The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (9 page)

5.
Beloved

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

– John Toland,
Hanover

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

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

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

But Melusine’s elevation created problems of precedence. Although Melusine was a noblewoman, Sophia’s nephews and nieces were royal. The dowager duchess refused to put her beloved relatives in the uncomfortable position of deferring to her son’s mistress as court protocol required once George had decreed it – he thwarted, for example, Sophia’s attempts to lodge them in state rooms at Herrenhausen. They continued to visit but the plan for a permanent move was abandoned. Melusine now dined publicly with George, and as her daughters grew, Sophia acknowledged them with positions in her own household. Although the dowager Electress continued to spare only the briefest of nods to Melusine’s existence, she formed good relationships with her illegitimate granddaughters. The girls were charming, opinionated and clever, and Sophia always liked clever people. Louise was beautiful, and young Melusine gained a reputation for telling George exactly what she thought. Sophia, enchanted with the girl’s precociousness, appointed her a lady-in-waiting, just as her mother had been before her. Sophia famously paid her ladies-in-waiting very little, and Melusine was obliged to supplement the meagre income given to young Melusine by her grandmother.
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Despite Herrenhausen’s beauty and tranquillity, Melusine could never bring herself to think of it as her home. It was completely Sophia’s domain, not least because Ernst August bequeathed the house, gardens and surrounding farms to her for the duration of her lifetime. The palace that Melusine could truly call home, particularly while Sophia was alive, was the old hunting lodge, or Jagdschloss, at Göhrde, some 120 kilometres from the city.

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

George employed the French architect Rémy de la Fosse to build a new palace. It took four years to complete. There is an anonymous painting on display at the Royal Collection at Windsor which, although dated 1725, shows a hunting party at Göhrde in 1723.
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From the painting we can see it has mellow golden walls and a bright red roof. But it is not a rustic retreat. Elaborate gates lead to a grand Palladian building, perfect not only for the private life Melusine and George craved, but also for entertaining on a large scale. George bought 500 paintings for the refurbished palace. Melusine, in keeping with her almost pathological desire for privacy, is not shown in the painting, but many of the family and courtiers are. George is there with his Prussian son-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm – the young Sophia Dorothea’s husband – and George’s grandson prince Frederick. Also present are two servants of whom George was extremely fond – the Turks Mehemet von Königstreu (literally ‘true to the king’) and Mustapha de Mistra. Mehemet, who had been captured by the Hanoverian army in Turkey and later converted to Christianity, was far more than just a servant to the couple. He became a friend and confidant. They both followed him to England. With so many members of his court and family present, the painting testifies to the centrality of this palace in George’s life.

Herrenhausen and the Leineschloss were Sophia’s homes, and the dowager Electress endeavoured to avoid Melusine as much as
possible when both were in residence. At Göhrde Melusine was truly mistress; Sophia loathed visiting because she found herself too much in Melusine’s company. For both Melusine and Sophia, the situation was rendered even more awkward after the old Elector’s death. Sophia relied on George completely. Figuelotte was in Berlin, Max was sulking abroad, and Christian constantly badgered her for money. Her youngest child, Ernst August, was so inexperienced compared with George that she found herself gravitating towards her first-born as a confidant, adviser and sparring partner. Although Melusine was quiet and patient, she must have felt the strain of a difficult ‘mother-in-law’, particularly as there were few opportunities to completely escape her company. Sophia was a fact of life who had to be borne for the sake of harmony.

In 1701, at the age of thirty-three, Melusine gave birth to her last child, also a daughter. The large gap between her second and third daughters – young Melusine was eight years old when the baby was born – suggests that there may have been failed pregnancies during the intervening years. But typically discreet, Melusine makes no reference to her childless years in any surviving correspondence. The addition to their family only added to Melusine and George’s domestic joy.
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Once again George did not acknowledge the child, even though he was now the Elector, divorced, and no longer had a father to please. Perhaps it would have been too awkward to admit that he and Melusine had effectively lied about the parentage of the two older girls and they thought it best to keep it an open secret. The newly gained electoral cap was still, George believed, precarious, and he wished to avoid any scandal.

Melusine’s family stepped in yet again to save her honour. Her adored eldest sister, Margarete Gertrud, who had so willingly accepted the maternity of Melusine’s first two daughters, had died
in 1697. This treasured sister, wife and mother was honoured with the epitaph on her headstone: ‘Here lies this fine woman, and a true heart is buried.’
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Melusine, as a mark of her great feeling for her sister, named her baby daughter Margarethe Gertrud, but the child was always known by the affectionate diminutive Trudchen. Now it was Melusine’s sister Sophia Juliane and her husband, Rabe Christoph von Oeynhausen, who claimed Trudchen as their own daughter.

As Trudchen grew older she was known as ‘die schöne Gertrud’ (the beautiful Gertrud). A portrait survives which today hangs at the convent of Barsinghausen, near Hanover. It was probably painted when she was in her early twenties and it shows an extremely beautiful young woman with long dark curly hair and a rosy mouth and cheeks. She resembles her mother.

During these years, Melusine was seemingly liked and admired by everyone – save for the chilly Sophia. John Toland, an Irishman who served as a diplomat to the court of Hanover, wrote to his patron William III in 1701 on the occasion of the deliverance of the Act of Settlement to Sophia by Lord Macclesfield: ‘The Electress’s [Sophia’s] maids of honour are worthy of the rank they enjoy, especially Mademoiselle Schulenburg, who in the opinion of others as well as mine is a lady of extraordinary merit.’
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Toland was obviously enamoured of Hanover. Many Englishmen imagined the state a mere provincial backwater, but Toland disagreed. He was impressed by the ‘fine, and richly furnished’ palace apartments and ‘a pretty theatre’. He observed that: ‘the opera house in the castle is visited as a rarity by all travellers, as being the best painted and the best contrived in all Europe . . .’

As to court life, he observed that it was ‘extremely polite, and even in Germany it is accounted the best, both for civility and decorum . . . Strangers of figure or quality are commonly invited to the Elector’s table, where they are amazed to find such easy
conversation . . .’ He thrills at ‘well-bred . . . obliging’ and ‘handsome’ court ladies and singles out Sophia Charlotte, daughter of Klara Platen and George’s half-sister, who was growing into an intelligent and vivacious woman. Her sister-in-law, Countess Platen, he comments, ‘may pass for a beauty in any court whatsoever.’ He was equally enamoured of the intellectual life of the court, which despite Leibniz’s complaints that it was not up to London or Paris, Sophia had made into one of the most interesting in Europe.

Toland was particularly impressed with George, and his writing glowed when describing England’s putative future monarch:

He understands our constitution the best of any foreigner I ever knew; and though he be well versed in the art of war, and of invincible courage, having often exposed his person to great dangers in Hungary, in the Orea, on the Rhine, and in Flanders . . . yet he is naturally of peaceable inclinations . . . He is a perfect man of business, exactly regular in the economy of his revenues, reads all dispatches himself at first hand, writes most of his letters, and spends a very considerable part of his time about such occupations in his closet, and with his ministers. I hope therefore that none of our countrymen will be so injudicious as to think his reservedness the effect of sullenness or pride, nor mistake that for state which really proceeds from modesty, caution and deliberation: for he is very affable to such as accost him, and expects that others should speak to him first . . .
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Significantly, Toland was writing around the time when George’s position was strengthened both in England and in Germany. The Act of Settlement automatically naturalized him as an Englishman in anticipation of his inheriting the throne. Sophia was thirty-five years older than Queen Anne, leading many to assume that it would be George, and not Sophia, who would succeed her.

For Melusine, irrespective of the developments regarding George’s likely succession to the English throne, life continued to revolve around her immediate family circle – George, her daughters, and her brothers and sisters who were frequent visitors to Hanover. From 1695, the year of his father’s illness, George remained in Hanover rather than going on campaign, enhancing his intimacy with Melusine. Family life was enriched by the arrival of Melusine’s clever and ambitious half-brother Frederick William around 1700, who relied on his highly-placed sister to advance his career. George, who obviously had an immediate liking for the young man as well as an obligation to Melusine, undertook the completion of his education. The Elector was impressed, and used him on at least one diplomatic mission during the War of the Spanish Succession.
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Friendship followed; when George went to England he appointed Frederick William a gentleman of his bedchamber. Melusine’s young brother was now officially a member of her lover’s most intimate circle.

Another of her brothers who moved in the couple’s orbit was Johann Matthias, who served the Doge of Venice for much of his career but had come to use his sister as a sounding board. He took up residence at the Palazzo Loredan in Venice when he retired from fighting the battles of European princes, and became an art collector. George regularly sought his opinion and advice, and Melusine’s relationship with her eldest brother enhanced her stock at Hanover. He was a gifted soldier and astute statesman who made it his business to know all the European gossip and was enormous fun to be with. Johann Matthias visited Hanover to see his sister as often as possible, on average once a year between 1705 and 1713. Melusine probably never visited Venice. Once George became Elector he took his responsibilities far too seriously to journey far from home for a holiday, preferring to visit Göhrde and the spa town of Bad Pyrmont, and it is unlikely that Melusine would have gone without him.

That Melusine’s advice was valued by her brother Johann Matthias is evident from a letter he wrote to her in February 1706.
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He writes to her in distress and disbelief following his rout at Sorau (now in Poland) during the Great Northern War, in the service of Augustus of Saxony against the Swedes. This debacle was unusual in Johann Matthias’s otherwise highly successful career. He had obviously discussed the war in depth with Melusine, as he begins the letter: ‘Your predictions, my dear sister, have been but too just.’ He speaks frankly: ‘There is no army in Europe worse disciplined than this: the thefts, cruelties, and murders which the dragoons and troopers committed after their flight are unheard of, and that even from the field of battle itself to Saxony . . . and I am inconsolable for having been at the head of the army in this in famous action, which cannot fail to cause the greatest disorder in his [Augustus of Saxony’s] affairs.’ He promises to tell her more at a later date. But meanwhile, he asks her to communicate the news to Leibniz, now an important diplomat in Hanover: ‘Have the goodness at once to show and communicate the plan and the relation, which has been drawn up in haste, to M. de Leibnitz [sic], to whom I cannot write at full.’ Significantly, it was Melusine, and not Leibniz – who was the official channel of communication – who was informed of the disastrous news first.