The House of Brunswick:
The Leibniz Connection
In 1668, shortly after receiving his doctoral degree in law from the University of Altdorf, Leibniz accepted employment as lawyer, librarian, and foreign affairs advisor to Johann Christian Freiherr von Boyneburg and the archbishop-Elector of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn. Then, at the end of 1669 and upon the recommendation of the Swedish Ambassador in Frankfurt, Leibniz was invited to Hanover by Johann Friedrich (1625-1679), Duke of Brunswick - Lüneburg - Calenberg (Hanover). Although Leibniz declined the offer at the time, the duke's overture was the beginning of what was to become a long and fateful association between Leibniz and the royal House of Brunswick. Being the only brother of four who had converted to Catholicism, Duke Johann Friedrich had a natural interest in religious matters, and in May of 1671 Leibniz sent him two of his writings on religious themes. Leibniz appears to have met Johann Friedrich in person in Frankfurt early in October 1671, and later that month he again wrote to the Duke, describing his research in various fields.
In 1672 Leibniz found himself in Paris on a diplomatic mission at the behest of Baron von Boynebureg. But on 15 December of that very year, Baron von Boyneburg died. The Elector von Schönborn died shortly thereafter, while Leibniz was on his first trip to London. During this trip, Leibniz had demonstrated a model of his new calculating machine to the Royal Society, and primarily on the strength of that he was later unanimously elected as a Fellow of the Society on 19 April 1673. After returning to Paris, where he was desperate to remain after having experienced the excitement of its intellectual life, Leibniz sought patronage from the new Elector of Mainz; and although the new Elector allowed him to remain in Paris without jeopardy to his post as advisor to the court and judge in the High Court of Appeal, Leibniz's salary remained suspended.
For some time after the death of the Baron von Boineburg and the Elector von Schönborn, Leibniz remained in the employ of the Boineburg family, tutoring and looking after the late baron's son, who had been sent to Paris for his studies shortly before his father's death. But due to misunderstandings and disputes with the family he was eventually dismissed in September of 1674. At the beginning of 1676, still in Paris but without any firm prospects for employment, Leibniz received another offer of employment from Johann Friedrich's Counselor to the court at Hanover—which offer he now promptly accepted. His hope, however, was to remain in Paris as a political representative of both the duke and the elector of Mainz. On 27 January 1676 Leibniz was officially appointed Counselor to Duke Johann Friedrich. But September still found Leibniz in Paris, and toward the end of that month he was informed that duke Johann Friedrich was growing impatient for him to arrive in Hanover to take up his official duties. His options exhausted, Leibniz bowed to the inevitable and finally departed Paris, never to return, on 4 October 1676.
Leibniz had elected to follow a rather circuitous route to Hanover, stopping first for a brief, second, and final visit to London on 18 October. When he left London a little over a week later, he was bound for the Continent, but due to delays in the crossing he did not finally arrive in Rotterdam for another 14 days. From Rotterdam he traveled to Amsterdam and eventually to The Hague, where he was able to engage Benedict Spinoza in a number of long conversations. Toward the end of December he finally arrived in Hanover to assume his duties as Counselor and Librarian at the court of Johann Friedrich.
Johan Friedrich was the third eldest of four brothers born to Georg (1582-1641), Duke of Brunswick - Lüneburg - Calenberg (Hanover) and founder of the New House of Brunswick - Lüneburg. This royal house was descended from the Welfs, the oldest authenticated royal family line in Europe. Johann Friedrich assumed the rule in Lüneburg - Calenberg upon the death of his eldest brother Christian Ludwig (1622-1665) in 1665. When Johann Friedrich died in 1641, his youngest brother, Ernst August (1629-1698), assumed the rule in Lüneburg - Calenberg. Ernst August retained Leibniz in the position he had occupied under his brother Johann Friedrich; but in 1696 Ernst August elevated Leibniz to the position of Privy Counselor of Justice, a judicial office ranking just below that of Vice-Chancellor.
Shortly after he had become duke of Lüneburg - Calenberg, Ernst August put Leibniz to work on a history of his royal House of Brunswick. The idea for writing a history of the House of Brunswick was apparently first proposed by Leibniz himself in a letter to Prime Minister Franz Ernst von Platen shortly after Ernst August assumed power in Hanover. While in Venice in April 1685, the Duke apparently became interested in tracing his own Welf lineage back to the Italian House of Este, a connection that Leibniz was eventually able to establish. Work on the history gave Leibniz an excuse to travel, and he spent most of the years between 1687 and 1690 traveling in Southern Germany, Austria, and Italy, consulting with scholars and studying manuscripts and records in a variety of libraries and monasteries. In the end, Leibniz was never able to complete the history, although the three volumes of his history were eventually published after his death. The work on the history plagued Leibniz for the rest of his life, and in a letter to the Jesuit mathematician Adam Kochanski he noted that writing the history bound him like the stone of Sisyphus.
In 1692, due in no small part to the negotiations and research of Leibniz, the ninth Electorate in the Holy Roman Empire was conferred upon Ernst August and the House of Brunswick - Hanover - Celle (the New House of Brunswick - Lüneburg). But there had been a keen rivalry for the electorate between Hanover and the other branch of the House of Brunswick - Lüneburg, that of Wolfenbüttel. This had put Leibniz in a rather delicate position, since he was not only in the employ of Ernst August but also on friendly terms with the two ruling dukes in Wolfenbüttel, duke Rudolf August (1627-1704) and his younger brother duke Anton Ulrich (1633-1714), who coveted the new electorate for himself. Indeed, at the beginning of 1691 the dukes of Brunswick - Wolfenbüttel had appointed Leibniz the Director of the Wolfenbüttel Library.
Ernst August's wife, Sophie (1630-1714), became a close friend, philosophical confidant, and correspondent of Leibniz, as eventually did her daughter, Sophie Charlotte (1668-1705), as well. In 1688 Sophie Charlotte became the electress of Brandenburg, and she helped Leibniz to convince her husband, the elector Friedrich III. (1657-1713), to establish the Society (later Academy) of Sciences in Berlin in 1700. Leibniz was appointed the first president of the Society. A year later, in 1701, Sophie Charlotte's husband ascended the throne as the first king of Prussia (Friedrich I.), and Sophie Charlotte thus became the first queen of Prussia.
A third women to play a significant role in Leibniz's life was Caroline (1683-1737), Princess of Brandenburg - Ansbach. While visiting Sophie Charlotte and her mother Sophie at Sophie Charlotte's palace at Lützenburg (later, Charlottenburg) outside Berlin in the autumn of 1704, Leibniz met the twenty-one-year-old Caroline, of whom he eventually became the good friend and tutor. They corresponded until the end of Leibniz's life in 1716, and she played an important role as go-between in the famous correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke. In 1705 Caroline became an official member of the royal House of Brunswick - Lüneburg when she married Georg August (1683-1760).
Georg August was the only son of Georg Ludwig (1660-1727), who was the eldest son of Sophie and Ernst August. Georg August's mother was in fact Georg Ludwig's first cousin, Princess Sophie Dorothea (1666-1726), the only daughter of Ernst August's elder brother, Duke Georg Wilhelm (1624-1705) of Lüneburg - Celle.
With the death of his father Ernst August in 1698, Georg Ludwig became the Elector of Hanover. Then in 1701, through the Act of Settlement, the English Parliament decided to amend the law of succession to the throne in favor of the Protestant House of Stuart. In default of heirs from William III. of Orange (1650-1702)—who had ruled alone in England after the death of his wife, Queen Mary II. (1662-1694)—or Anne (1665-1714), Mary's sister, the Act declared that the English crown would settle upon "the most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and duchess-dowager of Hanover" and "the heirs of her body, being Protestant." But Sophie died in her beloved park at Herrenhausen on 8 June 1714, and it was her son, Georg Ludwig, Elector of Brunswick - Lüneburg (Hanover), who, upon the death of Queen Anne (1665-1714) on 12 August 1714, moved to London, along with his only son, Georg August, to become the first Hanoverian to ascend the British throne. On 12 October 1714, Caroline, the new Princess of Wales, followed her husband and her father-in-law to London. When they transplanted to London, Caroline and Georg August left their then seven-year-old eldest son, Friedrich Ludwig (1707-1751), behind in Hanover. He did not rejoin them until 1727, shortly after Georg August had ascended the throne.
Georg I. Ludwig, who had never fully appreciated the extent of his Privy Counselor's genius and fame, and had always been rather ill-disposed towards him, refused to summon Leibniz to join the royal family in London, ostensibly on the grounds that Leibniz had not made progress—sufficient, at least, to satisfy the king—on writing the history of the king's royal House of Brunswick with which he had been commissioned so many years before. In December 1714 Leibniz petitioned the King, through Caroline and the king's Hanoverian Prime Minister, to make him historiographer of England on the grounds that his history of the House of Brunswick required him to take account of the history of England. The King refused, but Caroline continued to champion Leibniz's cause. In September 1715 she told Leibniz that she had again spoken to the King about his desire to become historiographer of England, but the King replied that "he must first show me that he can write history; I hear that he is diligent."
Leibniz was never called to London by Georg I., and he died at the age of seventy in Hanover at 10 PM on Saturday 14 November 1716. His funeral and burial took place on 14 December. At the time, Georg I. was in Germany on a visit to his Electorate; he and his retinue were at the hunting lodge at Göhrde, near Lüneburg, and within easy reach of Hanover. But though the entire Court was invited to attend Leibniz's funeral, none of them appeared. Leibniz was buried in an unmarked grave.
Sources
- The Encyclopædia Britannica, 13th edition. New York: The Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1926.
- Aiton, E. J. Leibniz: A Biography. Boston: Adam Hilger, 1985.
- Hatton, Ragnhild Marie. George I: Elector and King. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.
- Mates, Benson. The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.