Sex with the Queen (28 page)

George arrived at the German border on June 19, 1727. After a large dinner and a short rest, he ordered his departure for three a.m. Stepping into his carriage to set out for Osnabrück, the king was handed a letter by a stranger who stepped forward and begged to present it to His Majesty personally. Used to re-ceiving petitions from his subjects, George took it into the coach. A couple of hours later, as the summer sun rose over green fields, he opened the letter. It was from his dead wife, cursing him for his cruelty. She promised to meet him before the tribunal of God a year and a day after her death. For decades he had tried so hard to repress the shrill voice that had called to him of his guilt. Yet as the coach lumbered forward, that voice came clearly now, rending the early morning air with a clarion cry of vengeance from beyond the grave.

The king dropped the letter and began to shake violently. His tongue hung out of his mouth. “I’m finished,” he panted to his chamberlain. When the coach arrived at the town of Linden, the king was bled, but insisted on continuing the journey. “To Os-nabrück!” he cried over the rising chorus of protest.
“Nach Os-
nabrück!”
When the coach arrived there, his servants opened the door and thought he had fallen asleep. But he had suffered a stroke and was near death. They brought him into the palace to die in the very bed in which he had been born. And the fortune-teller’s prophecy, given forty years before—that if he were in any way responsible for his wife’s death, he would follow her within the year—had proved correct.

Britain did not grieve for its unloved king. The only one who truly mourned was Melusina von Schulenburg, now the wealthy duchess of Kendal. For four decades she had loved him and was perhaps the only person ever to have loved him. The good-hearted Melusina was comforted by frequent visits of her dead 1 2 6

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lover in the form of a little bird who flew into her rooms regu-larly and fed from her hands.

Certainly the king’s son did not grieve. George II, knowing that his father had burned his mother’s will, now in turn burned his father’s will and claimed all
his
property. One morning, shortly after George I’s death, Lady Suffolk visited the royal chambers and saw two portraits of a beautiful woman wearing the royal robes of a generation earlier—portraits of Sophia Dorothea which the new king had kept hidden from the wrath of his father.

If Sophia Dorothea had survived George I, her son would have released her from prison instantly and installed her as queen dowager of Great Britain.

George II, eager to solve the mysteries of his parents’ divorce more than thirty years earlier, commanded that he be shown the secret Hanoverian records and, after reading them, set them on fire, watching the evidence of his mother’s adultery burn to cold ash. But neither Sophia Dorothea’s husband nor her son had burned all the evidence of her love for Königsmark. His sister Aurora, safely out of Hanover, had taken with her some two hundred of their love letters—1,399 pages in all—which she passed down in her family as cherished possessions. Today they are preserved at the University of Lund, Sweden.

In 1754 another packet of sixty-four letters mysteriously came into the possession of Frederick the Great of Prussia. These “not very honorable souvenirs” of his grandmother, as he called them, are also at Lund.45 None of the letters of the last six months of the love affair—those confiscated by Elector Ernst August and used as evidence against the princess—has ever been found.

It is possible that Königsmark, who had energetically bounced around the courts of Europe, resurfaced even after death. De-cades after his murder, workmen repairing the floor of the great hall in the Leine Palace reportedly found a nearly decomposed skeleton, covered in quicklime. The rumor quickly spread that the corpse had a ring bearing the Königsmark coat of arms. The Leine Palace, that place of secret lovemaking and sudden death, was destroyed by Allied bombs in World War II.

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The castle of Ahlden, the cage in which Sophia Dorothea sighed and remembered for thirty-two years, is now an antiques auction house. Her remains lie in the crypt of St. Mary’s Church at Celle. The visitor enters through a trapdoor next to the altar. It is a small, low space, with thick walls and the smell of mildew. Lead coffins are pushed together three rows deep, im-posing coffins set atop wide legs, ornamented with engravings of angels and coats of arms upon their lids. On the side, away from the great ones, is a low, narrow coffin, very plain and utterly alone. In it is all that is left of Sophia Dorothea. Even in death she was punished; her coffin had to be lower than those of her exalted relatives.

And yet, it is the only one on which visitors place fresh flowers daily; the glorious caskets of her relatives remain eternally un-adorned. All their palaces, built to sing their praises forever, were reduced to rubble by the firebombing of 1943. But the un-happy tale of a miserable girl still moves us. We make pilgrimage to her crypt to lay flowers on her small, mean coffin.

Perhaps her spirit had her day at the tribunal of God with George Louis, and a loving reunion with her Königsmark. As he had written her so many years earlier, “It is better to die than to live without being loved.”46

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F I V E

e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y

r u s s i a : t h e u n c h a s t e

e m p r e s s e s

Hard-hearted you are, you gods! You unrivaled lords of
jealousy—scandalized when goddesses sleep with mortal.

— h o m e r ,
THE ODYSSEY

I

M y s t e r i o u s a n d p e r p l e x i n g , R u s s i a h a s a l way s b e e n a nation of exaggerated contradictions. A land of gentle kindness and vindictive cruelty, of medieval piety and reckless debauch-ery, of opulent splendor and wretched filth. Forests glitter with snow; precious gems sleep deep beneath black earth, and rolling plains stretch endlessly toward the horizon. Tempestuous and scintillating, the Russian soul is easily angered and quick to for-give. It is the greatest of nations, the worst of nations, encom-passing the unexpected, the vast, and the priceless.

In the late seventeenth century Russia remained secluded in a heavy pall of Orientalism. Men wore long robes and long beards; women were sequestered in a
terem,
a Russian version of the harem, and prevented from contact with unrelated men.

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Russian Orthodox superstition ruled ever y aspect of life, and foreigners—those frightening non-Russian, non-Orthodox heathens—were kept securely in their own area just outside of Moscow, lest they infect God-fearing natives with their devilish ways.

For some thirty years before his death in 1725, Peter the Great single-handedly wrenched Russia’s gaze from east to west, a Herculean task well suited to a giant six feet eight inches tall in a world where the average man measured five foot four. This ar-duous effort was continued for another thirty-four years, starting in 1762, by Catherine the Great, the most extraordinary Russian monarch ever, who was, in fact, German. And so a gloss of West-ern civilization was daubed thinly over the rude barbarism of medieval Russia, a Russia with raging passions little calmed by the strains of the minuet. “It is as if there were two peoples,”

wrote the chevalier de Courbon, a French diplomat at the court of Catherine the Great, “two different nations on the same soil.

You are in the 14th century and the 18th century at the same time.”1

It was a land of unlimited opportunity. Unlike in France and England, with their rigid social structure, in Russia the most humble souls could soar unhindered to greatness. The fabu-lously wealthy Alexander Menshikov, governor-general of St.

Petersburg and commander of the armed forces, started life as a pie seller. Empress Catherine I, wife of Peter the Great, had been a laundry wench and prostitute. His Serene Highness the duke of Courland and regent of Russia, Ernest Biron, launched his brilliant career by shoveling horse manure.

Foreign visitors, offended by the barbaric brutality and hor-rendous table manners of Russian nobles, were most perplexed at their bizarre hygiene. Emerging from an Oriental past, Russia kept the Eastern tradition of bathing daily and, though the most backward nation in Christendom, boasted the cleanest people.

Russian nobles flaunted the largest, most dazzling emeralds and diamonds in Europe; visitors from golden Versailles routinely expressed their astonishment at stones the size of hens’ eggs glit-tering obscenely on men and women who seemed unaware of 1 3 0

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their value. Perhaps foreign visitors would have been equally as-tonished to find that fully half of these courtiers who shone like the sun did not know how to write, and a third did not know how to read.

In this land of unnerving contradictions, perhaps the greatest was this, that only a few years after blasting free of the
terem,
women ruled the most chauvinistic, testosterone-rich European nation for seven decades. On the other hand, France, which had for centuries recognized the political brilliance of the fair sex, had a law that prevented a woman from inheriting the throne in her own right.