brunswick.
37
K, XI, 14-15.
38
K, XI, 19-20.

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 90 Gregory Brown

he had written a long letter to the empress-dowager Amalie describing in detail

his plans for the imperial academy of sciences and suggesting a scheme for its
funding, but he also described his history of the House of Brunswick. Concern-
ing this the king’s minister Bernstorff had sent Leibniz a letter from London,
telling him that “you do well, sir, to remain in Hanover and to resume your
work there”; and he added that “you would not be able to make your court to
the king better, nor better make amends for past absences, than by presenting to
His Majesty, when he returns to Hanover, a good part of the work for which he
has waited a long time.”39 But in his letter to the empress dowager, Leibniz
stressed the importance of his work for establishing the rights of the empire.
Significantly, he referred to the work not simply as a history of the House of
Brunswick but as “the annals of the empire and of Brunswick,”40 and he told
the empress-dowager that “as I hope with the aid of God to see to it that this
work is put in a publishable state this year, I am ready to return to Vienna the
following year.”41 He thus made it clear even at this early date that he intended
to return to Vienna as soon as he had discharged his obligation to the king. A
week after writing his letter to the empress dowager Leibniz received a letter
from Fräulein Klenck with news concerning the proposed imperial academy of
sciences:

My silence would be unpardonable, sir, if I had not waited to write to

you that I had something to tell you about your interests in this country.
I have spoken to Count Schlick and to the Count Sinzendorf, who both
believe your presence is necessary in order to press for the execution
of the design for the academy, chiefly through what I have understood
from the first of these gentleman. He earnestly expects to contribute in
every way he can, and he repeated to me many times that you would do
well, if your affairs permitted you, to come here. Her Majesty the Em-
press has also ordered me to tell you that she has many times spoken
about your business, but it seems to her that as long as the new system
of finance is not in better shape, it is not possible to think about a new
establishment, like an academy, for which considerable funding would
be required.42

After adding some court gossip, Fräulein Klenck ended by saying,

You will see from the date of my letter that we are in the country. As it
is my favorite sojourn, I am in splendid health, and I should like some-

39
K, XI, 22.
40
K, XI, 41.
41
K, XI, 42.
42
K, XI, 45.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 91

time to have your conversation so that my stay here might lack nothing
as far as the pleasure I find in it. Honor me with your news and trust me
more than anyone....43

Fräulein Klenck’s closing line, “trust me more than anyone,” hints of court
intrigue and promises her help. A little over a year later Leibniz had occasion
to make use of it. On 9/20 September, just two months before his death, when
Georg Ludwig was still visiting in the Hanoverian electorate, Leibniz wrote to
both the empress-dowager Amalie and Fräulein Klenck. He was seeking assur-
ance from both of them that his salary as imperial privy counselor was not
being suspended, as rumor had reached him that it was. For his part, Leibniz
reassured the empress dowager that he was “preparing to be able to return to
Vienna when the king of Great Britain will have gone back across the sea,”44
and he ended by telling her that “as Your Imperial Majesty has had much kind-
ness for an old servant, I thought that I could have recourse to her protection in
a matter which concerns nearly all of the short life that remains to me, and that
I must order it upon the outcome of this affair.”45 To Fräulein Klenck he wrote,

Mademoiselle. Based on the wonderful expectations that I have formed

of the good graces and plans of the emperor, of which you yourself
have procured for me some declarations, I worked hard and fast to
complete my history, which is nearly finished, in order to prepare to
return to Vienna next year with the help of God, but astonishing news
of the cancellation of my wages lands me in great uncertainty. I do not
want to speak or write to any of the ministers about it, but I have re-
course to our incomparable empress to try to prevent the harm if there
is still time. But if the matter is done, and if it is done in conformity
with the intentions of the emperor, I must take precautions about this
as best I can. For to play the supplicant after that appears to me to be
unworthy of me. Have the kindness, Mademoiselle, to add to all your
past kindnesses that of extracting me from this difficulty, without speak-
ing about it to anyone except the empress. Mr. Théobald Schottel is the
only one I have written about it. He is an honorable man, and he will
take care of the matter.46

Fräulein Klenck’s reply reveals the value to Leibniz of her eyes and her
ears but of her friendship above all:

43
K, XI, 46.
44
K, XI, 193.
45
K, XI, 195.
46
K, XI, 191-92.

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 92 Gregory Brown

I am so persuaded, sir, that the news that has been given to you about
the suspension of the wages which you enjoy here is absolutely false
that I have resolved with our friend Théobald to prevent the empress
from acting in any fashion until we see if the quarter that is to be paid
in fifteen days will be withheld. Then we could ask for the explanation
of such a change. Would I dare tell you that you have some correspon-
dents here whose knowledge I believe to be very limited and who at
any rate do not do you any honor? I even fear that they would not make
very good use of the confidence that you could have in them, given the
poor state of their fortune, above all Mr. Corswaren, to whom the em-
peror no longer grants an audience, and Mr. Spedazzi. These men are
adventurers who pretend to do credit to your friendship, but who, if I
be permitted to speak so frankly, do not merit it. Our friend, who is a
perfectly honorable man, has hesitated to send you this warning, but I
think nothing of risking to send it to you, expecting that you will not
make any use of it which might be unpleasant for me; and after all
these gentlemen scarcely care about it. If I were not as much a friend to
you as I am, I would not give a detailed account, which is not very
suited to my temperament. I will give your memorandum to the em-
press as soon as I have the chance, and I will neglect nothing that can
be useful to your interests, but I think only your presence can repair
them completely.47

In a letter written to Leibniz on 18 November 1716, four days after his

death, the emperor’s inspector of antiquities, Karl Gustav Heraeus, paid tribute
to the efforts on Leibniz’s behalf of both the empress dowager and Fräulein
Klenck:

Sir. I am moved as so I ought to be by the particular confidence that

you do me the honor of showing me. And without concealing the ap-
pearances of a conceit, I sincerely confess that your approval takes the
place for me of many others, which I do not desire. What makes me
write this letter with more satisfaction than usual is that I am in a posi-
tion to verify what you have asserted concerning your wages, that you
probably have nothing to fear concerning them. It is true that all the
extraordinary pensions of the old counselors of the empire being abol-
ished, it was necessary to elicit some clarification about yours, and
you have a great obligation to the Majesty of the empress Amalie, for
an intervention which does honor to her protection of the world of
letters and to her judgment. You cannot ignore, sir, the share that Lady

47
K, XI, 195-96.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 93

Klenck takes in this obligation. If all the Ladies had the mind of this
one, they would profit more from a true glory which costs them so
little.48

V. Leibniz and the Court in England: Caroline, the Princess of Wales,

and the Dispute with Newton

The last letters that Leibniz wrote to the empress dowager and Fräulein
Klenck make it clear that during the nearly two years that had passed since
Caroline’s departure from Hanover Leibniz had not wavered in his decision to
abandon the prospect of England in favor of Vienna–and this despite several
pleas and wishes from the princess in the interim that he might join her there. It
is clear that his plans for the imperial society of sciences weighed heavily in
this decision. But at least as important as this was the priority dispute with
Newton over the discovery of the calculus which had been simmering for sev-
eral years and had come to a boil in the months preceding and following the
Hanoverian succession. Matters had come to a head in February of 1713 with
the publication of the Commercium epistolicum, the notorious report of the
Royal Society, written by the Society’s then president, Isaac Newton himself,
and rubber-stamped by a select committee of his supporters—which upheld
John Keill’s charge that Leibniz had stolen the calculus from Newton.49
England’s well was thus forever poisoned for Leibniz. Nonetheless, it is clear
that Leibniz thought that Caroline’s presence in England as the future queen
could provide a means for his vindication against Newton. For Caroline was
Leibniz’s last real friend from his Hanoverian circle, his last disciple. In a letter
to her in January 1715, just three months after her departure for England, Leibniz
chose to remind Caroline of some shared and intimate history: “for me, madam,”
he wrote, “you take the place of queens and electresses.”50 The allusion to
Sophie and Sophie Charlotte could not have been clearer, nor the burden more
heavy than the one it placed upon Caroline’s affections.
As his correspondence with Caroline unfolded in the following months,
Leibniz’s plans became clear. One aspect had actually been broached in the
very first letter he had written to Caroline in England, probably at the begin-
ning of December 1714. After having reported that the sight of Hanover was so
“unbearable” for him in her absence that he had had to travel to Saxony in
order to recover himself, he went on to tell her that he intended to spend the

48
K, XI, 233-34.
49
In a paper he wrote in 1708, and which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society in 1710, Keill accused Leibniz not only of stealing Newton’s method of fluxions,
but also of deliberately trying to cover up his thievery by changing “the name and symbolism”
(see A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War [New York, 1980], 145).
50
K, XI, 31.

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winter working on his history of the House of Brunswick, and this led him to
propose that the king make him an historiographer of Great Britain.51 He made
the same proposal in a letter to the king’s minister Bernstorff. Caroline got a
negative response when she put the proposal to the king, and sometime around
the beginning of May 1715 Leibniz received the following note from Fräulein
Pölnitz:

I just received a letter from Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales.
She writes me these words: “I am reading the books of Locke. Those
on the understanding appear good to me, but completely ignorant as I
am, I should think that there would be some response to them, and I
believe that Mr. Leibniz will be of my view. I bid you to tell him that
I will not respond to him until the king grants me the office he de-
sires.”52

In responding to this Leibniz informed Caroline, apparently for the first time,
of his dispute with Newton, and he explained his desire for the position in the
following way:

What Your Royal Highness communicated to me through Mademoi-

selle Pöllnitz can be considered a very remarkable favor or a very great
threat. It is only on the condition that she obtain from the king the
office that I request that she gives me hope of being able to see again
one day her precious hand-writing addressed to me.... It is true that
what makes me aspire to it is in good part a point of honor. I would not
want to concede any of it to a certain antagonist that the English have
placed in front of me. Your Royal Highness will perhaps know that the
Chevalier Newton has a pension from the king, because he has super-
intendence of the mint, which the king has entrusted to him.

Then in an attempt to place the dispute in terms that might appeal to Caroline’s
sense of national pride he added:

I dare say that if the king were at least to make me the equal of Mr.
Newton in all things and in all respects, then in these circumstances it
would give honor to Hanover and to Germany in my name. And the
title of historian with which I aspire to be distinguished furnishes a
fine occasion for it.53

51
K, XI, 19-20.
52
K, XI, 37.
53
K, XI, 38.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 95

He went on to tell Caroline that he had not had time to respond to the Newtonians,
saying that he “prefer[s] to satisfy the king by publishing my annals” and add-
ing that “His Majesty will better be able to refute them than I by treating me as
the equal of Chevalier Newton, which will assuredly sting these gentlemen
who have little love for Hanover.” Newton “is my rival,” he declared, “and that
is all there is to say.”54
Although Caroline continued to champion his cause to the king, in the end
nothing came of Leibniz’s request. Not only was there the matter of the Act of
Settlement, which forbade grant of British offices to foreigners, a prohibition
that the king had assiduously respected55; but there was perhaps more impor-
tantly the matter of Newton. We have seen that Leibniz hoped that his appoint-
ment would “sting,” as he expressed it to Caroline, Newton, and his support-
ers; but then this very fact would just as surely have led Georg Ludwig’s En-
glish ministers to advise strongly against the appointment, given that Newton
was the ornament of England and that Leibniz had been portrayed as his mortal
enemy. Georg Ludwig could scarcely afford to alienate such an important con-
stituency when the legitimacy of his own nascent reign was still so much in
doubt. Faced with these realities, Caroline could do nothing but attempt, as she
did with increasing fervor as her correspondence with Leibniz progressed, to
reconcile the two rivals.
The second aspect of Leibniz’s strategy involved an attempt to have his
Theodicy translated into English and published with a dedication to Caroline
with her imprimatur. This project grew out of a conscious effort on Leibniz’s
part to turn his dispute with the Newtonians from one narrowly focused on
mathematics to one having to do with a subject that Leibniz knew Caroline
could appreciate and on which she could be expected to be in complete sympa-
thy with him, given her admiration for the Theodicy. Thus in his famous letter
to Caroline of November 1715 initiating the dispute with Clarke, Leibniz threw
down the gauntlet to the English philosophers in this very pointed way: “Natu-
ral Religion itself seems to decay (in England) very much.”56 Although the
Theodicy project came to be a central and recurring theme of the letters ex-
changed between Caroline and Leibniz during the period of the correspon-
dence with Clarke, it, too, came in the end to nothing. One sticking point was in
finding a suitable translator. Initially Caroline reported that her friend the Bishop
of Lincoln (William Wake) “assures me that there is no on capable of it except
Dr. Clarke, whose books I have sent you”; but she added ominously that “this
man is an intimate of the Chevalier Newton, and I do not believe the matter is
in very good hands.”57 After having spoken with Clarke and having shown him

54
K, XI, 39.
55
See Hatton, George I, 156.
56
K, XI, 54.
57
K, XI, 50.

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Leibniz’s indictment of English philosophy, she later firmly declared that “he
is too much of the opinion of Sir Isaac Newton, and I am myself engaged in a
dispute with him.”58 Eventually, on 18 August 1716, Leibniz was able to report
to Caroline that “a good translator has been found and a bookseller who wants
to have it printed.”59 But time was by then growing very short, for Leibniz died
scarcely three months later, and with his death the Theodicy project was aban-
doned. Even if it had succeeded, Clarke had taken measures to ensure that it
would be but a Pyrrhic victory, for Caroline reported to Leibniz that Clarke
would write a response to the Theodicy and that “the response will also be
dedicated to me.”60
It is hard to read the letters exchanged between Leibniz and Caroline after
her arrival in England without a profound sense of sadness. Although they do
have their light and uplifting moments, these are always played out against the
dark and dreary backdrop of Leibniz’s dispute with the Newtonians, and Caroline
was caught squarely in the middle. Caroline, who was faced almost from the
moment of her arrival in England with a barrage of Newtonian propaganda to
win her over and away from Leibniz, slowly bent and then finally broke under
the relentless onslaught. By the end, one has the sense of having seen it all
coming, and Leibniz himself was clearly worried from the beginning. In the
first letter that she sent to Leibniz after her arrival in England Caroline had
enclosed a letter from minister Bernstorff as well, and Leibniz’s response re-
veals his uneasy state of mind:

It appears that Your Royal Highness has chosen to take pleasure in

honoring me with a letter in which everything was mysterious and some-
what strange, and it seems that She has chosen to present me with an
enigma for exercising the mind.... The response of others placed inside
instead of that of Your Royal Highness prevents me from distinguish-
ing her sentiments, which are laws for me, from those of others.61

That very day he also wrote to the countess Bückenbourg, who had been with
Caroline when Sophie died at Herrenhausen and who had accompanied Caroline
to England:

I hope that Her Royal Highness will not have abandoned us entirely in
favor of the English, nor will have chosen to diminish her kindnesses
to us through division, as the sun does not shine less on each in order to

58
K, XI, 52.
59
K, XI, 132.
60
K, XI, 197.
61
K, XI, 32.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 97

shine on several. Your Excellency who belongs to us [i.e., the Ger-

mans] will take care of us in this regard, and I hope that you, Madam,
will choose to protect me in particular against the harmful effects of
the absence that I have only too much reason to fear.62

At various times throughout the rest of the correspondence Leibniz expressed

worries that Caroline had forgotten him or that she had changed her feelings
toward him. In her letter to him of 3/14 November 1715, she asked “how do
you come to believe, sir, that I am able to forget a man such as you?”; “the
whole world,” she said, “would remind me of you.”63 Afterwards, when the
correspondence with Clarke was well underway, Leibniz again expressed wor-
ries about Caroline’s loyalty to him, and in her letter of 13/24 April 1716 she
asked “whence does it come that you suspect me of not being the same for
you?,” and she added that “I believe that to be loyal to our friends is one of the
points of our duty, and I appeal to the king [on your behalf] on account of it.”64
But as if to confirm the worries she had sought to dispel, she then told Leibniz
that “last Saturday I had ... Mr. Clarke from 6 till 10 o’clock ... [and his] knowl-
edge and manner of clear reasoning has nearly converted me in favor of the
vacuum.”65 And then there was a most portentous P.S.:

The day after tomorrow we will have the experiments of Chevalier

Newton. The king has a made a room available for this. I wish you
were here for that, and also for Saturday, when Chevalier Newton ...
and Mr. Clarke will be with me.66

Three weeks later she wrote again in order to send Clarke’s third paper, and she
ended by saying:

Tomorrow we will see the experiments on colors, and one that I have
seen to prove the vacuum has nearly converted me. It is your business
sir, to bring me back to the right path, and I await the response that you
will make to Clarke.67

If there is a clear turning point in Caroline’s allegiances, it occurs in these last

two letters, and it is thus ironic that in the second of them she signed off by
writing: “You will find me, despite your suspicions, always the same.”68 Some
62
K, XI, 33
63
K, XI, 49.
64
K, XI, 90.
65
K, XI, 91.
66
K, XI, 92.
67
K, XI, 93.
68
K, XI, 93.

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 98 Gregory Brown

variation of this became her standard signoff for the rest of the correspondence
with Leibniz. When Leibniz wrote again on 1/12 May, he began by “beg[ging]
the pardon of Your Royal Highness if I feared some coolness,” but he noted
that “Your Royal Highness has seemed a little wavering, not in her good will
towards me, but perhaps in her good opinion of me and my opinions, above all
since the translation of the Theodicy remains in arrears.”69 To this letter he
attached a P.S. in which he attacked the doctrine of atoms and the void. In her
reply of 15/26 May Caroline insisted that “you have reason to beg my pardon,
sir, for having suspected me of not being the same for you, as your merit would
bind me to you always.”70 Still, she seemed to ignore Leibniz’s P.S. against
atoms and the void: “I am in on the experiments,” she gushed, “and I am more
and more charmed by colors. I can’t help being a little biased in favor the
vacuum.”71 When she finally did come to mention Leibniz’s P.S., it was only to
say that “I have given it to the king, that he may never quit thinking about
you.”72 But the king was not the only one to whom Caroline gave Leibniz’s P.S.
on atoms and the void, for she sent a copy of it forthwith to Newton, apparently
for his comments.73 It may well be that, in a fine reversal of loyalties she was
now seeking Newton’s help in answering Leibniz as she had initially sought
Leibniz’s help in answering Clarke.
In any case as one reads through the remaining letters, and it becomes
increasingly clear that Caroline was in fact no longer the same for Leibniz, her
signature line begins to ring hollow and appears to lack all conviction. Her last
letter to Leibniz, written just two weeks before his death for the purpose of
transmitting Clarke’s fifth paper, was a thin, four-sentence affair, flatly non-
committal on the dispute that had occupied them for so long:

I add these few lines to the response of Dr. Clarke. I hope that you find
it at least pleasant even if you do not find it favorable. I have made the
acquaintance of a man who admires you a lot, the archbishop of Dublin.
I will respond to your letters in the following post, and I will always be
the same for you.74

VI. Leibniz’s Death and the Court in Paris: Madame, Elisabeth Charlotte

When Leibniz died on 14 November, the king was still visiting in the
Hanoverian electorate. When Leibniz was buried in Hanover a month later, on
69
K, XI, 102.
70
K, XI, 112.
71
K, XI, 112.
72
K, XI, 113.
73
See Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (New York, 1980),
778.
74
K, XI, 198.

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 Leibniz and the Ladies of the Courts 99

14 December, the king and his party were at the hunting lodge in Göhrde, within
seventy miles of Hanover. But neither the king nor any of his party deigned to
attend the burial. John Ker of Kersland, a Scotsman of Leibniz’s acquaintance,
was in Hanover the day Leibniz died and later wrote:

I must confess, it afforded me matter of strange reflection, when I per-

ceived the little regard that was paid to his ashes by the Hanoverians;
for he was buried in a few days after his decease, more like a robber
than, what he really was, the ornament of his country.75

Just when Caroline first heard the news of Leibniz’s death is unclear. In any
event she might have been forgiven her lack of an immediate response, for
within hours after Leibniz’s own death she had gone into a difficult labor with
her second son, and five days later she had very nearly lost her own life in
giving birth to a stillborn infant. But the months passed with no official word
from either London or Berlin. Finally, on 13 November 1717 Fontenelle read
the eulogy that he had prepared for Leibniz before the Royal Academy of Sci-
ences in Paris, from which I quoted at the beginning of this paper. Fontenelle
had not prepared the tribute on his own accord but at the behest of Elisabeth
Charlotte, the niece who had stayed with her aunt Sophie so many years before
during the family’s early years in Osnabrück. In 1671 she had married Philippe
I of Orléans, the younger brother of Louis XIV, and had then moved to Paris.
For the rest of her life she carried on an extensive correspondence with her
Palatinate relatives, asking them to write to her in German so that she could
keep her native tongue. Although she had never met Leibniz, Elisabeth Char-
lotte knew of him through her aunt Sophie, who had written often to her about
Leibniz. At one point Liselotte wrote to Sophie to tell her that “she could not
really be sad when she had Leibniz by her, for she had seen from all he had
written that he must be good company.”76 In September 1715, just a year before
his death, she had finally entered into direct correspondence with Leibniz.77
She had heard that upon his deathbed Leibniz had refused to take Holy Com-
munion, had said that he had harmed no one and therefore had nothing to con-
fess.78 She wrote then to Friedrich von Harling, the husband of her late and
one-time governess Katharina, who had remained with Sophie to become the
governess of Sophie Charlotte. “I cannot believe,” she told von Harling,

75
K, XI, xxxvi.
76
Aiton, Leibniz: A Biography, 255.
77
Ibid., 327.
78
Benson Mates, The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language (New York, 1986),
30.

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 100 Gregory Brown

that he had had need of priests around him; they could teach him noth-
ing, for he knew more about it than them all. A habit does not make a
true belief in God, and communion, considered as the result of habit,
has no moral value, if the heart is destitute of laudable sentiments. I
have no doubt at all about the salvation of M. Leibniz.79

As matters turned out, as E. J. Aiton observed at the end of his biography of

Leibniz,

it was Sophie’s niece, Liselotte (whom he had never met), who re-
mained his most loyal friend among the great and secured for him in a
foreign land the ceremonial recognition that his own countrymen had
been either too indifferent or too bigoted to give.80

University of Houston.

79
Elisabeth Charlotte, Correspondence complète de Madame duchesse d’Orléans, née
Princesse Palatine, mere du regent, tr. M. G. Brunet (2 vols.; Paris, 1886), II, 277-78.
80
Aiton, Leibniz: A Biography, 350.

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