The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (4 page)

She goes on to note: ‘That was the contents of the anti-contract of marriage which the four of us signed, the Duke of Celle and the Olbreuse, my husband and myself. After that the two lovers went to bed together without further ado.’
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A daughter, Sophia Dorothea, was born to the couple in the autumn of 1666. Eléonore, although overjoyed at her birth, was nevertheless distraught that her daughter was illegitimate and
feared for the financial provision of any future sons. However Sophia Dorothea remained an only child; subsequently the unfortunate Eléonore suffered only miscarriages or stillbirths.

Sophia gave birth to George Louis, Sophia Dorothea’s first cousin and future husband, and the future George I of Great Britain, on 28 May 1660. Only two years had passed since his parents’ marriage. He was much longed for by his mother. Prematurely, she had thought herself barren. Sophia adored him at once, her love fuelled by relief that she could conceive a child. She was in rhapsodies over his big blue eyes, believing him ‘as beautiful as an angel’. Seven more children followed, although one boy, the twin of Maximilian Wilhelm, died very young. Friedrich August was born in 1661, Maximilian Wilhelm in 1666, Sophia Charlotte (the only girl, known as Figuelotte) in 1668, Karl Philipp in 1669, Christian Heinrich in 1671 and Ernst August in 1674. Although she loved all of her children, Sophia later commented that perhaps she had had too many.

Sixty years later, Liselotte recalled George Louis’s birth:

I remember the day when the King of England was born as if it were today. I certainly was a willful, forward child. They had put a doll in a rosemary bush and wanted to make me believe that it was the child to whom Ma Tante [Sophia] had given birth; just then I heard her screaming dreadfully, for Her Grace was in great pain; and this did not seem to fit in with the baby in the rosemary bush. I pretended to believe it, though, but hid as if I were playing seek . . . squeezed into Ma Tante’s reception room where Her Grace was in labour, and hid behind a large screen that had been placed before the door by the fireplace. When the child was born, it was carried to the fireplace to be bathed, and then I crawled out. They should have spanked me, but because it was a happy day I was only scolded.
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Sophia called herself a ‘nearly stupidly fond’ mother; perhaps no woman, neither wife nor mistress, would ever be good enough for her beloved ‘Görgen’, as he was known to the family. As a child George was eager to please his parents. He was studious and reliable, a solemn boy who took his responsibilities seriously. Sophia vigorously defended him to critics, amongst them Liselotte, who thought him cold. Sophia argued that he was an intensely private individual, not given to displays of emotion but capable of deep feeling. He was loyal: once gain his friendship and he gave it for life. Although his stubbornness irritated her, particularly when he replaced his father as ruler of Hanover in 1698 and they found themselves frequently in one another’s company, she thought him the most admirable of her children.

In 1679 another obstacle to Ernst August’s ambition was removed with the death of Johann Friedrich. As he had produced only daughters, the dukedom of Hanover passed, at last, to Ernst August, and the family moved to the Leineschloss.

Sophia’s father had inadvertently unleashed the horrors of the Thirty Years War. Yet paradoxically it presented his son-in-law Ernst August with the opportunity to reinvent his principality. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, marking the end of the war, allowed for the creation of an eighth elector. For the first time since the Golden Bull of 1356 another German prince would be admitted to the Electoral College, the small elite body that elected the Holy Roman Emperor. Ernst August began to entertain a dream: if the electoral cap could be won for his house, the glory days of his medieval ancestor Henry the Lion would surely return.

The Hanoverian electoral cap has been called ‘the most expensive bonnet in history’, and to secure it, Ernst August was prepared to compromise his religious beliefs, send his people to war, use his children to further his dynastic ambitions and – most damaging to his immediate family circle – establish primogeniture in
Hanover. It could only be achieved if Ernst August could prove that Hanover was large enough and wealthy enough to be of use to the Emperor – and more so than any of the competing German principalities.

In pursuit of electoral status, Ernst August and Sophia spent a fortune on building and patronage. They rebuilt and modernized the Leineschloss, and the small summer villa of Herrenhausen was entirely remodelled by Ernst August’s Italian architect, Quirini, who used as his archetype the sublime Palladian palaces of the Veneto. If the Hanoverians could have lived anywhere on Earth they probably would have chosen Venice. Ernst August and George William adored it and kept a permanent residence there. But they were not doges of Venice; they were dukes of a minor German principality with ambitions, and Sophia was determined to make the best of it. Since the assumption of rule in Hanover, with the time-consuming duties it entailed, meant fewer opportunities for Venetian holidays, she would create a little Venice right there in Hanover, at Herrenhausen, for the family and court to delight in. When the work was completed the family spent every summer there, from May until October.

The relatively simple building began life in 1665 when Johann Friedrich dismantled his hunting lodge, Lauenstein, near Coldingen, and took it to Hanover. Its half-timbered frame was remodelled by the Venetian architect Lorenzo Bedoghi, and the foundations of the baroque gardens were laid the following year. Johann Friedrich, a humanist and an enlightened prince, clearly gave much thought to the gardens and their layout. The philosophy behind baroque gardens was man’s taming of nature, and he charged his new thirty-year-old court adviser, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – who would achieve renown as a philosopher, mathematician, polymath and the implacable rival of Isaac Newton – to bring his skills to bear on the gardens from the outset.

At Herrenhausen Leibniz’s fingerprints are everywhere. Throughout the 50 hectares of the Great Garden, for example, there is not one perfect right angle: they are all precisely 2.8 degrees out of true.
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Baroque thinking gave rise to the paradoxical theory that perfection appears imperfect to the eye, hence flawlessness can only be achieved by a small discrepancy. Leibniz’s mathematical genius had detected that anything up to 3 degrees awry created something even more faultless to the eye than a perfect right angle. The ideal baroque garden aspired to be far more than a pleasing space. It was meant to represent the immeasurable nature of the universe. And at Herrenhausen the long pathways of the Great Garden almost tricked the eye into supposing that they carried on into infinity.

Johann Friedrich continued to extend the house and the gardens until his death in 1679. Although the foundation of something marvellous was already there, Sophia was disappointed with what she saw as rural, dreary Herrenhausen. But she set about her improvements with such passion and determination that the project consumed her. She spent the next thirty-five years turning it into one of the glories of Hanover, and its incomparable gardens made the duke and duchess the envy of many a European ruler. Sophia said: ‘The garden is my life.’ And by the time she died in the middle of her wonderful creation in 1714 it was the most gorgeous and perfectly baroque garden in Europe.

She summoned the French gardener Martin Charbonnier, who had designed the gardens at their palace of Osnabrück, to help her; in turn he employed other gardeners and sent them on scouting missions throughout Europe. Charbonnier oversaw the design of the Great Garden, the Garden Theatre, the Nouveau Jardin, the Great Parterre, the Gallery, the pavilions and the Great Fountain. Water was everywhere. Sophia would take walk after walk during the summer days, listening to the trickle of the fountain and the
gentle lapping of the river against its bank. Heady scents more typical of southern Europe filled the air; the gardens were stocked with exotic plants from far warmer climates, particularly date palms, apricots, peaches, figs, pomegranates and orange trees. The orange trees were housed in the Gallery during the winter, but in the summer when the family and court were in residence they nestled in the courtyard, pervading the gardens with the scent of their blossom.

The roses in the Rose Garden, or Love Garden, imbued the air with their aromatic perfume, and at the centre of the Labyrinth stood a wooden temple filled with doves. During the carnival or summer festivals musicians accompanied the revellers. For those in a philosophical mood, the Lawn Garden was a perfect place to walk, with no distractions. The grotto, built by Johann Friedrich in 1676, offered relief from the burning midsummer sun. And in the Berggarten, opposite the Great Garden, a beautiful garden theatre was created between 1689 and 1692. Here Sophia encouraged the family to perform; one year George acted in Leibniz’s play
Trimalcion
, apparently very well. In contrast to the rest of the gardens, the Berggarten was carefully cultivated to present the appearance of being untamed by man, rather than showcasing a mathematical ideal. Here one could lose oneself entirely, and one can imagine the games of chase the ducal children would have played here, and the forbidden liaisons that the frenzied atmosphere of carnival would have encouraged.

Carnival was an established fixture in the calendar in Johann Friedrich’s time, but under Sophia and Ernst August it became ever wilder and more elaborate, leading contemporaries to call Hanover ‘the Venice of the North’. The canal built at Herrenhausen between 1686 and 1701 provided carnival revellers with gondolas in which to float and contemplate, or to indulge in the debauchery associated with the festival.
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A Venetian gondolier, Pierre Madonetto,
was employed to look after the boats and to ferry those who would not or could not row themselves.

Carnival, Ernst August believed, served two purposes. The first was to throw a huge party that gave the regime a veneer of accessibility; the second was to burnish the glory of the ruling house. Masques and tableaux where family members would dress as gods and goddesses enhanced the notion of rule by divine right; yet equally the populace was distracted by the music, dancing, free food and access to glorious Herrenhausen. They adored the sight of the nobility in their most outrageous fancy dress parading through the town in open carriages or on horseback, accompanied by musicians. By the time of Ernst August’s death, the Hanoverian carnival rivalled the Venetian for pomp, debauchery and fun; anyone who could afford a mask could join in. Ernst August was a lotus eater and the pleasure seekers of Europe benefited.

In antithesis to the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, Hanover became a party town. The war created a huge shift in approaches towards life and happiness. Just as the survivors of the Black Death in the fourteenth century became less risk-averse, so the Thirty Years’ War created a culture of excess, most visibly amongst the rich. Whole generations had been raised under the yoke of death; many responded with a taste for earthly delights.

If Germany’s princes adored Italian licentiousness, they also coveted French style. Writing nearly one hundred years later, George’s grandson, Frederick the Great of Prussia, wrote of the enduring attraction of France: ‘there is no prince [of Germany] down to the younger member with an apanage who does not imagine himself to be a Louis XIV. He builds his Versailles, has his mistresses and maintains an army.’
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The French King Louis XIV’s unsurpassable court and palace of Versailles, a former hunting lodge some 25 kilometres from Paris, became the model for aspirational princes throughout Europe.
Louis moved the court there in 1682 in an attempt to curb the intrigues of his courtiers in the vast and labyrinthine Louvre – he wanted the key men in France to remain under his watchful eye. When Sophia visited in 1664 on a grand tour of France and northern Italy, she was struck by the unique formal beauty of the palace and grounds. She admired the pomp and the sophisticated revels. The rigidity of the court structure appealed to her sense of royal entitlement. After she and Ernst August inherited the principality in 1679, Sophia succeeded in creating a court at Hanover that became an eastern reflection of that of the Sun King in France. Whilst Hanover’s pleasures reflected the frenzied delights of the Venetian carnival, the style, the fashion, and the language of the court was French – the lingua franca of international diplomacy.

Sophia and Ernst August had inherited the services of the dazzling Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Johann Friedrich, and he became so indispensable to the dynasty that he stayed for forty years. Leibniz became the family’s historian, diplomat, adviser and great friend. In him, Sophia found an intellectual sparring partner, just as her contemporary Queen Christina of Sweden, the ‘Minerva of the North’, had done in the philosopher René Descartes and in her secretary Monsieur Urban de Chevreau, who briefly filled the post in Hanover until Leibniz’s arrival. With Leibniz, the new duke and duchess devised a plan to promote the glory of their house, to make them all ‘immortal’.

Leibniz was charged with producing a genealogy of the House, the
Historia Domus
, in order to support its claim to the Electorate by claiming descent from heroes of German and Classical history. His excavations in the archives of Germany and Italy produced the hoped-for link with the twelfth-century German hero Henry the Lion. But Leibniz was not the first to delve into the family’s past. In 1685 a Venetian scholar, Abbot Theodoro Damaideno, had discovered not only a link to the d’Este family of northern Italy, but
also to Rome’s second Caesar, Augustus, to the fifth-century
BC
Accius Navius, a contemporary of the legendary Tarquin, supposed fifth king of Rome, and to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor.