CHAPTER VII.
KÖNIGSMARK AT COURT.
Various accomplishments of Count Philip Christopher Königsmark—The early companion of Sophia Dorothea—Her friendship for him—An interesting interview—Intrigues of Madame von Platen—Foiled in her machinations—A dramatic incident—The unlucky glove—Scandal against the honour of the princess—A mistress enraged on discovery of her using rouge—Indiscretion of the princess—Her visit to Zell—The Elector’s criminal intimacy with Madame von der Schulenburg—William the Norman’s brutality to his wife—The elder Aymon—Brutality of the Austrian Empress to ‘Madame Royale’—Return of Sophia, and reception by her husband.
The estimation in which Count Philip Christopher von Königsmark was held at the Court of Hanover was soon manifested, by his elevation to the post of Colonel of the Guards. He was the handsomest colonel in the small electoral army, and passed for the richest. His household, when thoroughly established, in 1690, consisted of nine-and-twenty servants; and about half a hundred horses and mules were stalled in his stables. His way of life was warrant for the opinion entertained of his wealth, but more flimsy warrant could hardly have existed, for the depth of a purse is not to be discovered by the manner of life of him who owns it. He continued withal to enchant every one with whom he came in contact. The spendthrifts reverenced him, for he was royally extravagant; the few people of taste spoke of him encouragingly, for at an era when little taste was shown, he exhibited much both in his dress and his equipages. These were splendid without being gaudy. The scholars even could speak with and of him without a sneer expressed or reserved, for Philip Christopher was intellectually endowed, had read more than most of the mere cavaliers of his day, and had a good memory, with an understanding whose digestive powers a philosopher might have envied. He spelt, however, and he wrote little better than his grooms. He was not less welcome to the soldier than the scholar, for he had had experience in ‘the tented field,’ and had earned in the ‘imminently deadly breach’ much reputation, without having been himself, in the slightest degree, ‘illustriously maimed.’ Königsmark was as daring in speech as in arms. It is said of him that when George Louis in crowded court once asked him why he had quitted the Saxon service, Königsmark replied, ‘It moved me to anger to see a prince poison the life and happiness of his lovable young wife, by his connection with an impudent and worthless mistress!’ The whole audience gaped with astonishment, and the speech was reported in many a ball-room. But ball-rooms also re-echoed with the ringing eulogiums of his gracefulness, and his witty sayings are reported as having been in general circulation; but they have not been strong enough to travel by the rough paths of time down to these later days. He is praised, too, as having been satirical, without any samples of his satire having been offered for our opinion. He was daringly irreligious, for which free-thinkers applauded him as a man of liberal sentiments, believing little, and fearing less. He was pre-eminently gay, which, in modern and honest English, means that he was terribly licentious; and such was the temper of the times, that probably he was as popular for this characteristic as for all the other qualities by which he was distinguished, put together.
There was nothing remarkable in the fact that he speedily attracted the notice of Sophia Dorothea. She may, without fault, have remembered with pleasure the companion of her romping youth; and have ‘wished him well and no harm done,’ as Pierre says. He was not a mere stranger; and the two met, just as the husband of Sophia Dorothea had publicly insulted her by ostentatiously parading his attachment and his bad taste for women, no more to be compared with her in worth and virtue than Lais with Lucretia. Up to this time, the only confidantes of her secret sorrows were her mother and her faithful von Knesebeck. She had repulsed the affected sympathy of the Countess von Platen; and had concealed her feelings, when her jealousy was stirred by allusions to the countess’s sister and to Ermengarda von der Schulenburg. The Countess von Platen, mature of age, cast admiring eyes on Königsmark. It is asserted, that the count had scarcely been made Colonel of the Guards when the Countess von Platen fixed upon him as one of the instruments by which she would ruin Sophia Dorothea, and relieve George Louis of a wife whose virtues were a continual reproach to him.
The princess had been taking some exercise in the gardens of the palace, returning from which she met her little son, George Augustus, whom she took from his attendant, and with him in her arms began to ascend the stairs which led to her apartments. Her good will was greater than her strength, and Count Königsmark happened to see her at the moment when she was exhibiting symptoms of weakness and irresolution, embarrassed by her burthen, and not knowing how to proceed with it. The count at once, with ready gallantry, not merely proffered, but gave his aid. He took the young prince from his mother, ascended the stairs, holding the future King of England in his arms, and at the door of the apartment of Sophia Dorothea again consigned him to maternal keeping. They tarried for a few brief moments at the door, exchanging a few conventional terms of thanks and civility, when they were seen by the ubiquitous von Platen, and out of this simple fact she is supposed to have gradually worked the subsequent terrible calamity which may be said to have slain both victims, for Sophia Dorothea was only for years slowly accomplishing death, which fell upon the cavalier so surely and so swiftly.
This incident was reported to Ernest Augustus (Mon Sieur, as the countess used to call him) with much exaggeration of detail, and liberal suggestion not warranted by the facts. The conduct of the princess was mildly censured as indiscretion, that of the count as disloyal impertinence; and, thereto, a mountain of comment seems to have been added, and a misty world of hints, which annoyed the duke without convincing him.
Foiled in her first attempt to ruin Sophia Dorothea, von Platen addressed herself to the task of cementing strict friendship with the count; and he, a gallant cavalier, was nothing loth, nought suspecting. Of the terms of this friendly alliance little is known. They were only to be judged of by the conduct of the parties whom that alliance bound. A perfect understanding appeared to have been established between them; and the Countess von Platen was often heard to rally the count upon the love-passages in his life, and even upon his alleged admiration of Sophia Dorothea. What was said jokingly, or was intended to seem as if said jokingly, was soon accepted by casual hearers as a sober, and a sad as sober, truth. The countess referred often to his visits paid to Sophia Dorothea as ‘rendezvous’; but at these, Fräulein von Knesebeck was (as she subsequently affirmed) present from first to last; and two other ladies-in-waiting, pages, women, and George Louis’ own servant, Soliman (a Turk), had free and frequent ingress and egress.
This first step having been made, no time was lost in pursuing the object for which it had been accomplished. At one of those splendid masquerades, in which Ernest Augustus especially delighted, Königsmark distinguished himself above all the other guests by the variety, as well as richness, of his costume, and by the sparkling talent with which he supported each assumed character. He excited a universal admiration, and—so it was said by the Countess von Platen—in none more than in Sophia Dorothea. This may have been true, and the poor princess may possibly have found some oblivion for her domestic trials in allowing herself to be amused with the exercise of the count’s dramatic talent. She honestly complimented him on his ability, and on the advantages which the fête derived from his presence, his talent, and his good-nature. Out of this compliment the countess forged another link of the chain whereby she intended to bind the princess to a ruin from which she should not escape. At this time the countess is said to have hated the handsome Königsmark as much as she had previously admired him. He had met her liberal advances with disregard, or had disregarded her after reciprocating them. In either case, the offence was deadly.
The next incident told is more dramatic of character, perhaps, than any of the others. The countess had engaged the count in conversation in a pavilion of the gardens in the Electoral Palace, when, making the approach of two gentlemen an excuse for retiring, they withdrew together. The gentlemen alluded to were George Louis and the Count von Platen; and these entering the pavilion which had just been vacated, the former picked up a glove which had been dropped by the countess. The prince recognised it by the embroidery, and perhaps by a crest, or some mark impressed upon it, as being a glove belonging to his consort. He was musingly examining it, when a servant entered the place, professedly in search of a glove which the princess had lost. On some explanation ensuing, it was subsequently discovered that Madame von Weyhe, the sister of the Countess von Platen, had succeeded in persuading Prince Maximilian to procure for her this glove, on pretext that she wished to copy the pattern of the embroidery upon it, and that the prince had thoughtlessly done so, leaving the glove of Madame von Weyhe in its place. But this, which might have accounted for its appearance in the pavilion, was not known to George Louis, who would probably in such case have ceased to think more of the matter, but that he was obligingly informed that Count Königsmark had been before him in the pavilion where the glove was found; been there, indeed, with the excellent Countess von Platen, who acknowledged the fact, adding, that no glove was on the ground when she was there, and that the one found could not have been hers, inasmuch as she never wore Netherland gloves—as the one in question was—but gloves altogether of different make and quality. Königsmark had been there, and the glove of the Princess Sophia Dorothea had been found there, and this German specimen of Mrs. Candour knew nothing beyond.
Thenceforth, George Louis was not merely rude and faithless to his wife, but cruel in the extreme—the degrading blow, so it was alleged, following the harsh word. The Elector of Hanover was more just than his rash and worthless son: he disbelieved the insinuations made against his daughter-in-law. The Electress was less reasonable, less merciful, less just, to her son’s wife. She treated her with a coolness which interpreted a belief in the slander uttered against her; and when Sophia Dorothea expressed a wish to visit her mother, the electoral permission was given with an alacrity which testified to the pleasure with which the Electress of Hanover would witness the departure of Sophia Dorothea from her court.
Sophia Dorothea, as soon as she descended at the gates of her father’s residence, found a mother there, indeed, ready to receive her with the arms of a mother’s love, and to feel that the love was showered upon a daughter worthy of it. Not of like quality were the old duke’s feelings. Communications had been made to him from Hanover, to the effect that his daughter was obstinate, disobedient, disrespectful to the Elector and Electress, neglectful of her children, and faithless in heart, if not in fact, to their father. The Duke of Zell had been, as he thought, slow to believe the charges brought against his child’s good name, and had applied to the Elector for some further explanation. But poor Ernest Augustus was just then perplexed by another domestic quarrel. His son, the ever troublesome Prince Maximilian, having long entertained a suspicion that the Countess von Platen’s denial of the light offence laid to her charge, of wearing rouge, was also a playful denial, mischievously proved the fact one day, by not very gallantly ‘flicking’ from his finger a little water in which peas had been boiled, and which was then a popularly mischievous test to try the presence of rouge, as, if the latter were there, the pea-water left an indelible fleck or stain upon it. At this indignity, the Countess von Platen was the more enraged as her denial had been disproved. She rushed to the feet of the Elector, and told her complaint with an energy as if the whole state were in peril. The Elector listened, threatened Prince Maximilian with arrest, and wished his family were as easy to govern as his electoral dominions. He had scarcely relieved himself of this particular source of trouble, by binding Prince Maximilian to his good behaviour, when he was applied to by the Duke of Zell on the subject of his daughter. He angrily referred the duke to three of his ministers, who, he said, were acquainted with the facts. Now these ministers were the men who had expressly distorted them.
These worthy persons, if report may be trusted, performed their wicked office with as wicked an alacrity. However the result was reached, its existence cannot be denied, and its consequences were fatal to Sophia Dorothea. The Electress Sophia is said to have at last so thoroughly hated her daughter-in-law, as to have entered partly into these misrepresentations, which acquired for her the temporary wrath of her father. But of this enmity of her mother-in-law the younger Sophia does not appear to have suspected anything. Sophia Dorothea, at all events, bore her father’s temporary aversion with a wondering patience, satisfied that ‘time and the hour’ would at length do her justice.
The duke’s prejudice, however, was rather stubborn of character, and he was guilty of many absurdities to show, as he thought, that his obstinacy of ill-merited feeling against his own child was not ill-founded. He refused to listen to her own statement of her wrongs, in order to show how he guarded himself against being unduly biassed. The mother of the princess remained her firmest friend and truest champion. If misrepresentations had shaken her confidence for a moment, it was only for a moment. She knew the disposition of Sophia Dorothea too well to lend credit to false representations which depicted her as a wife, compared with whom Petruchio’s Katherine would have been the gentlest of Griseldas. As little did she believe—and to the expression of her disbelief she gave much indignant force of phrase—as little did she believe in the suggestions of the ministers of the Elector that the familiar terms which, as they alleged, existed between the Electoral Princess and Count Königsmark were such as did wrong to her husband George Louis. Those judges of morality had jumped to the conclusion that youth and good looks were incompatible with propriety of conduct.
The worst that could have been alleged against Sophia Dorothea at this period was, that some letters had passed between her and Count Königsmark, and that the latter had once or twice had private audience of the Electoral Princess. Whatever may be thought of such things here in England, and in the present age, they have never been accounted of in Germany but as common-place circumstances, involving neither blame nor injury. A correspondence between two persons of the respective ranks of the Electoral Princess and the count was not an uncommon occurrence; save that it was not often that two such persons had either the taste or capacity to maintain such intercourse. As to an occasional interview, such a favour, granted by ladies of rank to clever conversational men, was as common an event as any throughout the empire; and as harmless as the interviews of Leonora and that very selfish personage, the poet Tasso. The simple fact appears to have been that, out of a very small imprudence—if imprudence it may be called—the enemies of Sophia Dorothea contrived to rear a structure which should threaten her with ruin. Her exemplary husband, who affected to hold himself wronged by the alleged course adopted by his consort, had abandoned her, in the worst sense of that word. He had never, in absence, made her hours glad by letters, whose every word is dew to a soul athirst for assurances of even simple esteem. In his own household his conversation was seldom or never addressed to his wife; and, when it was, never to enlighten, raise, or cheer her. She may have conversed and corresponded with Königsmark, but no society then construed such conversation and correspondence as crimes; and even had they approached in this case to a limit which would have merited censure, the last man who should have stooped to pick up a stone to cast at the reputation of his consort was that George Louis, whose affected indignation was expressed from a couch with Mademoiselle von der Schulenburg at his side, and their very old-fashioned (as to look, but not less illegitimate as to fact) baby, playing, in much unconsciousness of her future distinction, between them.
It was because Sophia Dorothea had not been altogether tamely silent touching her own wrongs, that she had found enemies trumpet-tongued publishing a forged record of her transgressions. When Count von Moltke had become implicated in the little domestic rebellion of Prince Maximilian, some intimation was conveyed to him that, if he would contrive, in his defence, to mingle the name of Sophia Dorothea in the details of the trumpery conspiracy, so as to attach suspicion to such name, his own acquittal would be secured. The count was a gallant man, refused to injure an unoffending lady, and was beheaded; as though he had conspired to overthrow a state, instead of having tried to help a discontented heir in the disputed settlement of some family accounts.
The contempt of Sophia Dorothea, on discovering to what lengths the intimacy of George Louis and Ermengarda von der Schulenburg had gone, found bitter and eloquent expression. Where an angry contest was to be maintained, George Louis could be eloquent too; and in these domestic quarrels, not only is he said to have been as coarse as any of his own grooms, but, at least on one occasion, to have proceeded to blows. His hand was on her throat, and the wife and mother of a King of England would have been strangled by her exasperated lord, had it not been for the intervention of the courtiers, who rushed in, and, presumedly, prevented murder. To such a story wide currency was given; and, if not exact to the letter, neither can it be said to be without foundation.
The circumstances which led Sophia Dorothea to formally complain of the treatment she experienced at her husband’s hands were these. One evening, after being one of a group in the open air, witnessing an eclipse of the moon, and listening to Leibnitz’s explanations, Sophia Dorothea (attended by Fräulein Knesebeck and Madame Sassdorf) returned towards the castle. The ladies missed their way in the dark, but they found themselves at last at the door of a newly-erected building, which Sophia Dorothea entered, despite Frau Sassdorf’s entreaties to the contrary. She equally disregarded the same lady’s urgent entreaties not to enter a room at the end of the ante-chamber where the ladies were standing together. Sophia Dorothea opened the door of the room, and there beheld Mademoiselle von der Schulenburg on a couch; one hand in that of George Louis, who with the other was rocking a sleeping baby (the future Countess of Chesterfield) in a cradle.
After the scene of unseemly violence which followed, and after Sophia Dorothea’s recovery from a consequent illness, she made her indignant complaint to her husband’s parents. ‘Old Sophia’ censured her son, and found fault with Sophia Dorothea’s rashness. Ernest Augustus intimated that all princes had their little weaknesses, and that it was her duty to condone her husband’s.
This treatment drove Sophia Dorothea to Zell; but the wrath of her husband and the intrigues of von Platen made of that residence anything but a refuge. The duke refused to give permission to his daughter to remain longer in his palace than was consistent with the limit of an ordinary visit. She petitioned most urgently, and her mother seconded her prayer with energy as warm, that for the present she might make of Zell a temporary home. Her angry father would not listen to the request of either petitioner; on the contrary, he intimated to his daughter, that if she did not return to Hanover by a stated period, she would be permanently separated from her children. On the expression of this threat, she ceased to press for leave to remain longer absent from Hanover; and when the day named for her departure arrived, she set out once more for the scene of her old miseries, anticipation of misery yet greater in her heart, and with nothing to strengthen her but a mother’s love, and to guide her but a mother’s counsel. Neither was able to save her from the ruin under which she was so soon overwhelmed.
Her return had been duly announced to the Court of Hanover, and so much show of outward respect was vouchsafed her as consisted in a portion of the Electoral family repairing to the country residence of Herrnhausen to meet her on her way, and accompany her to the capital. Of this attention, however, she was unaware, or was scornfully unappreciative, and she passed Herrnhausen at as much speed as could then be shown by Electoral post-horses. It is said that her first intention was to have stopped at the country mansion, where the Electoral party was waiting to do her honour; that she was aware of the latter fact, but that she hurried on her way for the reason that she saw the Countess von Platen seated at one of the windows looking on to the road, and that, rather than encounter her, she offended nearly a whole family, who were more nice touching matters of etiquette than they were touching matters of morality. The members of this family, in waiting to receive a young lady, against whom they considered that they were not without grounds of complaint, were lost in a sense of horror which was farcical, and of indignation at violated proprieties which must have been as comical to look at as it no doubt was intense. The farcical nature of the scene is to be found in the fact, that these good people, by piling their agony beyond measure, made it ridiculous. There was no warrant for their horror, no cause for their indignation; and when they all returned to Hanover, following on the track of a young princess, whose contempt of ceremony tended to give them strange suspicions as to whether she possessed any remnant of virtue at all, these very serene princes and princesses were as supremely ridiculous as any of the smaller people worshipping ceremony in that never-to-be-forgotten city of Kotzebue’s painting, called Krähwinkel.
When Sophia Dorothea passed by Herrnhausen, regardless of the company who awaited her there, she left the persons of a complicated drama standing in utter amazement on one of the prettiest of theatres. Herrnhausen was a name given to trim gardens, as well as to the edifice surrounded by them. At the period of which we are treating the grounds were a scene of delight; the fountains tasteful, the basins large, and the water abundant. The maze, or wilderness, was the wonder of Germany, and the orangery the pride of Europe. There was also, what may still be seen in some of the pleasure-grounds of German princes, a perfectly rustic theatre, complete in itself, with but little help from any hand but that of nature. The seats were cut out of the turf, the verdure resembled green velvet, and the chances of rheumatism must have been many. There was no roof but the sky, and the dressing-rooms of the actors were lofty bowers constructed near the stage; the whole was adorned with a profusion of gilded statues, and kept continually damp by an incessant play of spray-scattering water-works. The grand tableau of rage in this locality, as Sophia Dorothea passed unheedingly by, must have been a spectacle worth the contemplating. Perhaps she had passed the more scornfully as George Louis was there, who, of all men, must at this time have been to her the most hateful.