She went to court to serve the Queen of Prussia and married the queen's husband. The queen remained his wife. Sophie acquired a marriage ceremony, but considerably less say in her husband's affairs than she was prepared to accept.
Sophie Juliane Friederike von Dönhoff was born on 17 October 1768 at Beynuhnen in East Prussia, into a noble family with land of its own. She came to the Prussian court in 1789 as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Frederica Louisa. She sang and played the piano well, and her beauty attracted the attention of the queen's husband, Frederick William II. Within a year, the young woman in the queen's household had become another of the king's wives.
There was already a place in his life for such an arrangement. His previous morganatic wife, Julie von Voß, had died in 1789. In April 1790, Sophie married him in the chapel at Charlottenburg Palace. She was twenty-one. Frederica Louisa was still Queen of Prussia, and the ceremony did nothing to alter that.
A morganatic marriage joined people whose rank was considered unequal. Sophie was noble, but she did not belong to a reigning house, and marrying a king did not make her a queen. Their children would have no claim to his throne. The unequal rank explained the limits placed on the marriage; the continued existence of his first wife made it an additional one. Frederick William had found a way to marry again without giving up the marriage he already had.
Sophie, however, did not confine herself to being agreeable. She challenged the influence of Wilhelmine Encke, the king's longstanding companion, and of Hans Rudolf von Bischoffwerder, one of his trusted advisers. These were relationships that had existed before her wedding and continued afterwards. Being his wife gave her access to him. It did not give her precedence over everyone whose advice he preferred.
In the spring of 1792, as Prussia prepared to go to war with revolutionary France, Sophie argued against the campaign. She told the king she would give him up altogether if he entered so important and difficult an undertaking with such levity. It was a judgement about war and its consequences, offered by a woman whose place beside him was supposed to have rather less to do with either. Frederick William rejected her interference in politics.
He had married her. He had not appointed her to advise him.
Their son, Friedrich Wilhelm, had been born in January 1792. By the summer, the couple had separated and Sophie had been sent away from court. She went to Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, then a principality belonging to the Prussian king, and their daughter, Julie, was born there in 1793.
In November 1793, Sophie came back to Potsdam and handed both children to the king. She was not received at court again. The children were brought up by Wilhelmine Encke, the companion whose influence Sophie had tried to break.
Sophie was given a pension and sent to live in Angermünde. In 1794 she sold her share of the family's East Prussian estates to her sister, and the following year she moved into a house built for her there, set in a large park. Her circumstances were comfortable by most standards. Comfort was something a royal pension could supply. It did not come with her children.
In September 1794, she wrote to the writer Isabelle de Charrière, who lived near Neuchâtel. Sophie believed that no one had ever loved, or ever would love, as she had loved the king. Yet that love, she wrote, could not oblige her to speak against her conscience and the truth. She had loved him. She had also disagreed with him.
Years passed before she bought Beerbaum, an estate in the Barnim countryside, in 1805. This was a property to manage, with land, buildings and people whose livelihoods depended upon its operation. Sophie took up that work. The woman whose political opinions had been unwelcome at court now had decisions of her own to make.
She followed the agricultural principles of the reformer Albrecht Daniel Thaer and introduced improvements to the estate. She had houses built from clay for the families who lived and worked there. Later, in 1817 and 1818, she had an elaborately furnished manor house built for herself. There was room in her expenditure for a handsome house and for better accommodation for the people around it.
There was also the question of the children's schooling. The nearest school was in Tuchen, about an hour's walk away. Sophie had a schoolhouse built at Beerbaum and engaged a teacher herself. The responsible authority objected to her acting on her own initiative. Her answer was that the main thing was for the children of her people not to walk to Tuchen and make themselves ill in winter. The journey was the problem she had addressed, and she stood by the provision she had made.
Nobody had appointed her to provide a school, either. She provided one anyway.
Beerbaum remained her home until her death on 28 January 1834. At Charlottenburg, she had married a king who already had a queen, and her own children had been raised in another woman's care. At Beerbaum, the children of her estate had a school close to home. Sophie paid the teachers herself.
