by Emily Hahn
Madame Platen was a handsome woman with flashing eyes and one of those high square bosoms the Germans love. She was completely unprincipled. Principles were not widely distributed in her set, and we should not be censorious of her on that account, but she was perhaps more dangerous than other villainesses because she was also nearly brainless and had an appetite for power. A dominating fool can do a lot of damage. The commission she received from William of Orange to convince her ducal lover that his son should marry Sophie Dorothea pleased her. Not only did it promise to be profitable, but it gave her a chance to meddle in diplomatic affairs, and such meddling was her particular hobby.
Everything went well for William, from beginning to end. George Louis’s lackadaisical wooing of Anne got him nowhere, Bernstorff found a ready listener to the new plan in the Duke of Celle, and Madame Platen, working away in Hanover, made a definite impression on Ernest Augustus. Actually, William’s machinations apart, the suggested match made sense from Ernest Augustus’s point of view. There was the old lure of reuniting the domains, for one thing, and for another, there was Sophie Dorothea’s wealth, which would go as a matter of routine into her husband’s possession. Yes, Ernest Augustus liked the idea.
So did George William, perhaps for the same reason, the attraction of reuniting the land, but more likely because he was easily led by Bernstorff. And so, in spite of the feud of the duchesses, in spite of Sophia’s furious opposition at first (she gave in ultimately, however, and was active in arranging the contract) and Eléonore’s tears and tantrums, Sophie Dorothea married her cousin George Louis.
Their wedding could hardly be described as an auspicious beginning to married life. The two principals had never seen each other, and had only heard the worst things about each other’s immediate families. Sophia had always talked of Eléonore as a lowborn trollop, and declared her daughter was bound to be worse. Eléonore had brought up Sophie Dorothea on nursery tales about the wicked aunt at Hanover. Beaten down to submission by a husband grown suddenly stubborn and unpleasant, the Duchess of Celle, mother of the bride, wailed and had hysterics at the wedding feast. It is not surprising that Sophie Dorothea went off on her honeymoon in a pitiable state of apprehension, and George Louis was the last man in the world to comfort or soothe a girl.
To put it plainly, the Prince of Hanover was a lout. He was selfish, extremely slow in his reactions, and constitutionally sullen. His one positive virtue was physical courage; he was a good soldier, not flashy but steady and completely lacking in fear. He had not desired this marriage or any marriage, but he did not actively object, knowing it was all part of the job of being prince. Sophie Dorothea was not his type; her daintiness held no charms for him. He liked something less Latin, more Saxon. But that, in the end, need not matter. He was totally insensitive to anyone’s feelings but his own. Even Sophia did not dote on him, though in general she was a fond mama to her children. She wrote about the marriage in a letter to her confidante the Duchess of Orleans:
“Ernest Augustus always had a queer head, and how such an idea could have entered it passes all my understanding. However, one hundred thousand thalers a year is a goodly sum to pocket, without speaking of a pretty wife, who will find a match in my son George Louis, the most pigheaded, stubborn boy who ever lived, and who has round his brains such a thick crust that I defy any man or woman ever to discover what is in them.”
Sophia must have been softened by the size of the dowry to admit that a daughter of Eléonore d’Olbreuse could be pretty, but the fact is, the princess was pretty, noticeably so. Even had she not been a princess she would have been admired. Certainly she was better-looking than many contemporaries of royal blood, perhaps because she was a love child, the fruit of natural selection rather than political breeding. She was small, dark, and vivacious, with large wide-set eyes and a sweet expression. Her great interest was costume; she spent hours every day on her appearance, and chose her jewels with the greatest care and very good taste. She was properly accomplished in music and dancing and all that, and seems to have had the kittenish charm of a petted, spoiled, only child. She could not lay claim to intellectual pretensions like those of the Duchess Sophia, who was a true bluestocking; the bride had little interest in books. We would not have considered Sophie Dorothea intelligent, I suppose, but we would have called her a nice little thing. She was gay and sweet, a singing cricket of a princess. The idea of such a creature being suddenly plunked down in the unfriendly, humorless and very dull Hanover court inspires pity. One thinks of a toy poodle forced to live in a kennel of mastiffs.
Yet it was not too bad at first. She was homesick, that goes without saying, but she was not exiled; the marriage smoothed over the traditional enmity between the Duchesses of Celle and Hanover, and her parents came sometimes to visit, and she returned now and then to see them. George Louis continued to be morose and uncouth, but the mistress he had maintained before his wedding in the public manner characteristic of the Georges had been sent away by special request of Eléonore, and for some time no substitute appeared on the scene to offend Sophie Dorothea’s sense of dignity.
The life they led at Hanover sounds unbelievably tedious when we read about it. What in Heaven’s name did they do with themselves, we ask ourselves, when they were not appearing in full panoply at state dinners or balls? Actually, they did just about nothing. There were no outdoor games and few urban amusements for the ladies. Sophie Dorothea spent the whole morning at her toilette, talking with her companion Fräulein Knesebeck or with such few ladies of the court as she liked and trusted. Then there was a heavy lunch, the long afternoon rest, and a sedate drive later, if the weather was fine. Then a terrific dinner, and cards or perhaps dancing afterwards—not gay dancing, of course. We think it a slow life, but after all it was the only tempo Sophie Dorothea had ever known, so we must beware of pitying her more than is called for.
Perhaps one of the troubles with George Louis was that he was bored and didn’t know it. Like his wife, he had never known a more exciting existence, save that he sometimes went out campaigning. No doubt for this reason he welcomed war, as he welcomed a good day’s hunting, but life at home, the life to which duty usually called him, was a stupefying routine against which it never occurred to him to rebel.
In due course the princess bore a son, and then she produced a daughter, just as she should have done. Everyone was gratified; even the redoubtable Sophia put aside her memories of the old feud and showed her daughter-in-law a grim sort of graciousness. As for Ernest Augustus, he really melted, and became sentimentally fond of the princess, and took to giving her presents and allowing her to accompany him on his travels to Italy. But George Louis remained his noncommittal, surly self, and the Platen was not a warm admirer of Sophie Dorothea, either.
This attitude of the royal mistress was partly the princess’s own fault. As might be expected, Sophie Dorothea in her position as legal wife and mother of a prince was prejudiced against the entire institution of court mistresses. It was a kind of class loyalty, the attitude of a member of one trades union toward that of a rival organization. A clever woman might have done something effective about this class enemy. She would have tried not merely to annoy the Platen and thus relieve her own feelings, but actually to undermine the other woman’s influence. Sophie Dorothea was not a clever woman, nor even crafty like Madame Platen. She behaved like a child; she snubbed the mistress at every opportunity. When Ernest Augustus advanced Herr Platen to the rank of count, the princess’s resentment heightened on general principles, though she felt no loyalty toward her mother-in-law. Just as Sophia had objected to her own mother’s advancement, Sophie Dorothea hated to think of this upstart becoming a countess. She made catty remarks which were reported in record time to the other lady. The countess promptly set to work on Ernest Augustus, turning him against his pretty little daughter-in-law. And so it went, until the mistress thought of a better revenge.
No doubt George Louis did not need the Platen’s encouragement to s
tray from the path of monogamy; he would have found his own way into the woods in due time. Perhaps he did his own selecting; perhaps it was only court gossip which credited the countess with having produced the new woman who took his fancy. Her name was Ermengarda Melusina von Schulenberg, and anyone less like George Louis’s wife would be hard to imagine. She was tall—much taller than her lover—with yellow hair and big bones, and George Louis fell promptly in love. Sophie Dorothea was furious.
We must remember that the princess had her own set of values, which though they may not be ours, were important to her. Although she did not love her husband, she was nevertheless capable of fierce and very painful jealousy over him. A discreet liaison between George Louis and some woman would not have troubled her at all, even had she known all about it, but this was in full view of the whole court; that is what she could not bear. Jealousy, after all, is chiefly composed of pride and possession; very little of it is due to frustrated love. That is why the seventeenth-century royal system of infidelity was so cruel, so much more brutal than the modern way.
For George Louis followed his father’s example. Not quite as conscienceless as Charles II, who insisted that his mistress serve his bride as one of her ladies-in-waiting, he was exhibitionistic enough to annoy any wife. At social gatherings, regardless of who might be watching, he paid his amorous attentions to the Schulenberg with the happy abandon of a goldfish. He set her up in luxury and saw to it that she moved in the same circles as did Sophie Dorothea. The princess naturally felt that he had degraded her own rank. She felt herself scorned, which was bad; laughed at, which was worse; and pitied, which was insupportable. Why, the woman wasn’t even attractive! She was a great clumsy blond giantess. Little Sophie Dorothea complained bitterly about it.
She was no philosopher, and the reflection that other queens and princesses had to cope with similar problems did not soothe her. Her mother-in-law Sophia coped superbly, and was on good terms with her rival, but it was not in the princess’s intellectual power thus to accept and ignore. She made childish scenes, which did not at all shake George Louis: after them he simply avoided her for a bit. Then she rushed off to Celle to wail to her parents and beg that they make representations. But George William, standing stanchly by his own sex, told her brusquely to go home to Hanover and do her duty. There, having obeyed him, she went into new fits of rage and grief. Again and again she followed the cycle, while the court gossiped and tittered and George Louis calmly spent the days and nights with his mistress.
Sophie Dorothea had quite got used to being unhappy by the time Philipp Christoph von Königsmark arrived.
During the six years that had elapsed since Karl Johann’s escapade and consequent trial, Philipp had behaved much like any other young man of his family, wandering from country to country, taking an officer’s commission now and then, and, when he tired of it, giving it up. He had returned several times to Dresden and there had become very friendly with Frederick Augustus, the Elector of Saxony who was later to fall in love with Philipp’s sister. Like Karl, Philipp had had his successes at arms, but he had not been so spectacular a fighter as Karl, perhaps because the ladies ran after him and distracted his energy. A few months before he came to Hanover he had received the sad news of Karl’s death, which had, of course, taken place on a battlefield, in a fight with the Turks.
Philipp inherited Karl’s fortune, as well as his position as nominal head of the family. Strictly speaking, he should thus have been accountable for the behavior of his two sisters, one of whom, Amalie, had married a Count von Lewenhaupt. The other was the charming and notorious Aurora. All three young people, however, would have laughed heartily at the idea of restricting each other’s movements. Anyone but a Königsmark, coming into so much money, would have gone home to Sweden immediately, and stayed there at least long enough to put his affairs in order. The question of Philipp’s estates and property soon became even more complicated, because Uncle Otto Wilhelm died without issue, and his fortune too, a very considerable one, went to Philipp. But the young count was in no hurry to leave Germany, for he scented trouble and a great war in the offing.
It was 1688. James II of England was putting himself off the throne with as much energy as if he were aiming for that end instead of merely clinging to the Roman Church. Louis XIV’s activities were stimulating Leopold to a burst of activity; the Emperor was busily collecting allies, preparing for the all-out war which was Louis’s evident ambition. Among other rulers on the Continent, Ernest Augustus had been approached with regard to his loyalties and those of his brother the Duke of Celle. So far, the Duke of Hanover had evaded the question and put off signing any treaty. As I have already said, Ernest Augustus was not compelled to support the Emperor. He could with impunity line up with France if he wished. Whether he would have been wise to make an ally of Louis XIV, considering that everyone else except Turkey was going to be on Leopold’s side, was another matter. Ernest Augustus played for time and for more than time: he wanted to make a good bargain before he signed.
It is not quite clear just why Königsmark went to Hanover, but it was a natural enough thing to have done, for he was idle at the moment. He had made friends with Prince Charles, a younger brother of George Louis, at Dresden, and Charles no doubt suggested that he come home with him for a little hunting and gaiety; even, perhaps, to take a commission in his father’s well-drilled army. That is how Count Königsmark came to meet his childhood sweetheart, Sophie Dorothea, for the second time.
The situation between George Louis and his wife had become fairly static. The prince was still in the first excitement of his infatuation with Ermengarda Melusina, and Sophie Dorothea was still kicking up an occasional row. There exists a book about Philipp’s love story, supposedly written by Aurora, which is in the form of a novel, the characters denoted by initials and dashes. A passage in it describes one of these scenes:
“The Prince … not only avoided her Bed, but her Company, and for two whole months together, never exchang’d a Syllable with her, nor allow’d her a Moment’s Opportunity to enquire the Cause of so sudden and undeserv’d an Alteration.
“Not being able, however, to digest the Affront any longer, as likewise believing it to be her Duty to solicite an Explanation, she one Day made a Shift to surprize him in his Closet alone, and, when able to speak (for Tears and Passion for a while held her speechless) conjured him in the most urgent and affecting Manner, to let her know wherein she had offended, and why he so industriously avoided her. For myself, said she, I am not conscious of a blameable Thought, nor can I attempt to justify my Conduct, till I am informed in what I have had the Misfortune to displease you.… I would fain make it my Glory to please you, and should esteem it the highest Obligation you can confer on me, if you would point out the Way.
“By leaving me to myself,—interrupted the Prince, with a Voice like Thunder, and a Look if possible, yet more killing; and withal, rush’d out of the Closet like a Fury, leaving the Princess in Agonies not to be described.”
Overcome, Sophie Dorothea rushed back in turn to her apartments, where Königsmark was waiting with Knesebeck to pay a ceremonial call. The princess was crying, and in her excitement told them all about it in a wild outburst. It seems quite inevitable that Philipp should have been seized at that moment, if not before, with chivalrous love for Sophie Dorothea, and a determination to remain near her. Soon afterward he accepted a commission as colonel in the Hanoverian Guards, and he also bought an estate near Hamburg.
Correspondence which has survived shows that this gesture, far from being a practical arrangement made between confirmed lovers, was purely romantic. The affaire did not yet exist. Philipp may not even have intended, there at the beginning, to attempt to seduce Sophie Dorothea. The danger of such a relationship was great, as he fully realized, and the princess would have run a far greater risk than his. There were some courts where the ladies of the reigning families were as dissolute as the men, but those of the Brunswick-Lüneberg group were
not among them. No, Philipp loved the princess, he probably told himself, in a different way—a purer way; the way knights of chivalry were erroneously supposed to love their ladies, at long distance. He would stay near her as long as he could, in order to protect her if need be from that brute of a husband, but as for anything carnal—no.
Still, for all these uplifted sentiments, Philipp was no Galahad, He had a deserved reputation for gallantry, so there were plenty of interested spectators when he mooned about, looking unutterable things at Sophie Dorothea. More than two years before the pair became lovers, it was whispered, and believed, that they were guilty.
This mischief-making was due in the main to Sophie Dorothea’s enemy the Countess Platen. The story is that there was a splendid ball held at Hanover, at which George Louis, as usual, paid marked court to his fair giantess. Count Königsmark, magnificently arrayed in pink and silver, danced with Sophie Dorothea, who was dressed as Flora, all in white with a flower wreath. Everyone regarded them with admiration. As a portrait made of Philipp at the time shows, he was a good-looking man of boyish appearance. Whether it was his pretty face and the pink and silver, or the fact that he was supposed to belong to the princess, he had an electric effect that night on the Countess Platen, and she invited him to come to her apartments after the ball was over. Let Aurora continue:
“There was … a Mixture of Self-Conceit and Spleen to the Princess, as well as Affection for K—k, in this forward step of the Countess’s; She had neither been accustomed to Neglect, nor was of a Temper to bear it; much less could she suffer any Body else to dispute the Pre-eminence with her, or rob her of the Homage which she thought still due to her Charms, though now in their Wane.
