Lives of the Queens of England of the House of Hanover (Complete‪)‬

When George I. ascended the throne of England, the heralds provided him with an ancestry. They pretended that his Majesty, who had few god-like virtues of his own, was descended from that deified hero Woden, whose virtues, according to the bards, were all of a god-like quality. The two had little in common, save lack of true-heartedness toward their wives.

The more modest builders of ancestral pride, who ventured to water genealogical trees for all the branches of Brunswick to bud upon, did not dig deeper for a root, or go farther for a fountain head, than into the Italian soil of the year 1028. Even then, they found nothing more or less noble than a certain Azon d’Este, Marquis of Tuscany, who having little of sovereign about him, except his will, joined the banner of the Emperor Conrad, and hoped to make a fortune in Germany, either by cutting throats, or by subduing hearts whose owners were heiresses of unencumbered lands.

Azon espoused Cunegunda of Guelph, a lady who was not only wealthy, but who was the last of her race. The household was a happy one; and when an heir to its honours appeared in the person of Guelph d’Este the Robust, the court-poet who foretold brilliant fortunes for his house failed to see the culminating brilliancy which awaited it in Britain.

This same Prince ‘Robust,’ when he had come to man’s estate, wooed no maiden heiress as his father had done, but won the widowed sister-in-law of our great Harold, Judith, daughter of Baldwin de Lisle, Count of Flanders, and widow of Tostic, Earl of Kent. He took her by the hand while she was yet seated under the shadow of her great sorrow, and, looking up at Guelph the Robust, she smiled and was comforted.

Guelph was less satisfactorily provided with wealth than the comely Judith; but Guelph and Judith found favour in the eyes of the Emperor Henry IV., who forthwith ejected Otho of Saxony from his possessions in Bavaria, and conferred the same, with a long list of rights and appurtenances, on the newly-married couple.

These possessions were lost to the family by the rebellion of Guelph’s great-grandson against Frederick Barbarossa. The disinherited prince, however, found fortune again, by help of a marriage and an English king. He had been previously united to Maud, the daughter of Henry II., and his royal father-in-law took unwearied pains to find some one who could afford him material assistance. He succeeded, and Guelph received, from another emperor, the gift of the countships of Brunswick and Luneburg. Otho IV. raised them to duchies, and William (Guelph) was the first duke of the united possessions, about the year 1200.

The early dukes were for the most part warlike, but their bravery was rather of a rash and excitable character than heroically, yet calmly firm. Some of them were remarkable for their unhappy tempers, and they acquired names which unpleasantly distinguish them in this respect. Henry was not only called the ‘young,’ from his years, and ‘the black,’ from his swarthiness, but ‘the dog,’ because of his snarling propensities. So Magnus, who was surnamed ‘the collared,’ in allusion to the gold chain which hung from his bull neck, was also known as the ‘insolent’ and the ‘violent,’ from the circumstance that he was ever either insufferably haughty or insanely passionate.

The House of Brunswick has, at various times, been divided into the branches of Brunswick-Luneburg, Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Brunswick-Zell, Brunswick-Danneberg, &c. These divisions have arisen from marriages, transfers, and interchanges. The first duke who created a division was Duke Bernard, who, early in the fifteenth century, exchanged with a kinsman his duchy of Brunswick for that of Luneburg, and so founded the branch which bears, or bore, that double name.