THE KING’S MISTRESS
THE KING’S
MISTRESS
The True and Scandalous
Story of the Woman Who Stole
the Heart of George I
Claudia Gold
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Quercus
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2012 Claudia Gold
The moral right of Claudia Gold to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material
reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the
publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Print ISBN 978 1 84916 411 5
eBook 978 1 78087 550 7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Text and plates designed and typeset by Ellipsis Digital Ltd
Family Trees © Rich Carr Studios
For my sister Tanya
Contents
Dramatis Personae
Family Trees
1 A Portrait
2 The Mermaid and the Girl
3 Venice of the North
4 The Mistress
5 Beloved
6 The Crown at Last
7 Germans in England
8 A Strange Family
9 A City out of Rubble
10 Palaces
11 Politics and Players
12 A Battle
13 A Bubble
14 Venality
15 Diplomacy
16 A Marriage?
17 Endings
Plates
Notes on illustrations
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Dramatis Personae
An astonishing number of contemporary women were called Sophia, or had Sophia as a prefix to their name. To add to the confusion, George’s illegitimate half-sister and his only legitimate sister shared the same name, Sophia Charlotte. George’s youngest and favourite brother shared their father’s name, Ernst August. Below is a list of some of the main characters who appear in The King’s Mistress, in the hope that it will help to illuminate and distinguish them.
Caroline of Ansbach, Georg August’s wife, later Queen of England.
Ernst August, Elector of Hanover. George’s father.
Ernst August, prince-bishop of Osnabrück, later Duke of York. George’s youngest and favourite brother.
Figuelotte, see Sophia Charlotte
Georg August, George’s eldest son, later King George II.
Maximilian Wilhelm (Max), George’s most troublesome brother.
Melusine, see Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg
Sophia, princess of the Palatinate and Electress of Hanover. George’s mother. Proud and haughty, she was descended from King James I of England.
Sophia Charlotte (Figuelotte), later Queen of Prussia. George’s only sister.
Sophia Dorothea of Celle, George’s wife and first cousin, and Melusine’s rival.
Trudchen, see Margarethe Gertrud von Oeynhausen
Young Sophia Dorothea, George and Sophia Dorothea’s legitimate daughter.
Margarethe Gertrud von Oeynhausen (Trudchen), Melusine and George’s youngest daughter. She married Albrecht Wolfgang of Schaumburg-Lippe.
Sophie Juliane von Oeynhausen, Melusine’s younger sister. She and her husband accepted Trudchen as their daughter.
Klara Platen, Sophia Charlotte’s mother. Mâitresse en titre of Ernst August, Elector of Hanover.
Sophia Charlotte von Platen (later Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg by her marriage, and Countess of Darlington), George’s illegitimate half-sister.
Sophie Karoline von Platen, married to Sophia Charlotte’s brother, Ernst August von Platen, and a leader of the anti-Melusine faction at the Hanoverian court.
George Augustus of Schaumburg-Lippe, Trudchen’s elder son.
Joanne Sophie, Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe. A courtier in both Hanover and England, she was Melusine’s closest friend, and Trudchen’s mother-in-law.
William of Schaumburg-Lippe, later Count of Schaumburg-Lippe. Trudchen’s younger son.
Anna Louise von der Schulenburg, later Countess Delitz (Louise). Melusine and George’s eldest daughter.
Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg, later Duchess of Kendal (Melusine). The mistress of George, Electoral Prince of Hanover, later King George I of Britain.
Frederick William von der Schulenburg, Melusine’s half-brother, gentleman of the bedchamber, friend and confidant of George.
Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg. Melusine’s eldest brother, an internationally renowned field marshal and diplomat.
Margarete Gertrud von der Schulenburg. Melusine’s eldest sister, she and her husband accepted Louise and young Melusine as their daughters.
Petronella Melusine von der Schulenburg, later Countess of Walsingham, and by her marriage, Lady Chesterfield (young Melusine). Melusine and George’s middle daughter.
1.
A Portrait
‘As much Queen of England as any ever was; . . . he [George I] did everything by her.’
– Robert Walpole on Melusine, recorded
in Mary Countess Cowper, Diary
On a spring day in 2011, in the storeroom of a provincial museum in Celle, northern Germany, I saw the face of Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg. I had first become aware of her in 2006 while I was researching a book about queens and courtesans. She fascinated me.1
She was the mistress and possibly the secret wife of George I, Elector of Hanover and later king of Great Britain. Yet her reputation is appalling. I read that she gleefully purloined Queen Anne’s property, particularly her jewels. Several historians have gone so far as to imagine Melusine and her lover George I’s half-sister, Sophia Charlotte, nightly plundering Anne’s diamonds in the candlelit vaults of St James’s Palace. One claims that she was so meticulous in her looting that Caroline of Ansbach, George II’s queen, had only one strand of pearls at her disposal for her coronation and was crowned in borrowed jewels.
Few could understand George’s infatuation. By contemporary standards Melusine was not a great beauty. Eighteenth-century men preferred their women plump, and ‘la Schulenburg’ was slim. Her nickname amongst the English, who loathed her, was ‘the Maypole’.
Others sources twittered that she was old; she was hideous; she was excessive in her greed; she had no love for George and would have ‘sold him to the highest bidder’; she was dim-witted; she was dull; she stood by passively as George pursued younger and more attractive mistresses; she condoned incest, willingly sharing George’s affections and his bed with his half-sister, Sophia Charlotte.
Yet this seemingly grasping and unattractive woman managed to wrest George f
rom his beautiful and tempestuous wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, and bind him to her for almost forty years. In doing so she rose from the ranks of minor courtier to become one of the most powerful women in Europe. Her influence led Louis XV of France to write to his ambassador to the Court of St James’s, Count Broglio: ‘You will neglect nothing to acquire a share of her confidence, from a conviction that nothing can be more conducive to my interest.’2
She became the conduit between the king and his ministers and she traded in court places and titles. She was a prime mover in the South Sea Bubble, that unedifying spectacle of greed, deception, stupidity and finally blind panic that resulted in misery and economic ruination. Melusine’s part in the scandal would seal her notoriety.
Melusine, a clever woman in a position of power, was one of Thomas Carlyle’s notorious ‘harlots’. She was not in the tradition of those glorious, vibrant courtesans who for centuries have held sway over kings. But she was extremely powerful. The king’s ministers did little without her say-so and she used her position to accumulate fabulous wealth. As I investigated the sources, it became clear that George I was devoted to her.
Although she lived only 300 years ago, the sources are problematic. We have the opinions of those who loathed her and laughed at her foreignness, the coffee-house wags and the court gossips, and the testimonies of those who were indebted to her, whose views were naturally biased. She wrote charming notes to the court glitterati and was forthright in sending instructions and admonitions to the king’s ministers. But very little about her personal life comes from Melusine’s own lips. The reason is the Königsmarck affair.
In 1694 George divorced his wife Sophia Dorothea of Celle in circumstances that scandalized Europe. The princess was conducting an indiscreet love affair with a Swedish mercenary, Count Philip von Königsmarck, and it was the letters between the lovers that left no room for doubt.
Count Philip was subsequently murdered, probably on the orders of George’s father, and the unfortunate Sophia Dorothea was denied access to her children and locked in Ahlden Castle for the rest of her life. A shocked and humiliated George instructed his mistress that they must never write anything of an intimate nature to one another. Unusually, as her status as maîtresse en titre – the king’s official mistress – was established both in Hanover and England, no letters survive between the pair. Frustratingly the biographer can only surmise her most intimate thoughts.
Until recently only three portraits of Melusine were known. One is in the British Museum. It is a delightful print of her head and shoulders, etched in her youth; it dates from about 1691. The second, in a tiny room in the sleepy convent of Barsinghausen, shows a haughty and imposing Melusine, in her late forties or early fifties, richly but soberly dressed. The other, in Hanover, is a sumptuous three-quarter-length portrait, which was probably painted in the early 1720s. But as I researched this book, an archivist at Celle Castle told me there was another painting of Melusine in the castle’s storage block.
I went out of the spring sunshine to find her. Celle Castle has portraits of queens on its walls, but Melusine in consigned to the vaults. A grave curator accompanied me to a dismal basement and slid her out from amongst hundreds of paintings that may never be displayed again. And there she was, a little faded and in poor condition, but unmistakably Melusine – regal, elegant, her left hand resting on the royal ermine.
2.
The Mermaid and the Girl
‘Dear lady . . . Please believe me when I say there will be nothing I will not strive to do for your sake, however difficult it might be.’
The Count of Lusignan to the Fairy Melusine
A medieval story tells of a count of Poitou who falls in love with a golden-haired maiden called Melusina. She consents to marry him on one condition: that she can spend one day each week in complete solitude. The count agrees until at last, after many years, his curiosity demands satisfaction. He spies on his wife in her bath, and sees that her lower body is transformed into a serpent’s tail. Later, when misery strikes his house with the death of one of their sons, he attacks Melusina with the words: ‘Away, odious serpent, contaminator of my honourable race.’
Whatever her parents were thinking as they named her, Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg was always known by her second name.
She was born at Emden, a prosperous town on the estuary of the river Ems, just two miles from the North Sea, on Christmas Day 1667, the second surviving daughter and fourth child of Count Gustav Adolph and his first wife, Petronilla Ottilia.
The Schulenburgs were minor aristocrats, well-entrenched and respectable. Their forebears had been ennobled in the thirteenth century. Family legend claimed celebrated generals, marshals and bishops among their ancestors. But despite past glories, by the time of her parents’ marriage the family was poor and their estates in ruin. Melusine’s early childhood was spent in relative poverty, in a ramshackle castle.
Her father was named after his father’s hero, Gustav Adolph, the legendary king of the Swedes. Gustav studied in Helmstedt, where he was a less than model student. In the autumn of 1653 he was fined a swingeing amount for a now unknown misdemeanour. After his studies he served in the Swedish army, before turning to the civil service, where his rise was meteoric.
He entered the service of the Elector of Brandenburg, where his talents were rewarded with promotion after promotion. In 1683 he was created Privy Councillor, one of the highest honours in the Electorate. Administrative brilliance brought diplomatic responsibility; he successfully undertook emissaries to Lüneburg in 1682, to Dresden in 1685, and to Leipzig in 1690.
But credit for a turn in the Schulenburg fortunes lies with Melusine’s mother, Petronilla. She was a daughter of the Holstein family, another of the myriad of minor aristocrats whose tiny principalities formed the intricate patchwork of separate regimes that occupied the territory we now call Germany, all owing allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. (Germany consisted of over 300 tiny city-states, and the number was ever-changing.) Petronilla’s financial management was spectacular. Within a few short years she managed to pay off her husband’s stupendous debts, to reorganize his estates and to finance the building of the castle at Emden, which became their family home.1 It was Petronilla who enabled Gustav Adolph to pursue his brilliant career in the service of the Elector of Brandenburg.
Meanwhile the Schulenburg family was growing. Between 1659 and 1674 Petronilla produced nine children, six of whom survived infancy. Melusine’s eldest sister, Margarete Gertrud, was born in 1659, followed two years later by her eldest brother, Johann Matthias. Daniel Bodo joined the nursery the following year. Melusine was born in 1667, followed swiftly by her sister Sophie Juliane in 1668, and by Anna Elisabeth in 1673.
When Melusine was only six years old Petronilla Ottilia died, probably due to complications in childbirth. Her youngest daughter, Charlotte, was born on 11 April 1674 and Petronilla died nine days later. Charlotte would live for less than two years.
The children’s grief must have been terrible. Their father was frequently absent from home and their primary relationship was with a mother who had created a loving domestic environment where the siblings’ deep affection for one another was nurtured. Melusine and her siblings were close all their adult lives. Later, her sisters would accept maternity of her illegitimate children, she would support them financially when necessary, and the family regularly took holidays together, despite being scattered across Europe. Petronilla was considerate, not only to her own children but to the children of the estate’s tenants, ensuring that even the poorest children received an education at the local school she established.2
At her funeral Petronilla’s grief-stricken widower dedicated a Latin song to her.3 But two years later his grief had abated enough to marry again, to the nineteen-year-old aristocrat Anna Elisabeth von Stammer, who was twenty-five years his junior. Melusine was only eight years old when her father’s new young wife took over the running of the household. There was a mere eleven
years between them. Anna Elisabeth gave birth to four children, two of whom survived infancy. Frederick William, born in 1680, became one of George I’s intimate circle through his sister’s intercession.4 Another sister, Johanna Auguste, was born in January 1687.
Though he may have lapsed into bouts of bad behaviour as a student, Gustav, who had been a pupil of the humanist John Caselius, nevertheless prized education for girls and boys alike. Although only his sons attended the university at Helmstadt, all the children enjoyed the services of a tutor. Melusine received a solid but not particularly inspiring education; she studied arithmetic, literature, music, drawing and dancing. Like most German aristocrats, to whom everything French was the epitome of good taste, Melusine spoke the language fluently.
Many aristocratic families sought positions for themselves and their children outside of their principality; the Schulenburgs were no exception. By the end of the 1680s Gustav decided that, with no imminent marriage prospect, Melusine must be found something to do. Johann Matthias and Daniel Bodo were long gone. They went to school in Magdeburg in 1676, when Melusine was nine. The brothers returned home briefly before continuing their education at Helmstadt, and then in 1680 they spent two years at the University of Saumur in Brittany. When their studies were completed they went to Paris, where Johann Matthias ran up such huge debts that he was forced to remain longer than Daniel Bodo – who returned to the family home in 1684 – to pay them off.5 Daniel Bodo then pursued his own military career, and by 1687 Johann Matthias, Melusine’s favourite sibling, had entered the service of the Emperor and was gone for good. He would eventually become one of the most famous field marshals of the age.
Margarete Gertrud, eight years older than Melusine, had become a mother-figure to her younger siblings after their own mother’s death. She married the diplomat Friedrich Achaz, a Schulenburg cousin twelve years her senior, in the summer of 1681 and they moved to Vienna. Of those siblings close to Melusine in age only Sophie Julianne remained at home, but by 1690 her marriage to Rabe Christoph von Oeynhausen, a courtier at Celle who at some point served as Master of the Hunt and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, had been arranged. The remaining children were very young. Anna Elisabeth was six years her junior and in 1690 her half-brother Frederick William was ten and her half-sister Johanna August only three. It was time for Melusine to fly the nest.
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