Henriette Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel

She and her successor as abbess, Elisabeth Ernestine Antonie, were well connected and great patrons of the arts: in the judgement of certain historians they presided over something of a golden age at Gandersheim.

This would have been principally designed to provide her with a small independent income ("benefice"), though even by the standards of the time it would have been a little unusual to confer such an office on an eleven year old.

On 2 November 1687, having achieved the necessary age, she was installed in her office with due solemnity in her father's presence, though at this stage she continued to live at the princely court with her family.

Just under six months after the death of her cousin, the Abbess Christina on 30 June 1693, however, the chapter unanimously elected Henriette Christine to take over as her successor, on 21 December 1693.

At the same time, as also agreed, a compensation payment was handed over in respect of a lost legal case concerning a hunting dispute at nearby Ellierode.

In practice Rudolf Augustus had generally been content for his ambitious younger brother, who was seen as "politically astute" to take a lead on matters of governance ever since 1685.

Duke Anthony Ulrich's own perspective was turned upside down between 1704 1708 by the engagement (in 1704) marriage (in 1708) of his famously beautiful teenage granddaughter, Elisabeth Christine, to the young prince who in 1711 would become the Emperor Charles VI.

The young people had been engaged since 1704, and the resulting dynastic alliance put an end, for Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, to the political tensions which under most circumstances were inherent in the power relationships between Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperors and the leading princes of the empire.

From the perspective of later historiography it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Leuckfeld also shares in the responsibility for the incomplete condition of the surviving archives at Gandersheim Abbey.

Meanwhile, on 5 March 1709 a contract was agreed between the Abbess Henriette Christine and her father, the Duke, formalising the revocation of Gandersheim's interest in the minor monasteries (but evidently important archival repositories) at Clus and Brunshausen.

Between 1696 and 1707 she oversaw the renovation of the choir area comprising the east end of the abbey church, being that part of the building which was the focus of the sisters' daily routine, and which had fallen into a state of disrepair during and since the upheavals of the reformation.

In 1697 it was at the suggestion of the abbess that the most valuable medieval piece from the monastic treasury was sold to a Jewish merchant identified in the accounting records as Lazarus Levin, in order to be melted down by the specialist jewellers and metallurgists of Osterode.

For Abbess Henriette Christine there are suggestions that she began to slide back towards the old faith after 24 March 1698, when the monastic chapter asked her to place her signature on a document consisting of a Christian Creed.

[1][2] Arranging for the engagement of his thirteen-year-old granddaughter to the young man who would one day become emperor was a very considerable political-dynastic achievement on the part of Duke Anthony Ulrich.

In 1707 having duly been persuaded of the benefits, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel converted to Roman Catholicism, and on 1 May 1707 was welcomed back into the true church in a great ceremony, at Bamberg Cathedral, which was conducted by the Archbishop-elector of Mainz.

In the immediate aftermath of the event, the word was put about that "an unknown stranger had violated the abbess", but by September it was generally accepted that the conception had resulted from an entirely consensual affair.

The child was the son of a minor German aristocrat called Georg Christoph von Braun (1663-1720), formerly a senior official at her father's court.

According to one source Duke Anthony Ulrich found out what he needed to know about his youngest daughter's "carnal intermingling" through a testimony received from his own father confessor.

The duke was too unwell on 6 September 1712 when his youngest daughter left Gandersheim, to accompany her; so he took his leave of her in an affectionate letter from which it is clear that, regardless of his having insisted on her resignation, the version of Henriette Christine's misfortune which he wished to share in public, and with posterity, held that she was the innocent and still much hurt victim of a monstrous abuse.

[5] Six months before he died, in August 1713, Duke Anthony Ulrich undertook the long cross-country journey to Roermond in order to visit his daughter, to whom he was still devoted.

According to a letter from the abbot in Roermond, by 26 October 1713 Henriette Christine had left the Cistercian house and moved to the nearby Ursuline convent which would normally have been expected to take her towards a more secular version of the consecrated life.

She seems to have suffered a serious illness during the first half of 1735, after which her tone becomes apologetic: "It is not my fault that it pleases God to keep me alive for so long: I'm only regretful that my home must still be burdened thereby...." [e] In 1744 she wrote in similar terms to the Duke Karl of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who had been born in 1713, almost a year after Henriette Christine's spectacular fall from respectabilityL he was her first cousin once removed (generationally).