Melusine was well connected and well educated. Her family was noble and newly rich. Her brother Johann Matthias was already making a name for himself as one of the brilliant military minds of the era, and her father enjoyed the confidence of the Elector of Brandenburg. The wily Ernst August and his wife could not have failed to note the potential diplomatic benefit Melusine would bring to their house, which is probably why she gained the position in Sophia’s household.
She entered a court peopled by a very small number of the nobility and their servants, dominated by the lecherous and ambitious Ernst August, the snobbish Sophia and the volatile and tricky Sophia Dorothea. Court was about spectacle, wealth and adventure. There were orgies with beautiful courtesans for those that sought them, meandering conversations with Leibniz for those with an intellectual disposition.
There were two distinct types of women at court – the respectable noblewomen and the courtesans. The latter were usually drawn from the families of the burgeoning middle classes, or less frequently, like Melusine, from the minor nobility. They were typically witty, excellent conversationalists, and most were very pretty. But no matter how accomplished, beautiful and talented they were, they were exchanging sexual favours for gifts and protection; as such they languished on the periphery of respectable society. There was misunderstanding and antipathy between the two groups.1 Characteristically the nobility, men and women, were extremely proud of their lineage. Ernst August, who always made zealous use of the courtesan, obviously saw them as amusing playthings and never referred to them with any respect in his letters. Respect belonged to the ‘proper’ court lady, and relations between the two groups, who rarely mixed, could be chilly. George’s youngest brother Ernst August tells in his correspondence of the outrage expressed by an established court grande dame, Frau von Reden, at the courtesan Katherine von Meysenbug’s temerity in calling on her in her rooms. So furious was she that a mere courtesan should dare to visit her as a social equal that she called her a ‘cat’, a huge insult.2
Perhaps the duke’s regard for Sophia had encouraged the court to divide along these lines. Although he kept mistresses and allowed at least one to grow powerful, he never treated Sophia with anything less than absolute respect.
Why did Melusine accept George as a lover? Had he not divorced Sophia Dorothea then Melusine would have been condemned to the margins of polite society. Her father and stepmother were hopeful that the Hanover appointment would lead to a good marriage – her old, respectable family demanded it. Melusine must have known that her liaison with George would be detrimental to any future marriage, and his track record suggested he would discard her quickly, even if she became pregnant. In 1690 Melusine had little to gain from such a relationship. Even so, this provincial virgin embraced George enthusiastically when there was absolutely no material reason for her to do so. It seems that Melusine – quiet, shy, not conventionally beautiful and possibly lacking in confidence – fell in love.
George has suffered at the hands of historians, who for the most part cast him as narrow-minded and a cultural philistine who was sometimes monstrous to his own family. The scandal of Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck so horrified Europe that the Frenchman Charles Perrault may well have had George in mind when he penned his bloody folktale ‘Bluebeard’ in 1697, and Charlotte Brontë may at least in part have modelled her anti-hero of Jane Eyre, Edward Rochester, on George: both effectively imprisoned their wives in the attic. But the historian Ragnhild Hatton has done much to rehabilitate his character. She produces strong evidence to suggest that George was actually sensitive, wise and capable of great love, sharing Melusine’s huge interest in art, architecture and music. He was also a brilliant soldier and an able administrator. George did not govern lightly either in Hanover or England. He was extremely active, and effective, both as elector and king, whereas many of his contemporary monarchs relied on ministers and courtiers to govern.
Sophia noted with derision the attention George lavished on Melusine, while in his letters George’s brother Ernst August is kinder, quickly accepting George’s new mistress as part of the family’s odd extended circle. From the beginning, Melusine worked hard to create a warm domestic bubble for George, away from the machinations of the court and his appalling marriage.
When she became aware of the relationship, Sophia was simply amazed – and angry. Melusine, newly arrived at court, was technically under Sophia’s protection. The duchess never reconciled herself to the fact that her charge chose to place herself outside ‘proper’ society and had thus betrayed her class.
Sophia found Melusine’s slim, tall figure ugly and thought her unfashionably thin, perhaps evoking memories of her own tiny figure, which she detested. She was forthright in her opinion of Melusine’s looks in casual conversation; for example, her rude remark to Henrietta Howard, an English noblewoman and future mistress of George’s heir Georg August, was, according to one source, uttered in Melusine’s hearing. ‘Do you see that maukin [scarecrow]?’ she asked, as Melusine, she knew, stood directly behind her. ‘You would scarcely believe that she had captivated my son.’3
In fact, Melusine was an extremely attractive young woman, but her looks were far more suited to modern tastes. In an age where small, plump women were in vogue, a figure like hers commanded little admiration. It was Sophia Dorothea who embodied everything that was fashionable in beauty: petite, buxom, plump and full-featured. Yet Melusine had a sweet face, wonderful dark hair, pale, flawless skin and large, almond-shaped eyes. For George, the fact that she was the antithesis to Sophia Dorothea’s magnetic ‘beauté tyrannique’ was the most attractive thing about her.4
Sophia would never accept her eldest son’s liaison with ‘La Schulenburg’. Mistresses, she knew, were a fact of life. She had tolerated her own sexually incontinent husband’s plethora for years. Ernst August expected Sophia to entertain his current and former mistresses, and for the sake of harmony she complied. She even shared an Italian holiday with Ernst August and several of his sexual partners. But it seems her tolerance had limits; she had baulked at his suggestion that she appoint the Marchesa Paleotti, a former mistress from Bologna by whom he had a son, to her staff. (Later Liselotte wrote of a romance between the young man and Sophia Charlotte, Ernst August’s daughter by Klara Platen. ‘Disgusting,’ thrilled the bored Liselotte, ‘ . . . they are probably brother and sister.’)
In the many volumes of Sophia’s surviving letters, which detail almost every aspect of her life, Melusine is mostly an absence. Sophia rarely committed herself to paper about her, and when she did she dismissed her as ‘la Schulenburgin’, with various spellings. Ever the drama queen, Sophia wrote in exasperation to her niece the raugravine Louise in 1702 that Melusine could ‘hardly be reckoned to her court-ladies any more’.5 If Sophia did refer to her by name it was with disrespect. For example, in September 1701 she wrote to Louise: ‘My son is not here yet; the three ladies who accompanied him did however arrive back yesterday: the Schullenburgin, Madame Wey, Enhausen, Schullenburgin’s sister.’
What Sophia resented most – and perhaps felt threatened by – was her son’s complete attachment to Melusine, to the detriment of his marriage to the beautiful, opulent, volatile and immensely silly Sophia Dorothea. George’s marriage would ultimately unravel amidst the scandal of a lover, a murder and a divorce. Sophia probably thought his relationship with Melusine was the catalyst.
Melusine was pregnant with her first child by the late spring of 1691 – but as she absorbed the news, her father Gustav died, in October. Melusine was grief-stricken and possibly terrified for her future. However, if she had had any reservations about upsetting her family with the affair, her father’s death removed them. Her mother was dead, her stepmother was respected but did not inspire the intimacies of a mother, and she enjoyed excellent and apparently non-judgemental relationships with her siblings. Melusine was still grieving for Gustav when her daughter, Anna Louise Sophia (always known as Louise by the family), was born in the depths
of the German winter, in January 1692.
George, cautious through experience and under pressure from his father, would not accept paternity of Louise. His refusal left his mistress in a fix. Melusine was vulnerable from the birth, mourning for her father, forced to endure the silent rebukes of a formidable and disapproving Sophia, who blamed Melusine for George’s increasingly dreadful marriage, and she found herself the mother of an illegitimate child with an unnamed father in an environment that snubbed courtesans. All the court knew the child was George’s, but he had let her down in the most public fashion.
It is unlikely that Melusine complained – George would not abandon one volatile woman, whom he found distasteful, to take up with another. Melusine was much more inclined to seek a practical solution to her difficulty than to cause a fuss. She called on her extremely close relationships with her siblings, formed in their motherless years in Emden. Rescue came in the form of Melusine’s eldest sister, Margarete Gertrud, and her husband Friedrich Achaz. The pair gallantly agreed to accept the child as their own. Baby Louise, however, would reside with her ‘aunt’ – Melusine.
Why was George so set on failing to acknowledge Louise? From the day she was born we learn, chiefly through his brother Ernst August’s letters, that George was a devoted father. But he remembered the excruciating embarrassment of having fathered a child with Figuelotte’s under-governess when he was only sixteen, and his parents’ furious reactions. This was also the year that Hanover would finally be raised to the electorate; both George and his father were determined that nothing, least of all the birth of an illegitimate child, should jeopardize such long-held hopes. And despite his detractors’ claims that George detested Sophia Dorothea, he was heartbroken at the failure of his marriage.6 By 1692 the couple were so unhappy that neither could see a way back to harmonious relations, and George was concerned not to heap misery upon misery by acknowledging Louise as his daughter.
Melusine evidently decided to accept the situation for what it was and, if she felt any rancour towards George, to forgive him. If she felt betrayed, it seems she bore it in silence. It is probable that they discussed the issue of paternity before the baby was born, and that George shared his familial pressures – a disapproving mother, a father’s single-minded pursuit of glory for their house, unruly siblings and a volatile wife – with a sympathetic Melusine.
Melusine, marginalized, stoically resigned herself to a life in the shadows as George’s mistress. Her future depended on her ability to continue to please George, who was married to Sophia Dorothea and had two children by her. Any permanent rupture in George’s relationship with his wife could endanger the all-important succession. But in 1692 limitless possibilities opened up for Melusine when a desperately unhappy Sophia Dorothea took a lover.
Sophia Dorothea, in a rare moment of accord with her mother-in-law, was furious with George for his relationship with Melusine. Melusine was admittedly slightly younger than her, but she thought her an inferior in everything that mattered – looks, rank, dress. Sophia Dorothea prided herself on her beauty and allure; it seemed to her that everyone at court was in love with her except her husband. She utterly failed to understand George’s attraction for this gentle young woman and she feared Melusine’s influence over him. George had virtually moved in with Melusine and shared her apartments in the Leineschloss when in Hanover, although he still expected Sophia Dorothea to remain a faithful wife. Ernst August had paraded a multitude of mistresses before Sophia, and Countess Platen enjoyed huge influence at court, but the Elector had never set up home with another woman under her nose. After her husband so publicly relinquished his affection for her by his entanglement with Melusine and the birth of their daughter, the forlorn princess saw no reason not to be persuaded into bed by a man who had courted her relentlessly for two years – the dashing and charming Swedish Count Philipp Christoph von Königsmarck.
Sophia Dorothea, bored, unhappy and ripe for a flirtation, had first met Königsmarck in 1689, when George’s brother, Karl-Philipp, brought him to her rooms in the hope of amusing her. Königsmarck was a mercenary, presently employed by the Hanoverian army. His grandfather, Hans Christoff von Königsmarck, had risen from a common soldier to the rank of general in Gustav Adolph of Sweden’s army and had amassed a fortune of nearly two million thaler during the Thirty Years War.7 Now his grandson made his living as a soldier of fortune. He was handsome, charming, sophisticated and seemingly enraptured by the neglected princess. Sophia Dorothea was enchanted. Writing of an affair that still gripped European gossips a century later, Thackeray noted acidly: ‘one cannot imagine a more handsome, wicked, worthless reprobate.’8 Königsmarck was certainly profligate. It is recorded that he had twenty-nine servants. Even very grand ministers only had twenty.9
Sophia Dorothea allowed Count Philipp to write to her. But what began as an innocent flirtation, accepted by the court and ignored by George, soon became far more dangerous. Sophia Dorothea began to write back, prompting a flurry of letters between the pair – she seemed addicted to their correspondence.
Philipp’s first letter to her dates from July 1690, the year that Melusine came to court.10 However the princess, jealous of George’s new mistress and beguiled by her admirer, began to take risks, and the tone changed fast, from generic courtly charm to jealousy and longing. By March 1692, just two months after Melusine had given birth, they were probably lovers. There was no harm in having a courtly lover who could yearn for, but not consummate, a passion with his adored. But whilst an admirer would have been tolerated, a lover could never be, as it would put a question mark over the succession. Ernst August had worked hard to establish primogeniture and the birth of his grandson Georg August assured it into the second generation.
Today we have access to roughly half of their correspondence. The count imagines her in bed, and coquettishly switches from German to French when he does so. He begs her to elope with him. He writes of the intimacy of seeing her amongst ‘thousands’ at court where they can use the language of their eyes. He reveals his delight when she comes to his room and finds him in his ‘natural state’. He expresses thanks for receiving him the night before, in the hope that he may come again that night. She writes of how life would not be worth living should he die, she swears she is true to him alone, and flatters him that he has changed her. She is no longer a social butterfly, but a more thoughtful creature who craves solitude to think of him.
Königsmarck also loved to regale Sophia Dorothea with his gossipy stories. He tells how a letter to George’s brother Ernst August in which he made fun of Melusine ended up in George’s hands. He writes of an orgy he attended at the home of a Georg Friedrich von Offener with five girls from Ghent, two extremely beautiful. George, he gleefully relates, was in attendance, but he (Philipp) ‘was very good’ and just ate and drank.11
They were careful to send their letters away from prying eyes at court, to the safe keeping of Königsmarck’s sister Aurora.12 Sophia Dorothea had known Aurora for some time and trusted her. She was married to a Swedish count who served in her father’s army. Some were found sewn into Sophia Dorothea’s curtains, others at the bottom of playing-card boxes. For a while at least the pains they took to conceal their affair paid off. Liselotte’s letters to Sophia show that even in the summer of 1692, Sophia Dorothea’s behaviour was still not seen as at all alarming or threatening to the regime.
As time went on, though, the exact nature of the relationship became an open secret. Sophia Dorothea’s lady-in-waiting Eleonore von dem Knesebeck was in their confidence and acted as messenger. When apart (as they were for much of their relationship while Königsmarck was on campaign), they wrote more letters, making them more vulnerable to disclosure. Königsmarck’s sisters and brother-in-law all knew of the affair. Königsmarck at times wrote to Sophia Dorothea in the presence of tens of courtiers, amongst them Melusine. On at least one occasion he listed his witnesses at the bottom of his letter.13 His letters are peppered with references to conversations w
ith various female courtiers about his unhappy love.
We know that they were warned to terminate the relationship – Sophia Dorothea by her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law Figuelotte when visiting from Berlin, and even by her mother; Philipp by his superior and head of the Hanoverian army, Field Marshal von Podewils, and by George’s brothers.14 Ernst August was aware of the relationship and talked of dismissing Königsmarck. And George certainly knew.
The lovers used guile to continue the affair. Both swore that nothing was going on. Sophia Dorothea used Max’s passion for her as a smokescreen, claiming his pestering of her, and a make-believe illness, as pretexts to escape Hanover to visit her parents in Celle. George did not believe her excuses. He was a diligent letter writer to his wife while away on campaign. Although much of this correspondence has been lost, we do know that he sarcastically likened Sophia Dorothea to Lucretia, a martyr of classical Rome who, when she was raped by the king’s son, chose to commit suicide rather than face her husband with her ‘shame’. George seemingly commended Sophia Dorothea for her hasty flight from the flirtatious Max, thrilling that his honour was ‘very safe’ with such a ‘veritable Lucretia’ for a wife; we know about this today because she was alarmed enough to quote it in a letter to Königsmarck.15
Concurrent with the threatened discovery, a darker element entered the relationship. Sophia Dorothea grew hysterical if Königsmarck attended parties with girls present. But at the same time she tormented him with news of her flirtatious behaviour with other men, and her sexual relations, or monter à cheval (literally ‘horseback riding’), with George. For George’s relationship with Melusine had not stopped his conjugal visits to the princess. She was his wife and their duty was to produce heirs. Königsmarck resented George, but he also accused Sophie Dorothea of taking other lovers.
The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I Page 5
