Chapter D: O. M (4)

But a long siege was needed before the _Hofburg_ could be expected to yield. The services and sacrifices which the Empire owed to the House of Hanover were indisputable, and the solidity of its dynastic future must have seemed beyond cavil, after the Duke of Celle had confirmed his renunciation of any transmission of his dominions to a possible son of his own, and had married his only daughter to the Hereditary Prince of Hanover, where the law of primogeniture had been established. The meeting (1689-90) of a Diet at Augsburg for the election of a Roman King in the person of the future Emperor Joseph I, seemed a suitable opportunity for bringing forward the Hanoverian proposal of a Ninth Electorate through Ernest Augustus’ plenipotentiary, Count Platen. Yet, although it could not but be of great importance to the Emperor to make sure of the adherence of Hanover to the alliance against France, of which at this very Diet he impressed the necessity upon the Electors, the request of Ernest Augustus met with no acceptance either at Augsburg or in the course of the ensuing negotiations at Vienna. So soon as the Emperor appeared to favour Hanover’s desire for an Electoral hat, Bamberg, Salzburg, Würzburg, Hesse-Cassel, and Pfalz-Sulzbach were immediately on the alert to try for the Ninth Electorate on their own account; and this general eagerness conveniently supplied the Imperial Government with a new bait for gaining votes in the Council of Princes.[98] Moreover, the high-handed action of the Brunswick-Lüneburg brothers in the matter of the Lauenburg Succession (September, 1689) had exercised a retarding influence, by which so friendly a court as that of Brandenburg had been for a time affected. Even certain overtures made through his emissary by Ernest Augustus—we may venture to surmise without the privity of his wife—that, if such a concession would solve the difficulty, he might be found disposed to listen to suggestions as to his conversion to the Church of Rome, and his enumeration of the services which his House had rendered to that Church, proved in vain. Hanoverian diplomacy hereupon tried a different tack, and occupied itself with a scheme for bringing about a combination between Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover, which would put the requisite pressure upon the Emperor by standing neutral between him and France. The device, for which more than one historical precedent could have been found, produced its effect on this occasion also, after Saxony had been induced to fall in with it. According to the current account, the eminent Hanoverian minister, Count Otto von Grote (who like Leibniz had been introduced by Duke John Frederick into the Hanoverian service, in which he spent twenty-eight years, doing his duty to the State in the very spirit of Frederick the Great), forced the hand of the Emperor by exhibiting to him at Vienna the compact with Saxony which realised the menace of a Third Party in the European conflict. Even if this story is apocryphal, there can be no doubt that the neutrality project furnished a very powerful lever in the negotiations carried on at the Imperial Court by Grote in conjunction with the resident Hanoverian minister, President von Limbach. Their arguments were supported by representations on the part of Great Britain, the United Provinces, and Brandenburg; but they were still more effectively reinforced by the Emperor Leopold’s pressing requirements for his next campaign against the Turks. Thus, then, early in 1692, was concluded the Electoral Compact (_Kurtractat_), in which the Dukes of Hanover and Celle undertook to provide, in addition to subsidies, a force of 6,000 men in their own pay, to be employed in the first instance against the Turks, and afterwards against France, while a supplementary agreement bound both sides to perpetual amity and military assistance, and assured to the House of Austria the support of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg in future Imperial elections as well as in the matter of the coming Spanish Succession. Hereupon, on March 19th, 1692, the Imperial rescript conferring an Electoral hat upon the Duke of Hanover was placed in the hands of his representative at Vienna.

-----

Footnote 98:

Droysen, _Geschichte der Preussischen Politik_, Vol. iv. Part i. p.
87.

-----

But, before this act of authority on the part of the Emperor could command the assent of the Estates of the Empire which he required in order to proceed to the investiture, much remained to be done at Vienna, where Grote was active in person during the latter half of the year; at Dresden, where Jobst von Ilten, another specially trusted servant of the Hanoverian dynasty, successfully exerted himself; and elsewhere. In the midst of these difficulties, the Duchess of Orleans wrote to her aunt that she was convinced as to the source of opposition being German Princes rather than France. As a matter of fact, not only the political but the religious interests were agitated with which the House of Hanover had been, or might hereafter be, in conflict; and Grote was informed that both the King of Denmark (Christian V) and the Pope (Innocent XII) were adverse to the desired investiture. The good offices of Brandenburg were, however, freely exerted in its favour, and the Elector Frederick III’s envoy at Ratisbon, von Metternich, was instructed to tranquillise the Catholic Electors by undertaking that, in the event of the dying-out of the Bavarian and Palatine lines, the establishment of a new Catholic Electorate should be promoted by Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover. Thus, by the middle of October, 1692, a majority of the Electors had been secured for the investiture, and it was possible to ignore the violent opposition of Duke Antony Ulric of Wolfenbüttel, who, as Elizabeth Charlotte had hinted, was irreconcilable on this subject, and was calling out troops as if the world were out of joint.[99] On December 10th following, the investiture took place at Vienna, and Grote received the coveted Electoral hat for his master. Ernest Augustus and Sophia were at Berlin on a visit to their daughter when the good news reached them; a series of brilliant festivities ensued as a matter of course, since Frederick III was always glad of a reason for display; and, two days before Christmas, a defensive alliance for three years was concluded between the two Electors, to be followed a month later by an ‘everlasting league.’ This alliance, to whatever other results it might or might not lead, unmistakably signified the recognition of an important success gained for the ‘Evangelical’ cause in Germany. Brandenburg, which was so soon to merge in the Prussian Kingdom, and Hanover, whose heir was not long afterwards to mount the English throne, would, if they held together, suffice to defy any religious reaction in the Empire, and likewise be able to resist any attempt in any quarter at asserting a political domination.

-----

Footnote 99:

See as to his opposition Bodemann, _Anton Ulrich und seine
Correspondenz mit Leibniz_, in _Zeitschr. d. histor. Ver. für
Niedersachsen_, 1879. It was largely from ambitious motives that this
Duke entered so zealously into the great scheme for a reunion between
Catholics and Protestants. (See Clemens Schwarte, _Die neunte Kur und
Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel_, in _Münstersche Beiträge zur
Geschichtsforschung_, Neue Folge, Münster, 1905.)

-----

Neither, however, had Grote’s labours as yet come to an end—though they were a few months afterwards cut short by his death—nor were the aspirations of the House of Hanover within the Empire satisfied by the Electoral investiture of December, 1692. Brandenburg, Saxony, and most of the other German courts recognised the new Elector; but the question of his introduction into the Electoral College, which implied his admission as Elector to his due share in the administration of the affairs of the Empire—the question _quo modo_—had still to be settled. The progress of its solution was delayed by a persistent opposition, of which the guiding spirit was once more Duke Antony Ulric of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and which included the King of Denmark as Duke of Holstein, the Dukes of Mecklenburg, and a number of other princes, both temporal and spiritual, in the north and west of the Empire. In 1693, these formed an association which designated itself as that of the Princes ‘corresponding’ against a Ninth Electorate, thus, as was justly observed to the Emperor by the Elector of Brandenburg, who continued loyally to support the demand of his father-in-law, lowering the Imperial authority by ‘maintaining’ a resistance against a decision already announced by it. The Elector of Saxony, John George IV, had been likewise well disposed to the Hanoverian promotion; but, in 1694, he had been succeeded by his brother Frederick Augustus (Augustus the Strong, the lover of Aurora von Königsmarck), whom, as will be seen in a different connexion, private as well as public motives had estranged from the Hanoverian Court; and thus a fresh obstacle had been put in the way of the admission of Ernest Augustus into the College of Electors. The virulence of Antony Ulric’s jealous hatred, which, as we shall also see, was to find in the Königsmarck catastrophe of 1694 and its antecedents a most tempting opportunity for damaging the reputation of the Hanoverian family, suggested to him what the Hanoverian diplomatist Ilten termed a ‘_projet d’alliance diabolique_.’ Frederick Augustus was to be gained over to the association of ‘Corresponding’ Princes by a surrender to Saxony of the Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel claims to part of the Duchy of Lauenburg, and he was to cooperate with Denmark in dispossessing Hanover and Celle, who had occupied other parts of the duchy claimed by them. Ernest Augustus had to appeal to King William III to put a stop to manœuvres which threatened seriously to affect the general peace of Europe.

Although the machinations of Antony Ulric were thus frustrated, he succeeded in depriving his hitherto so fortunate kinsman, Ernest Augustus, of the satisfaction of attaining in person to the consummation of his chief dynastic ambition. Soon after the death of Ernest Augustus, in January, 1698, the insensate jealousy of Antony Ulric led him to make, with fresh assistance, an armed attack upon Hanover, which amounted to an act of hostility against the Empire, committed at a critical season in the affairs of Europe. The defeat of this attempt by the energetic action of the Elector George Lewis broke down the opposition of Antony Ulric in the matter of the Ninth Electorate (1702); and soon afterwards he acknowledged the Electoral dignity and the precedence of the Hanoverian Elector at the Diet (1703). Previously to these occurrences, the exertions of Frederick III of Brandenburg had succeeded in inducing the three Spiritual Electors to abandon their resistance to the new Protestant Electorate (1699); but the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession had thereupon caused further delays. Thus it was not till 1707 that the positive assent of all the Electors was secured, nor till September 7th, 1708, sixteen years after the investiture at Vienna, that the Hanoverian envoy, von Limbach, at last took his seat in the Electoral College at Ratisbon.

The marriage between Sophia Dorothea of Celle and her cousin George Lewis of Hanover, which was to end so disastrously, came as a matter of course to be represented as having been ill-omened at the outset. It is, however, impossible to trust either the account of the transactions that preceded this marriage, or that of the long train of events ending in its dissolution, to be found in a long series of versions of this pitiful story. In substance, if not in every detail, they all go back upon the parent romance compiled by Duke Antony Ulric, very probably with the aid of information furnished to him by the confidante of the unhappy heroine. An authority so signally untrustworthy is best ignored; though it would be idle to pretend that the copious stream, which has flowed through all sorts of channels from this turbid source, is likely to be wholly devoid of some admixture of truth.[100] In point of fact, we cannot tell in what frame of mind Sophia Dorothea entered on her married life, or even what was her mother’s view of the match. Eleonora, beyond all doubt, tenderly loved her daughter; but Sophia Dorothea’s nature was light and frivolous, and there had not, so far as is known, been anything in her life to incline her to resistance. The views of the Duchess Sophia on the subject of her eldest son’s marriage it may seem easy to guess. But, though she had execrated the d’Olbreuze connexion in all its earlier stages, and though she seems at no time to have pretended to anything like affection for Eleonora’s daughter, we may take it for granted that, so soon as the marriage-project had been formally adopted as a matter of court and state policy, the Duchess completely acquiesced in it. And, indeed, no doubt could exist as to the advantages of the arrangement, whether from the point of view of the political future of the dynasty, or from that of the present resources of the House. The marriage-contract gave to the Hereditary Prince the free use of his wife’s income, though it secured her fortune—which was certain to be a very large one—to herself in the event of her husband’s decease preceding her own. It was only at a later date, when a dissolution of her marriage seemed desirable to Sophia Dorothea, that she complained of the terms of this settlement. The great wealth of the bride might well be held to cover whatever minor disabilities might result to the possible issue of the marriage from the imperfection of her own descent.

-----

Footnote 100:

The supplementary (sixth) volume of the _Roman Octavia_, which
contains the story of Sophia Dorothea under the title of the _History
of the Princess Solane_, was first published in 1707, when Sophia
Dorothea’s lady-in-waiting, Fräulein Eleonora von dem Knesebeck, who
had, from first to last, been in the secret of the Princess’ relations
with Count Königsmarck, either was or recently had been resident at
Wolfenbüttel under the protection of Duke Antony Ulric after her
escape from prison. In the revised edition of this ‘historical novel,’
published at Nürnberg in 1712 and dedicated to the ‘_Hochlöbliche
Nymfen-Gesellschaft an der Donau_, the name of _Solane_ was altered to
_Rhodogune_, and there were certain other changes. The derivation of
the traditional narrative from Duke Antony Ulric’s romance was
convincingly traced by the late Professor Adolf Köcher, who, though
disbelieving in the genuineness of the correspondence to be mentioned
immediately, succeeded in throwing a flood of light upon the entire
course of Sophia Dorothea’s story.—Writing, in 1709, about the amour
between the Landgrave Ernest Lewis of Hesse-Darmstadt and the
(married) Countess von Sintzendorf, the Duchess of Orleans observes
that, since the lady is quite ready to show the Prince’s letters, it
would be easy for Duke Antony Ulric to turn their affair into a
romance.

-----

Nothing, it may be added, could be more improbable than that either George Lewis or his mother should have been at the pains of considering how far Sophia Dorothea’s character and disposition were suited to his own, or whether she would find any difficulty in accommodating herself to his way of life. The Duchess Sophia had learnt by long experience to bear with the open faithlessness of her husband, and with his frank neglect of herself, without forfeiting the influence which her intelligence had long assured to her over him and his affairs. How should she, with her shrewd apprehension of the ways of the world, have supposed that the same lesson would not be learnt by her new daughter-in-law? And it may at once be stated that there is no indication of George Lewis having during the early years of his married life kept up any relation that would have been unbearable to his young wife. If there was any truth in the rumour that he had been on terms of intimacy with Countess Platen’s younger sister, Frau von dem Bussche (_née_ Marie von Meysenbug), the relation must have been broken off before his marriage, as indeed a further circumstantial piece of scandal asserted. She appears to have been a very pretty person, with plenty of admirers; and she is said to have set the fashion of ‘drinking tobacco’ among the ladies at Hanover.[101] For the rest, although George I was at no time in his life in the habit of seeking personal praise, and in truth cannot be said to have received an overflowing measure of it either from contemporaries or from posterity, yet he was not without qualities sure to impress themselves on anyone brought into close contact with him. His unflinching courage and military capacity were generally known; and it may further be averred in his honour, that he was never found false to his word, and that he was unswervingly true to any attachment once formed by him. His manners may, in his younger days in particular, have had a smack of the camp, and they must at all times have given proof of the reserve which was part of his nature, and which bad and good fortune combined to harden into the stolidity of his later years. That he made no pretence to intellectual tastes (though he quarrelled with his illustrious historiographer’s unpunctuality in fulfilling his engagement to digest the ancient records of the House of Guelf) may have disappointed his mother, but could hardly perturb Sophia Dorothea, who came of no lettered stock. In general, she might well have been thought likely to suit her own fluid temperament to a character cast in a stronger and sterner mould. The portraits which remain of her show her to have been graceful and pleasing beyond the common, and this impression is confirmed by notices of her personality dating from the early years of her married life. Perhaps there may be perceptible in certain of her portraits (one of which reminded the ingenious Wraxall of Sterne’s Eliza) a sentimentality of the superficial kind; but nothing could be more cruelly unfair than to draw from these likenesses conclusions as to her levity of disposition. On the other hand, the Duchess Sophia may be thought a prejudiced witness, when, in 1684 and 1685, she is found expressing distrust of both the smiles and the tears of her daughter-in-law, and setting her down as an unsatisfactory example for Sophia Charlotte, the apple of her mother’s eye; in truth, however, the Duchess’ strictures cannot, in this instance, be said to be very serious. The bad maternal bringing up of Sophia Dorothea, on which the same censor’s faithful echo, the Duchess of Orleans, was afterwards fain to dwell as the original cause of the Princess’ misfortunes, has been waived aside as a mere invention of spite; yet it should not be forgotten that both Sophia and her niece were, in their girlhood, carefully and even rigidly educated, and that to this training the unfaltering rectitude that marked the conduct of both is, in no small measure, attributable. At the same time, it is equally obvious that the kindly guidance by which the most perfect system of moral discipline needs at times to be supplemented, or by which the absence of such discipline may be in part redeemed, was wanting to Sophia Dorothea at Hanover. While there can be no reason for gainsaying this, and while it must be allowed to have been natural enough that those who had hated the mother should have treated the misconduct of the daughter as what might have been expected almost as a matter of course, yet the attempt to throw upon the Electress Sophia the responsibility of the catastrophe which we are about to narrate may be at once denounced as inherently absurd. Whether or not George Lewis cruelly ill-treated his wife—and there is no trustworthy evidence to support any such supposition—the assumption is altogether unwarranted that either in his bearing towards her, or in any other important relation of his life, he allowed himself to be influenced by his mother.[102] Least of all was he likely to be amenable to her counsel at a stage of his career when he must have known her to be at heart adverse to his interest in the matter, all-important to himself, of the institution of primogeniture. And as for Sophia herself, though elaborate efforts have been made to represent her as morally guilty of her daughter-in-law’s ruin, there is not a tittle of evidence to support a conjecture in itself utterly improbable. For her frankness and sincerity are never found belying themselves; and intrigue of all kinds, as both her public and her private conduct show, was wholly foreign to her nature. Moreover, though, as will be noted, no letters from her hand referring to the crisis in Sophia Dorothea’s affairs have been allowed to survive, the general tone of her correspondence during these eventful years is one of a serenity of mind unbroken, except by her grief for her losses as a mother.

-----

Footnote 101:

See _Briefe des Herzogs Ernst August_, &c., p. 33, note.

Footnote 102:

‘That the Elector is a dry and disagreeable gentleman,’ writes the
Duchess of Orleans in 1702, ‘I had opportunity enough to discern when
he was here ... but where he is entirely in the wrong, is in his way
of living with his mother, to whom he is in duty bound to show nothing
but respect.’

-----

At first, things seem to have gone well with Sophia Dorothea at Hanover. The Hereditary Prince (for he was, of course, not styled the Electoral Prince till 1682) continued the military career which best corresponded both to his aspirations and to his habits—serving during a series of campaigns in the Imperial army, and taking no part in the home government till, about 1694, his father’s health began to give way. Doubtless George Lewis’ long and repeated absences must have contributed to keep him estranged from the Princess, and, as already observed, there were at Hanover no members of the ducal family or court likely to aim at endearing themselves to her. The star of Countess Platen, mistress _en titre_, remained steadily in the ascendant, and her villa of Monplaisir, in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, became the centre of its fashionable dissipations. Her sister, Frau von dem Bussche, was likewise still to the front (she took part in Ernest Augustus’ farewell expedition of pleasure to Italy, to be noticed immediately); but, whether or not she had formerly been a recipient of the Hereditary Prince’s favours, they do not appear to have continued to be bestowed upon her either under her present name, or when, after her husband’s death (at Landen), she bestowed her hand upon another gallant officer, General von Weyhe.[103] When the exigencies of etiquette did not require her presence at the interminable court dinners and suppers, or at the operas in the new theatre, in which the heart of Ernest Augustus delighted, Sophia Dorothea may be concluded to have led a life as solitary as it was dull in her apartments in the Leine Palace at Hanover.[104] The favourite companion of her long hours of idleness was her lady-in-waiting, Fräulein Eleonora von dem Knesebeck, who had come with her from Celle, and whose devotion, self-sacrificing though by no means blind, was to involve her in the consequences of her mistress’ aberrations.

-----

Footnote 103:

He served with distinction under Marlborough in Flanders. The marriage
took place in 1696, two years after the Königsmarck catastrophe. Yet
the late Mr. Wilkins makes Countess Platen, ‘with a refinement of
cruelty,’ try to induce Sophia Dorothea to be present at the wedding.
This significant blunder, repeated in the second edition of _The Love
of an Uncrowned Queen_, is exposed by Mr. Lewis Melville, _The First
George_, Vol. i. pp. 52-6. A Fräulein von Weyhe was in Sophia
Dorothea’s service. The court of Hanover, after all, has much of the
aspect of a large family party. In 1701, Sophia mentions a tour to the
Harz made by the Elector in a company which included three ladies,
‘the Schoulenburg, Madame Wey, and Ernhausen, the Schoulenburg’s
sister.’

Footnote 104:

The Palace was enlarged about this time, and entirely ‘restored’ in
1831-41. In Sophia Dorothea’s days the bear at his chain and the lynx
in his cage were still to be seen near the guard-house at the outer
gate.

-----

In October, 1683, the Hereditary Princess gave birth to a son, who was named George Augustus, in honour of his father and grandfather respectively, and who was nearly half a century later to ascend the throne of Great Britain and Ireland as King George II. We may feel assured that an event so auspicious for the future of the dynasty, and so speedily fulfilling the hopes with which the marriage had been brought about, specially commended her to the favour of her father-in-law; and, that this favour continued, is shown by his consideration for her some two years afterwards. In 1684, Duke Ernest Augustus had undertaken his last journey to the beloved land of Italy, being accompanied on it by an oddly composed company consisting, among others, of Count Platen and Major-General von dem Bussche and their wives. During this visit the Duchess remained behind, professedly _à son grand regret_, and Prince George Lewis was, for part of the time, engaged in one of his Hungarian campaigns against the Turks. But his Princess, at the particular request of her father-in-law, joined the ducal party at Venice, arriving there just before the opening of the carnival of 1686. ‘I am delighted to hear,’ writes the Duchess Sophia from Hanover in January, ‘that my daughter-in-law and her following are in good condition.’ Sophia Dorothea then accompanied the Duke for the Holy Week to Rome, where their sojourn cost the cruel sum of twenty thousand dollars; but, though her husband had by this time finished his campaign, ceremonial difficulties (which one would have thought would have affected the father as much as the son) prevented him from coming to the papal city, and he amused himself with a trip to Florence and Naples on his own account. All these things are told without so much as a suggestion of untowardness; nor was it till long afterwards that a scandal, promptly credited by the Duchess of Orleans, declared Sophia Dorothea to have consoled herself for her husband’s absence by an amour carried on at Rome with a French marquis of the name of de Lassaye. But the story in question rests entirely on the braggadocio to which this squire of dames treated the Duchess, and on the still more doubtful evidence of certain compromising letters purporting to have been addressed by him to Sophia Dorothea when at Rome, and printed by him in his old age—as late as 1738. Thus the shame of this denunciation lies entirely with its cowardly author.

There seems, however, little doubt but that, after her return from Italy, Sophia Dorothea became further estranged from her husband. To this date would have to be assigned, were it otherwise worth noticing, the attraction said by the Duchess of Orleans to have been exercised by Sophia Dorothea upon the Raugrave Charles Lewis, one of the family of nephews and nieces ‘by the left hand’ to whom the Duchess Sophia extended so benevolent and almost maternal a protection. According to the same authority, it was to escape the wiles of the light-hearted Princess that the Raugrave took service against the Turks in the Morea, where he met with his death in 1688; but there was very probably more malice than truth in the story. In March, 1687, Sophia Dorothea gave birth to a second child, the daughter who was named after her, and who, as the wife of King Frederick William I of Prussia, was to become the mother of Frederick the Great and of his brother Augustus William, the direct ancestor of the subsequent Kings of Prussia and of the German Emperors of our own times. It cannot have been till after this event that George Lewis, who seems to have remained nearer home after his campaign in 1685, began to follow his father’s example and give publicity to his preference of other attractions to those of his wife. But much uncertainty exists as to the date at which this infidelity began, and as to the extent to which it was carried. It has been widely assumed, and is constantly repeated, that Countess Platen sought to maintain the family influence over the Hereditary Prince, after he had tired of her sister, through her daughter; but this assumption, which, because of its revolting character, was carefully kept alive and cherished by the detractors of George I and his dynasty, must be dismissed as baseless. This celebrated lady, who, like the Duchess Sophia’s own daughter, had been christened Sophia Charlotte, in 1701 became the wife of Baron von Kielmannsegg, a nobleman of honourable reputation, who had for some years been attached to the Hanoverian Court. Here the pair lived in unbroken union and enjoyed a distinguished position; their villa of _Fantaisie_ on the avenue to Herrenhausen being regarded as a favourite resort of foreign visitors to Hanover. They afterwards followed King George I to England, where, after the resignation of the Duke of Somerset, the high household office of Master of the Horse was left vacant, in order that its duties might be performed by the Hanoverian _Oberstallmeister_, while his wife was created Countess of Leinster in the Irish and afterwards Countess of Darlington in the English peerage. Neither at Hanover nor in England had George I ever made any secret of the nature of the tie which he believed to exist between her and himself; he had consistently treated her as his half-sister, giving her at the Electoral Court precedence over the Raugraves and Raugravines, and, in the patent that conferred an Irish peerage upon her, causing her to be designated _consanguinea nostra_. So simple an explanation of the honour in which she continued to be held till her death in 1727 was of course insufficient for Jacobite spite, for anti-German prejudice, and for the love of scandal on its own account. On the other hand, the only personage whom, either before or after he mounted the English throne, George publicly recognised as mistress, was also the only lady at the Hanoverian Court who seems in the days of his married life to have exercised a strong fascination over him. Yet Melusina von der Schulenburg (afterwards Duchess of Kendal)[105] appears at this time to have refrained from thrusting herself into notice; and this agrees with the indications of refinement which it is impossible to ignore in the portrait remaining of her in the period of her youth.

-----

Footnote 105:

Of the persistently repeated story of King George I’s morganatic
marriage to the Duchess of Kendal there appears to be no proof. The
late Dr. Richard Garnett, who could hardly have failed to come across
whatever evidence on the subject existed, assured me that he knew of
none.

-----

Thus, then, scarcely anything is ascertainable as to the beginnings and rise of the general sense of unhappiness which is known to have come over Sophia Dorothea during her life at Hanover, and to which—some time in 1692 or later—she gave _naïve_ expression by the avowal, afterwards, with cruel ineptness, judicially quoted against her, that she would rather be a ‘_marquise_ in France’ than Electoral Princess of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Yet fixed antipathies of this kind are commonly of gradual growth, and it would have been difficult for a nature like Sophia Dorothea’s, craving for impulse to meet impulse, and quite incapable of renunciation, to settle down into the dull acquiescence which, with so many women, has to do duty for contentment. The restraint of a monotonous existence and the petty rules of an elaborate etiquette, imposed upon her among surroundings in which there was so much to annoy her and so little to sustain her self-respect, must in any case have made her restive and unhappy. Least of all could she have felt any inclination to take an interest in the schemes of dynastic ambition to which she knew herself to have been sacrificed—perhaps against the wish of her best friend, her mother. The anecdote that it was attempted to implicate her in the plot hatched by Prince Maximilian—Moltke, who was to pay the penalty of the discovered design, being offered his release, if he would charge her with a guilty knowledge,—may be dismissed as fictitious. And it may be observed, by the way, that, while there is no authority for connecting Countess Platen with the supposed offer, it could not possibly have been promoted by the Duchess Sophia, whose sympathies were on the side of Maximilian’s revolt against the principle of primogeniture. Sophia Dorothea was, no doubt, on pleasant terms with her high-spirited but flighty brother-in-law Maximilian, who, indeed, unmistakably oppressed her with his attentions; but it is quite clear that, in no sense of the word, can there have been anything ‘serious’ between them. We do not know how Sophia Dorothea was affected by the rise in the family dignity which procured for her the title of Electoral Princess. But, in regard to a question of still greater importance for the future of the House, we have it on excellent authority that she took a line opposite to that adopted by her husband. Sir William Dutton Colt, who, as was seen, had entered upon his duties as English Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at Hanover in 1689, while describing the Duchess Sophia as an incomparable person, full of charming wit, kindness, and civility, and speaking of the ‘Princess of Hanover’ (Sophia Dorothea), for whom and her infant son, he says, Duke Ernest Augustus showed great fondness, as beautiful, accomplished, and agreeable, notes (in 1691) that the Princess was distinctly anti-English in her sympathies. Her partiality for France might have found a sufficient explanation in her descent, and in the associations so long cherished by her mother at Celle; but Sir William Colt assigns another reason that cannot be overlooked. The eldest son (George Lewis), the envoy reported, was not in the least French in his inclinations; and the French party, discontented with this, paid all the court imaginable to the Princess—‘and I fear not without success, for she has no great fondness for the Prince.’

It is, therefore, clear that, by this time (1691), Sophia Dorothea’s feelings towards her husband had passed into a condition of more or less active antipathy. And there can no longer be any pretence of doubt that, whether or not the indifference of her husband towards herself had hardened into positive unkindness, and whether or not this unkindness (as there is absolutely nothing to prove) had shown itself in actual ill-treatment, Sophia Dorothea was already under the influence of a growing passion for another man. The story of the guilty loves of Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck need not be related at length here, since large portions of their correspondence are generally accessible, at least in a translation from the French originals, while a supplementary part is for the first time (with the exception of two letters which have appeared elsewhere) printed in an Appendix to the present book. The evidence for the genuineness of this correspondence, in so far as the greater part of it is concerned, which covers 679 pages, and is now extant in the University Library at Lund, was practically irresistible as it stood, and is confirmed beyond the last shadow of doubt by the letters in the Royal Secret Archives of State at Berlin, which cover 65 pages, and which are seen at the first glance to belong to the same correspondence. They agree in the handwritings, and in the use of the same cipher, as well as in all the distinctive features of style; they refer to numerous details mentioned in the Lund letters; and to some of these certain of the Berlin documents stand in the relation of supplements or answers. It is said—but on no stated authority—that to these letters might be added others, of contents unknown, in the possession of the present head of the House of Hanover. No part of Count Königsmarck’s correspondence with the Princess Sophia Dorothea remains in the possession of the present representative of his family. As for the Lund documents, their history can be satisfactorily traced up to the direct descendants of Countess Lewenhaupt, the elder sister of Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck. The younger sister, the famous Countess Aurora, as will be seen, actively intervened in the transactions that followed on its discovery, at a time when both the sisters were residing at Hamburg. It must be supposed that Aurora at some time transferred the letters from her custody into that of her elder sister; how they came into her own, must remain matter of conjecture, though it is a not unnatural supposition that they were entrusted to her by the recipients. On the other hand, the evidence of handwriting obtained by a comparison of these documents with others of incontestable genuineness, from the hands of Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck respectively, is entirely satisfactory—though this part of the subject is complicated by the fact (for as such it may be set down) that the Princess possessed the art of writing in two different hands, while portions of her part of the love correspondence were dictated by her to her confidante. (Königsmarck wrote his own love-letters; but his official letters at Hanover are, except the signatures, probably in the handwriting of his private secretary.) But it is the internal evidence contained in the documents themselves, in face of which the refusal to accept them, though maintained by at least one historian of high eminence to whom this period of Brunswick-Lüneburg history and this particular episode were familiar as to no other among his contemporaries, must be said to have broken down. The internal evidence in the present case consists mainly of a number of coincidences of circumstance and date, such as it is impossible to ascribe either to chance or to design, that have been proved to exist between incidental statements in these letters and in contemporary documents of unimpeachable authenticity. The most important of these are the letters and contemporary despatches of Sir William Dutton Colt, the envoy to the Courts of Hanover and Celle mentioned above, now preserved in our Record Office, and extending over the period from July, 1689, to December, 1692. (To these have, at all events, to be added passages in the correspondence of the Electress Sophia, and isolated statements as to the campaign in the Netherlands and the battle of Steenkirke in particular, in a military list cited by Havemann, and in a contemporary account of the battle in the _Theatrum Europæum_.) The credit of placing this investigation on lines which could not but lead up to an irrefutable issue belongs to the late Mrs. Everett Green, for whom a careful second transcript had been made of the letters of which a first, incomplete, transcript had been presented to her by the late Count Albert von der Schulenburg-Klosterrode. The second, complete, copy, carefully digested and arranged, was placed by Mrs. Green in the British Museum, after she had, for prudential reasons, abandoned the idea of embodying it in a published work. This task was accomplished by the late Mr. W. H. Wilkins, in his own way, in a book afterwards republished in a new and revised edition; but he did not live to carry out his contingent design of some day ‘translating the whole correspondence at Lund, at Berlin, and at Gmünden, and arranging it in chronological order with the aid of first-hand documentary evidence drawn from other sources.’ The corroboration of the genuineness and authenticity of the Lund documents furnished by those now printed from the originals in the Berlin Archives is, as observed, complete, and all the more convincing, inasmuch as they must have been separated from the rest at a very early date. It is stated in the Register of the Archives of State at Berlin that they were found among the papers of Frederick the Great at Sans Souci after his death; and the superscription which they bear (‘_Lettres d’Amour de la Duchesse D’allen au Comte Konigsmarc_’) is in the King’s own handwriting. How they came into his possession must remain a matter of conjecture, which will be more appropriately discussed elsewhere. It should perhaps be added that the whole problem of the genuineness of this correspondence is of very secondary historical significance; but, apart from the human interest of the letters themselves, their whole story shows how difficult it is to find, and perhaps also how difficult it is to kill, the truth.[106]

-----

Footnote 106:

For an examination of the whole question of the genuineness of the
Lund letters I must refer the reader to an article on the original
edition of Mr. Wilkins’ book, _The Love of an Uncrowned Queen_,
contributed by me to the _Edinburgh Review_ for January, 1901. I have
since re-examined the cipher with the aid of the key supplied by the
late Count Schulenburg to the late Mrs. Everett Green; and it
certainly fills one with amazement that any rational human beings
should have thought concealment attainable by so perfectly transparent
a disguise. But the miserable folly of the whole business is at least
consistent with itself.—As to the Berlin letters, Mr. Wilkins does not
explicitly say that he had seen them; but it was unnecessary that he
should do so, as an exhaustive account of them (with the text of two
of them) was given by Dr. Robert Geerds in the _Beitlage_ to the
_Allgemeine Zeitung_, No. 77, Friday, April 4th, 1902. The eminent
historian Dr. A. Köcher, after first directing attention to these
letters in the _Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie_, Vol. xxxiv. (art.
_Sophia Dorothea_), and declaring them an audacious forgery (he
repeated this assertion privately to myself), deposited in the Royal
Archives at Berlin a statement of his belief that a comparison of
handwritings left him in no doubt as to the letters being spurious;
but Dr. Geerds’ explanations on this head (see _Appendix B_) are to my
mind perfectly satisfactory.—I should like to add that at my request
Count Königsmarck, in December last, most kindly allowed the
examination of his family archives at Plaue near Berlin on my behalf
by Archivrath Dr. Paczkowski, but that no part of any correspondence
between Sophia Dorothea and her lover was discovered there. Dr.
Paczkowski carried out the task which he was so good as to undertake
with a thoroughness and _savoir faire_ reflecting the highest credit
upon himself and the distinguished official body of which he forms
part.

-----

Nothing indicates that Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck, the ill-fated hero of the tragedy of Sophia Dorothea’s life, made his appearance at Hanover before the month of March, 1688, when his presence at a court _fête_ is accidentally mentioned—just a twelvemonth after the birth of the second and last of George Lewis’ and Sophia Dorothea’s children. Königsmarck was a member of a Swedish family of high position and great wealth, which had derived lustre from the important services of Field-Marshal von Königsmarck in the latter part of the Thirty Years’ War, and which had, through him, acquired large estates in northern Germany. The branch of the family to which Philip Christopher belonged were citizens of the world; to set them down as adventurers argues an imperfect apprehension of the spirit of their age, and indeed of that of a great part of the following century also. Like the rest of them, Philip Christopher had seen many courts already in his youthful days; and nothing could be more probable than that he should have found his way to Celle, especially as he had a family connexion with France, such as would always have ensured him a welcome at the court of George William and Eleonora. He may thus very well have formed a boy and girl acquaintance with their daughter; but the statement said to have been afterwards made by him, that he had loved her from childhood, is insufficiently authenticated, and does not recur in any of his love-letters. He then accompanied his elder brother, Count Charles John, whose wanderings had been more widely varied than his own (and with whom he is confounded by Horace Walpole, in his careless way), on a visit to England. Here the elder brother was the principal figure in a _cause célèbre_, the trial of himself and others for the murder of the wealthy Thomas Thynne (‘Tom of Ten Thousand’), of which crime an elaborate representation may to this day be seen carved in relief on the victim’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.[107] Fortunately for himself, Count von Königsmarck escaped the gallows, where the careers of his accomplices ended; but England was no longer an agreeable place of sojourn for the two brothers, and their travels recommenced. The elder died in the Morea in 1686; so that it was the younger who, in 1688, inherited the wealth of their uncle, on his death after a distinguished career as a commander in the service of the Venetian Republic. Thus, when Königsmarck, after visiting France and becoming acquainted with the Saxon Prince afterwards known as Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, in this same year, 1688, arrived at Hanover, he was not only a nobleman of much knowledge and experience of the world, but a personage of great wealth, and an extremely desirable acquisition for a court such as that of Hanover, where there were excellent opportunities for spending money as well as for encouraging its expenditure. On his side, Königsmarck, as the head of his migratory family, may have wished to further the settlement of his sisters; and the elder, about this time, married the Swedish Count Axel Lewenhaupt, who two years later passed into the service of the Duke of Celle. The younger, Aurora, had not as yet found at Dresden, where her brother was probably already well known, the sphere in which her beauty and wit, after liberally diffusing their radiance in many regions, were for a time established as supreme; at Hanover, so fixed a constellation as that of the Platen family was sure to regard this brilliant meteor with much displeasure. But Countess Platen could raise no objection to Ernest Augustus’ offer of a commission to Königsmarck; and this offer was certainly made and accepted. For he is soon found commanding a Hanoverian regiment, in frontier operations and in Flanders, and afterwards holding, in the same service, a colonelcy of dragoons.

-----

Footnote 107:

See Evelyn’s _Diary_ as to the scandal which surrounded the trial.

-----

So far we stand on solid ground; but, as to the beginnings of the intimacy between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck, and as to the incidents that occurred in the period before the commencement of the extant correspondence between them, we possess no trustworthy account whatever. There is no evidence even to show the authenticity of the story, which has been used with much effect in a recent poetic drama (very different in conception from that imagined by Schiller on the same theme),[108] that Königsmarck accompanied Prince Charles Philip in the campaign in which the Duchess Sophia lost her favourite son, and that he shared the Prince’s dangers, though escaping his doom.

-----

Footnote 108:

See Schiller’s _Dramatischer Nachlass_, ed. G. Kettner, Vol. ii. pp.
220 _sqq._ (Weimar, 1825), and the references there given to articles
by Kettner on the subject.—The play to which allusion is made in the
text is Mrs. Woods’ _The Princess of Hanover_ (1902).

-----

At the time when the correspondence between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck opens—at the beginning of July, 1691—he must at any rate have been for some time back in Hanover; for he had started at the head of a regiment of foot in the ducal service on a march towards the Elbe, undertaken for the purpose of ensuring the safety of Hamburg. A few weeks later, he was himself sent to that city on a diplomatic mission for the conclusion of a treaty of alliance with Sweden,—a balancing operation on the part of Ernest Augustus, before he had made up his mind to join the Grand Alliance against France. That this charge, for which of course his Swedish descent rendered him particularly suitable, should have been given to Königsmarck, proves him to have been at this time in full favour at the Hanoverian court.

Inasmuch as, already in the earliest of his extant letters to Sophia Dorothea, Königsmarck describes himself as _in extremis_, though at the same time assuring her that his respect for her is as great as his love, we find the pair already on the brink of an abyss of passion, and understand why their correspondence was a clandestine one. Such, in fact, it was, from first to last, intended to be and to remain; and all the usual devices of secrecy at the command of the writers of these letters were adopted for the purpose. Of course they were all—or nearly all—written in French, the language ordinarily used at the Hanover as well as the Celle Court. The communications from Königsmarck, which may be said to form about two-thirds of the whole series of letters or portions of letters, are, when they bear any address at all, directed to Fräulein von dem Knesebeck, either by name or by some kind of designation under which she is evidently intended. Part of the Princess’ letters are written in a hand differing so much from that which wrote the remainder, and which a comparison with her undoubtedly genuine writing seems to identify as her own, that it may be assumed to be the hand of the confidante. In the actual composition of the letters, the writers had further agreed to guard themselves by the adoption of a twofold—or perhaps one should say threefold—system of cipher, which it needs no Œdipus to unriddle, at all events sufficiently for the purposes of detection.[109] Under such flimsy safeguards, explicable in Sophia Dorothea’s case only by her youth and utter inexperience, and in Königsmarck’s by the habits of a roving life which had led him to cast himself recklessly into a whirlpool of excitement, the lovers gave full vent to their feelings of amorous and jealous passion. The voice of nature is audible in this correspondence, but it is singularly devoid of charm. Königsmarck’s tone, as could hardly but be expected, has a general tendency to coarseness, and is at times very gross, calling to mind Stepney’s description of the unfortunate man, after his catastrophe, as a loose fish whom he had long known and would always have avoided. No similar charge is to be brought against the letters of Sophia Dorothea, which are written in an easy and flowing style. But her letters, as well as Königsmarck’s, contain passages irreconcilable with any conclusion except one—that theirs was a guilty love. For the rest, there is no straining of style in the correspondence, and those who regarded it as fabricated might well describe it as a ‘clumsy’ forgery; for it omits to make certain points which a forger could hardly have missed. In the Lund letters, at all events, Königsmarck, except when calling up the image of the Electoral Prince George Lewis in his marital capacity, refers to him with good humour; and Sophia Dorothea gives quite a matter-of-fact account of a quarrel between her parents.

-----

Footnote 109:

First, they use pseudonyms of a more or less allusive nature in lieu
of proper names. Thus _Don Diego_ and _la Romaine_ signify the Elector
and the Electress (the former is not a flattering nickname in
contemporary English literature; it will be remembered that the eldest
of Sophia’s sisters had in former days been called _la Grecque_ by the
younger); _le Grondeur_, _la Pédagogue_, are farcical names for the
Duke and Duchess of Celle, while the Electoral Prince, Sophia
Dorothea’s husband, is (not quite so intelligibly) called _le
Réformeur_; Countess Platen (query with an allusion to Monplaisir) _la
Perspective_, and Sophia Dorothea herself goes by the appellation of
_la petite louche_, or of _le cœur gauche_, or of _Léonisse_, a
character in a romance of the times. Aurora von Königsmarck is
_l’Avanturière_, and Prince Ernest Augustus _l’Innocent_. Secondly,
the writers of these letters employ a numerical cipher of a tolerably
simple kind. Of this Professor Palmblad, who published a few of the
letters (carefully selecting the worst), and who formed a monstrous
hypothesis upon them, lacked the key; Mrs. Everett Green, who
possessed it, was already able to decipher most of the names; Mr.
Wilkins had not to leave much obscure. Thirdly, names, and
occasionally other words, are spelt in figures, the chief difficulty
of deciphering being in this case the phonetic spelling adopted by
Königsmarck (_biljay_ = _billet_, &c.). Finally, the lovers also
resorted to an occasional cryptogram, which would not deceive a child.
A name, such as Chauvet, is split up and interlarded with the letters
‘_illy_’—thus: ‘_illychauillyvetilly_.’ The farce of insertion might
have gone further. Cf. _Appendix B_ as to the Berlin letters.

-----