The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I

by Gold, Claudia

  Königsmarck found he had spent his fortune on fripperies. Sophia Dorothea’s sizeable dowry was at the disposal of her husband. She begged her parents to give her an income; they refused, knowing by now that she hoped to end her marriage.

  That the lovers were allowed to continue their affair for so long probably owes something to more pressing contemporary events. Max was plotting against his father, the Danes threatened Celle in 1693, and Hanover’s army was on campaign in the service of the Emperor. All this time, during 1693 and the first half of 1694 Melusine wisely kept a low profile at court.

  But when Königsmarck left Hanover to lead a Saxon regiment in 1694, Ernst August, probably with George’s knowledge and consent, determined to put a stop to the affair. The Elector feared Sophia Dorothea would flee to her lover in Saxony, or even worse, to Ernst August’s enemy Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, putting the succession into question. He had worked too long and too hard to establish primogeniture in Hanover for his plans to come to dust in the second generation. If Sophia Dorothea eloped, her children’s paternity would be questioned and the succession would be in crisis. In London court gossips would soon refer to her son by George as ‘young Königsmarck’.

  In July 1694, exactly four years after Königsmarck had sent his first charming missive to Sophia Dorothea, Ernst August moved against the lovers. George was conveniently absent in Berlin, visiting Figuelotte. Königsmarck had returned to Hanover, ostensibly to formally resign his commission, and Sophia Dorothea rushed from Celle to her apartments in Hanover to wait for him. But the couple had no immediate plan to elope. Lack of funds limited their options. The lifestyle Sophia Dorothea expected to enjoy, even if they eloped to some ‘little corner of the earth’, as she bucolically wrote to Königsmarck, was expensive.

  Although it was summer and traditionally Ernst August should have been at Herrenhausen, away from the heat of the city, he moved back to the Leineschloss to observe Sophia Dorothea. He ordered his spies to watch Königsmarck and his daughter-in-law.

  On 1 July Count Philipp Christoph von Königsmarck was seen entering the Leineschloss. He did not leave the palace alive. Königsmarck was murdered on the orders of Ernst August, probably by four Hanoverian courtiers. A Danish diplomat, Otto Mencken, recorded that it was the architect Nicolò Montalbano who had actually administered the lethal thrust of his sword. Ernst August gave him 150,000 thaler shortly after the murder (a considerable bonus, considering that his salary was only 200 thaler a year), which probably confirms him as the killer.16 Mencken concluded his report with Königsmarck’s sorry fate. His body was tied in a sack, weighted with stones and dumped in the Leine river.

  The events of the next few days were crucial to Melusine’s future. Sophia Dorothea was immediately placed under house arrest. She begged her accomplice Eleonore von dem Knesebeck to stay with her, pleading that she would be presumed guilty if Eleonore fled. Incriminating correspondence was found in the princess’s apartments and her lady-in-waiting was arrested and threatened with torture. The brothers Ernst August and George William decided Sophia Dorothea’s fate. She and George would be divorced. The fabricated pretext would be the princess’s refusal to cohabit with her husband. Königsmarck’s name would not be mentioned in the hope of avoiding further scandal and any question as to the paternity of Sophia Dorothea’s children.

  Sophia Dorothea, as yet unaware of her lover’s fate, eagerly agreed to the divorce. It is arguable that she had wanted it as early as 1690, when she first fell in love with the count. Now, she presumed it would mean freedom and a new life with Königsmarck. She was sent back to her parents’ territory of Celle, but not to her beloved childhood home. Instead she was exiled to the tiny and provincial backwater of Ahlden Castle, an ugly, cheerless, fortified house. Under the Acte de Disgrâce drawn up by Ernst August and George William, she became her parents’ responsibility, and was given an income of 8,000 thaler per annum. She was desperate to be rid of George and the marriage was dissolved on 28 December 1694.

  It slowly dawned on Sophia Dorothea that something was wrong. Her father would not see her, she was allowed no contact with her children, her divorce stipulated that she could not remarry (although it specifically stated that George could), and she was virtually a prisoner in the castle. Yet she still had no idea of what had happened to Königsmarck.

  Sophia Dorothea’s actions had made her a liability, and Hanover and Celle maintained a stony silence over the affair. The Electorate would not be assured until 1708 – although Hanover had received the electoral cap in 1692, they were not admitted to the Electoral College until 1708 – and nothing, the ruling family believed, should detract from that goal. So the officials who knew of the affair remained tight-lipped despite the pleas of foreign diplomats for the gossip their rulers craved, poor Eleonore von dem Knesebeck was kept prisoner in the fortress of Scharzfels to ensure her silence, and Sophia, unusually, neglected to write anything to anyone. Sophia Dorothea remained a focus for opposition to Hanover for the rest of her life, from Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel’s attempts to prevent their ancient enemies obtaining the electoral cap, to the Jacobite rebellions in Britain after George’s accession in 1714.

  The international community was outraged at Königsmarck’s disappearance. But despite fevered enquiries by his family, and the efforts of his employer Augustus of Saxony to discover his fate, his body was never found. Although the facts of the murder were detailed in correspondence between Duke Anton Ulrich and the Danish diplomat Otto Mencken, the truth of the affair was not accepted until the 1960s, when the German historian George Schnath published his corroborative findings.17 To this day we do not know the full extent of George’s involvement.

  When Sophia finally began corresponding with her legion of relatives again, Liselotte wrote back in sympathy from Versailles in February 1695: ‘Does the young duchess [Sophia Dorothea] not know that a woman’s honour consists of having commerce with no one but her husband, and that for a man it is not shameful to have mistresses but shameful indeed to be a cuckold?’18 Liselotte had summed up the situation in Hanover perfectly. It was fine for a woman to flirt with a man, but forbidden for her to sleep with him. By setting up house with Melusine, George had proven that the opposite was true for men.

  As to whether his former wife should ever see their children again, George was immovable, despite Sophia Dorothea’s pleading letters. She swallowed her pride and begged him to ‘permit me to see and embrace our beloved children; my gratitude for this boon, so ardently longed for, will be infinite since I desire nothing else to enable me to die content.’ To Sophia, she added: ‘I beseech once more your Electoral Highness to forgive all I have done which may have offended you and to speak a little on my behalf to your son the Elector. I implore him to grant me the forgiveness which I desire so intensely and to allow me to embrace my children. It would also be my passionate desire, Madame, to kiss the hands of your Electoral Highness before I die.’ Both letters went unanswered.

  When in 1705 George William died and the two duchies were finally united, George immediately stripped the picturesque palace of Celle with its creamy white walls and scarlet roof, and took the contents back to Hanover. Today we can only get an inkling of what beauty was once housed there; all that remains is the sublime stucco work and parquet floors.

  There is a suite of apartments in the castle that is heartbreaking to see. With her husband’s death, Sophia Dorothea’s mother, Eléonore, moved to a dower house. But George allowed her to come back to the castle frequently so that she could visit her daughter more easily at her prison at Ahlden, some 20 kilometres away. The flooring in Eléonore’s rooms is noticeably far more worn than in the rest of the castle, suggesting that she spent much of her time pacing and ruminating on her only child’s fate. As she grew older and her eyesight failed, she never neglected to write prodigious notes to her daughter, compensating for her lack of sight with increasingly large letters, until just two or three words filled a page. The grief-stricken duche
ss died in her eighties in 1722, just four years before Sophia Dorothea’s own death.

  We do not know if Melusine attempted to intervene with George on Sophia Dorothea’s behalf. After her escape from her fortress prison, Sophia Dorothea’s accomplice Eleonore von dem Knesebeck spoke of throwing herself on the mercy of George and ‘my good friend Mlle von der Schulenburg’; she, at least, thought Melusine ‘kind’. This however came to nothing, and Melusine was too pragmatic to help her without George’s approval. Furthermore there was no political role for Melusine in Hanover through which she could exert influence, not least because of her cool relations with Sophia. She dedicated herself to creating a secure family life for George and their daughters, and for the most part stayed in the domestic sphere. There was no advantage to interceding on her rival’s behalf. Sophia Dorothea’s divorce and imprisonment meant Melusine’s promotion to first lady of Hanover – save for the Duchess Sophia – in all but name.

  George’s treatment of Sophia Dorothea was universally condemned. The limited sources suggest that his primary motivation was not vengeance for his cuckolded state, but rather the grave political ramifications of Sophia Dorothea’s indiscretion. George had reason to feel aggrieved: in her letters to Königsmarck, which he had seen, she complains that George is a bad lover and she longs for his death in battle. All the same, George had found domestic harmony with Melusine and it is likely that, had she been more prudent, he would have turned a blind eye to Sophia Dorothea’s affair. But her actions had put Hanover’s ambitions at risk. To lose the electoral cap would have rendered Ernst August’s entire career a failure, and his total alienation from his sons, and George’s rows with his brothers over primogeniture, would have been for nothing. Rival states, jealous of Hanover’s success, were still jostling to exclude Ernst August from the Electoral College. Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck had considered flight to Hanover’s enemy, Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and had Sophia Dorothea not been imprisoned after her divorce she might still have fled, creating a diplomatic crisis. Similarly she was an easy target for those British enemies of the Protestant succession, the Jacobites. Even her father, George William, saw the political necessity of her detention. She was too dangerous to be free. Sophia Dorothea’s numerous portraits were quietly removed and destroyed, and her name eliminated from the State Prayers. It was as if she had never existed.

  Sophia Dorothea’s incarceration was probably the source of the rabid antipathy that would grow between George and his son, Georg August. The boy was only nine years old when his mother left Hanover. He never enjoyed a good relationship with his father, blaming him for his mother’s fate. Their lack of empathy for one another developed into open hostility and the eventual removal of Georg August’s children from his care. The young Sophia Dorothea, possibly because of the scarring events of 1694, became in turn a dreadful mother to her own children.19 In her extensive diaries her eldest daughter Wilhelmine records vicious beatings, both at her mother’s hands and from an abusive governess, encouraged by her mother.20

  The affair of the princess who had paid for her indiscretion with humiliation and imprisonment captivated Europe and spawned a rash of dubious romantic literature. Sophia Dorothea’s former maid, Eleonore von dem Knesebeck, swore for the rest of her days that the Countess Platen had orchestrated Königsmarck’s murder and Sophia Dorothea’s imprisonment and divorce. She claimed the havoc wreaked sprang from Platen’s jealousy of the young and pretty Sophia Dorothea. Contemporaries besides Eleonore von dem Knesebeck believed that Königsmarck was sleeping not only with Sophia Dorothea but also with the countess, in a bid for power and influence. Moreover Eleonore claimed the countess gave Ernst August syphilis and that both eventually died of the disease. This story, true or not, continued to entrance audiences well into the twentieth century, when a film, Saraband for Dead Lovers, starring Stewart Granger as Königsmarck and Joan Greenwood as Sophia Dorothea, was made in 1948.

  The events of 1694, so devastating for Sophia Dorothea, finally allowed George to begin, very slowly, to allow Melusine a public role. But although now divorced he continued to be cautious, not least because of the developments that were taking place in England, where the succession, despite the legislation that had been enacted in favour of the Hanoverians, was far from assured. Whilst the birth of Melusine’s second daughter Petronella Melusine – known to everyone by her second name – in April 1693 only added to George’s adoration of his mistress (throughout his letters his youngest brother Ernst August refers to the pleasure George found with his growing illegitimate family) once again Melusine’s sister and brother-in-law stepped forward to accept the baby as their own, although she would continue to reside with her ‘aunt’. Melusine and her namesake would not be parted for the rest of her life.

  Meanwhile after the upset caused by the Sophia Dorothea affair, Ernst August’s health quickly and dramatically declined – she was after all his niece. Perhaps his ambition was his undoing: he had sanctioned murder and his conscience was stricken. Cures at the spas of Bad Pyrmont and Wiesbaden had little effect on his ‘nervous condition’ – he was growing more and more shaky and his speech was slurred, prompting some historians to speculate that he suffered from a succession of strokes. With his father’s illness, George effectively became ruler of Hanover. Despite their rocky marital history Sophia was distraught, but comforted herself that at least Klara Platen was marginalized; now that the Elector was ill he only wanted his wife. She would read to him for hours, or offer him her arm as he briefly shuffled around the gardens. He died in January 1698, possibly of a stroke, in Sophia’s garden in Herrenhausen. With his death his detractors, chiefly Sophia Dorothea’s sympathizers, repeated the allegations that he died of syphilis caught from Countess Platen, who in turn had contracted the disease from lovers such as Königsmarck, and the orgies held at Linden, the Platen home near Herrenhausen.

  5.

  Beloved

  . . . Mademoiselle Schulenburg . . . is a lady of extraordinary merit.

  – John Toland, Hanover

  Ernst August’s death precipitated Melusine’s rise. For four years she had been in a strange kind of limbo. George, out of respect to his parents, and particularly to his father, whose illness he had not wished to exacerbate with any hint of a scandal, still refused to acknowledge her status as mother of his two illegitimate daughters and maîtresse-en-titre. Furthermore Sophia still resented her for her part – albeit passive – in the breakdown of George’s marriage. But with the death of his father and his becoming Elector in turn, George conferred almost every honour possible on Melusine. Once he took power in Hanover, she gained in confidence. When Sophia was absent she presided at all official functions; when the dowager Electress was present, Melusine was the second most important woman in the room.

  Melusine was fundamentally conservative. She was born into an ancient and noble family that expected a glorious marriage, and she evidently did not possess the temperament to relish the life of a courtesan, for all the freedoms it brought. Despite her love for George, she craved respectability. She was no Countess Platen or Madame du Barry, women who probably had little love for their patrons. The relationships they had were financial and social transactions. Melusine’s character and situation was more in the mould of the highly regarded Madame de Maintenon, the likely second wife of Louis XIV. Melusine had been George’s mistress for seven years, and so an acknowledgment of her status must have brought enormous relief.

  To Sophia’s chagrin, Melusine was raised to a position above all the ladies of court save Sophia herself. The dowager Electress was irritated not least because she had formed a plan to invite her raugrave and raugravine nephews and nieces, the illegitimate children of her brother Karl and his morganatic wife Louise von Degenfeld, to live with her in Hanover. Sophia took her responsibilities to the children of Karl and Louise seriously. Their mother had died in 1677, and the death of their father in 1680 made them orphans.

  But Melusine’s elevation created problems of
precedence. Although Melusine was a noblewoman, Sophia’s nephews and nieces were royal. The dowager duchess refused to put her beloved relatives in the uncomfortable position of deferring to her son’s mistress as court protocol required once George had decreed it – he thwarted, for example, Sophia’s attempts to lodge them in state rooms at Herrenhausen. They continued to visit but the plan for a permanent move was abandoned. Melusine now dined publicly with George, and as her daughters grew, Sophia acknowledged them with positions in her own household. Although the dowager Electress continued to spare only the briefest of nods to Melusine’s existence, she formed good relationships with her illegitimate granddaughters. The girls were charming, opinionated and clever, and Sophia always liked clever people. Louise was beautiful, and young Melusine gained a reputation for telling George exactly what she thought. Sophia, enchanted with the girl’s precociousness, appointed her a lady-in-waiting, just as her mother had been before her. Sophia famously paid her ladies-in-waiting very little, and Melusine was obliged to supplement the meagre income given to young Melusine by her grandmother.1

  Despite Herrenhausen’s beauty and tranquillity, Melusine could never bring herself to think of it as her home. It was completely Sophia’s domain, not least because Ernst August bequeathed the house, gardens and surrounding farms to her for the duration of her lifetime. The palace that Melusine could truly call home, particularly while Sophia was alive, was the old hunting lodge, or Jagdschloss, at Göhrde, some 120 kilometres from the city.

  Göhrde began as a simple hunting lodge in the middle of an ancient forest. It was in Celle territory, but George knew it well. He had often joined his uncle’s hunting parties there and George William had developed the shoot until it offered the best hunting with hounds in northern Europe. But when George William died in 1705 and George inherited Göhrde, he and Melusine renovated it to suit their own taste. It was already the place where they were happiest and they determined to put their mark on it.