Noble Endeavours, by Miranda Seymour – review

Like Miranda Seymour, the author of this considerable work on Anglo-German relations, I was raised in a Germanophile home. I spent summer holidays on the Bodensee and, after graduating from university, lived for a year in Munich and then another in Berlin. It seems to me a pity that my children and most of my friends, familiar with the Dordogne, Tuscany, California, New York and Rajasthan, have never been to the Black Forest or the Bavarian Alps; have never visited Potsdam, Dresden, Würzburg, Freiberg, Heidelberg, Regensburg or Passau; in fact know next to nothing of either the culture or civilisation of the largest nation in western Europe.

Yet there have been throughout our history many Britons who loved Germany and Germans who loved Britain. Seymour gives the history of this cultural cross-pollination. Her heroes and heroines are men like Herbert Suzbach, a German-Jewish refugee who, when released from internment during the second world war, set up a programme to detoxify German POWs and persuade them of the value of liberty, democracy and the rule of law.

Noble Endeavours starts with the wedding of Elisabeth, the daughter of King James I, to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, in 1612. The Protestant Frederick, later crowned King of Bohemia, was defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain by the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and lost his throne. Elisabeth lived out her life as a refugee in the Hague. She was not to know that the Act of Settlement of 1701, to exclude the Catholic Stuarts from the English throne, settled it on her Protestant descendants. Better a German than a papist.

We learn much from Seymour about Elisabeth’s descendants. Queen Victoria married a German princeling, Albert of Saxe-Coburg (pictured overleaf), and the two spoke German together when alone.