The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (14 page)

The queen was so bloated and ill with dropsy that she could barely move, and every movement achieved was at the expense of great pain. She was steeped in grief for her dead children and her dead husband. There were none of the glamorous parties or intrigues that had marked the beginning of her reign at the height of her relationship with her magnetic favourite, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. After the death of Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, even Sarah stayed away, sparking a shattering fall from grace and the installation of Sarah’s cousin, the Tory Abigail Masham, later wife of Robert Harley (the Earl of Oxford), as Anne’s new favourite. The historian G. M. Trevelyan wrote of Anne’s tedious life: ‘for a dozen weary years the invalid daily faced her
office work . . . In order to do what she thought right in church and state, she slaved at many details of government . . .’

The reporting of early eighteenth-century court life is comparable to our own fascination with celebrity. Court notices, with their accompanying descriptions of the royal family, the aristocracy and other ‘persons of note’, were today’s equivalent of gossip columns, recording the appointments, the illnesses, the parties and the holidays of the major characters. For example, on 18 May 1722 the
Daily Journal
reported: ‘On Tuesday the Duchess of Kendal gave a magnificent entertainment to most of the Foreign Ministers etc at her apartment in St James’s House.’ The same column, reflecting what typically economically minded and sensation-hungry Londoners wanted, lists stock prices and convicted criminals to be executed the following Monday:

Yesterday the dead warrant came to Newgate for the execution of the following malefactors on Monday next at Tyburn, viz; John Bootini, a youth, for a rape on a young girl, and giving her the foul disease, Thomas Smith alias Newcomb for felony and burglary, Leonard Hendry for felony, Jeremiah Rand for a street robbery, Richard Whittingham for felony and burglary. John Hawkins and George Simpson for robbing the Bristol Mail; the two last are afterwards to be hanged in chains near the place where they committed the acts . . .

But if the British aristocracy and gossip-hungry Londoners expected George and Melusine to head a more exciting court, they were to be disappointed. A newsletter dated 4 September 1714 happily speculated: ‘His Majesty brings with him 17 sets of fine coach horses. We hear the king will keep here a noble and splendid court.’
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But Melusine and George, immensely private, did all they could to avoid the trappings of kingship.

George and Melusine always preferred the intimacy of family life and close friends to a large and impersonal court, and this desire strengthened as they grew older. Melusine had begun to correspond with various English women whose husbands were important politically while still in Germany, and she created a good impression with all who knew her personally. But she was far more comfortable in informal surroundings, presiding over small dinner parties, attending the opera with her daughters or one or two ladies, or drinking coffee in her rooms. The newspapers are full of reports of outings to the opera or theatre with one of her ‘nieces’, and she was in the habit of spending evenings with just one or two ladies. Lady Bristol, one of Caroline’s Ladies of the Bedchamber, for example, wrote in her diary of seeing a great deal of Melusine in 1715. ‘I go to the opera a Saturday with Madam Shulenberg and her niece . . .’ she reported, and later in the year: ‘I went to court, where I was received more graciously than ordinary. And stayed till three a clock, and am to be at half an hour after four with Madam Shulenburg to drink coffee before we go together to the opera . . .’
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Similarly the conscientious George took his duties to the state extremely seriously. But as far as he was concerned those duties did not include providing entertainment for his courtiers and visiting dignitaries. He would provide no public spectacle with a levee and a coucher – the public putting to bed and getting up of the monarch – open to high-ranking courtiers, and he refused to dine in public.

Some English sovereigns had been happy to receive courtiers and ministers in their bedchamber – George was not. Instead he received them in a private closet beside his bedchamber. Entrance was strictly controlled and by arrangement with his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber only. Even peers must wait their turn.

George, if not exactly a misanthrope, only desired the company
of trusted friends, family and servants. He saw the frivolities associated with monarchy as distractions from the business of government and he did his utmost to avoid them. English courtiers and foreign observers obviously thought his habits strange. Even the dying Queen Anne, they muttered, had kept a court more fitting to monarchy than this new Hanoverian king.

The Prussian envoy Bonet, in a private report for George’s daughter and son-in-law, described the awkwardness George felt at being on ‘show’. George, he reported to his master:

is not seen at his lever, nor at his dinner, nor at his supper, nor at his coucher. Only during some minutes is he seen as he returns from the chapel, and this by stopping in a passageway to the chamber, which is lined on one side and the other with a double hedge of courtiers who touch all walls, of the type of whom there are not ten people of whose faces he takes note, and to whom he might speak . . . As His Majesty never appears in public, one may not speak to him of business except in a formal audience . . .

Bonet, shocked that a monarch could be so reticent about showing himself to his people, continued:

Withdrawn into his palace of St. James, rather into one room and one cabinet, the other apartments being for the Courtiers, His Majesty never ventured out to Kensington, to Hampton Court or to Windsor, which are spacious, more commodious, and which have a more royal air. In this room, he slept and ate, and in the neighbouring cabinet he gave audiences. He has made no plan to designate certain days for business, and others for recreation and for the examination of those who are presented to him in audiences.

He goes on to observe that English courtiers rarely had the opportunity to get near their king: ‘He had established some lords as his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, who would have served at table, and some other lesser gentlemen to dress him, but he never wanted to receive the services of either one or the other, and he wanted to receive only the service of his Turks and of his German valets de chambre.’

George, he continues:

stayed alone every morning in this chamber until midday when he passed into the cabinet in order to give audiences to the ministers of State of the two nations until two o’clock, when he went to his table for dinner; after dinner, he walked alone in the Garden of St. James, or he went to the rooms of the duchess of Munster, and in the evening to the circle of the Princess [Caroline], until midnight, or else to the opera, where he went incognito in a hired chaise, or to the rooms of Madame de Kielmansegge [Sophia Charlotte] . . . and it happened very rarely that his ministers of State spoke to him in the afternoons.

Both George and Melusine had brought their trusted servants from Hanover, and they very much kept to their inner circle – the girls, the extended family and old friends. If anything Melusine, during the early years of the reign, was more gregarious than George, ensuring that she visited and received the noblewomen who could be useful to the king, and taking outings with her daughters.

Two of George’s servants served to excite the most interest: the Turks Mehemet and Mustapha, who had served George in Hanover. As a trusted friend and confidant, Mustapha was party to his most private disappointments and pleasures. We know of George’s pitiful despair over his sister Figuelotte’s death, for
example, only because Mehemet told Mary Countess Cowper, a Lady of the Bedchamber to Caroline and the wife of William Cowper, George’s Lord Chancellor, and a prolific keeper of her diary, who recorded it. This scene provides us with an image of George as a man of passion, far removed from the taciturn soldier of the popular imagination.

Coxe, the early biographer of Robert Walpole, comments on the importance of these Turkish servants: ‘Their influence over their master was so great, that their names are mentioned in a dispatch of Count Broglio to the King of France, as possessing a large share of the King’s confidence.’ He continued: ‘These low foreigners obtained considerable sums of money for recommendations to places.’

Nor did their influence escape Alexander Pope, who mentioned Mehemet in his
Moral Essays
, ‘Epistle II, to a lady’:

From peer or bishop ’tis no easy thing

To draw the man who loves his God, or king,

Alas! I copy (or my draught would fail)

From honest Mah’met, or plain Parson Hale.

Mehemet and Mustapha were also immortalized by William Kent in his glorious mural on the grand staircase at Kensington Palace, with the Turkish touches in Mehemet’s dress adding to his exoticism. In the mural, alongside the two Turks and George’s jester-dwarf, Kent shows Peter the Wild Boy, a feral child, possibly mentally disabled, who had been abandoned by his parents and was living in the woods in northern Germany. George brought him over to England, where he was treated as a curiosity at court. In the minds of many Englishmen, particularly the Jacobites, this strange group – ‘heathen’ Turks, a dwarf, a ‘Wild Boy’, a half-sister who all thought was a mistress, and Melusine, who many laughed
at simply because she was ageing yet continued to captivate the king – were established as corrupt and bizarre, in antithesis to poor, beautiful, imprisoned Sophia Dorothea.

Melusine also brought her favourite German servants to London with her, but she was typically discreet about her household, and many of their names are lost to us. We do know that in December 1721, one of the women on her staff won the lottery. The
Daily Post
reported: ‘We hear that the prize of 300 l. per annum for life that was drawn in the York Buildings Lottery on Wednesday last, fell to the Duchess of Kendal’s gentlewoman.’ All we know of her identity is that she was a ‘German Lady, servant to the Duchess’.
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She was possibly Mrs Shrieder, Melusine’s chief gentlewoman, whom she employed until at least the end of 1727. Another servant important enough to her household to merit mention in the newspapers was Monsieur de Anthony, Melusine’s secretary. Melusine’s writing was an illegible scrawl, and Monsieur de Anthony must have taken dictation for those letters that are easier to read.

Despite their distaste for display and the commotion of the early years, certain duties towards the court continued. Melusine was frantic with worry at the effect the rebellions and his fractious English ministers were having on George’s health, and Mary Countess Cowper reported: ‘Mademoiselle Schulenberg [
sic
] in great concern.’
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Nevertheless the countess recorded in her diary the celebrations for Georg August’s birthday: ‘I never saw the court so splendidly fine. The evening concluded with a ball, which the prince and princess began.’

But they retreated as much as possible and happily allowed the more sociable and gregarious Georg August and Caroline to perform the social functions associated with monarchy and to provide the royal family with the requisite glamour.

Thus from the beginning of the new reign two courts existed side-by-side – the monarch’s and the far more lively ambience
created by Georg August and Caroline. It would eventually have disastrous consequences for the entire family. The separation would harden into a near-irreparable breach, splitting court, aristocracy and parliament.

Georg August and Caroline, now Prince and Princess of Wales, enthusiastically embraced the role of society leaders. Lord Hervey, a writer and a gossip at the centre of court life (he became Georg August’s vice-chamberlain in 1730), recorded the different temperaments of father and son, and perceived that ‘the pageantry and splendour, the badges and trappings of royalty, were as pleasing to the son as they were irksome to the father’.
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Caroline held a drawing room in the evening twice a week, and gave balls at Somerset House and St James’s. She and her husband delighted the English courtiers by including them fully on their staff.

Melusine and George lived at St James’s from October or November until May or early June. George’s birthday fell on 28 May, and they often stayed for the elaborate celebrations in London before departing for one of the summer palaces. Late spring was spent at Kensington, and high summer at glorious Hampton Court or Windsor. The movement between seasonal residences reminded them of Hanover, and the progression of its court between the Leineschloss, Herrenhausen and Ghörde. Courtiers followed them; in the winter receptions were held at the inadequate St James’s Palace, and in the summer at Kensington, Hampton Court or Windsor.

Melusine’s days were spent with her daughters, her friends and her new English acquaintances, and her evenings with George. Melusine’s siblings were welcome visitors. Johann Matthias came to London in 1726 and George made sure that he reviewed the troops in Hyde Park. The king wore him out with his long and habitual hikes through the palace gardens, which could last up to three hours.
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There were some familiar faces already in England:
the raugravine Caroline was married to one of William III’s officers, Meinhard von Schomberg, Duke of Leinster, and the two women were on excellent terms. Melusine and George dined together most evenings, either alone or with the girls. In 1717 she was given the generous sum of £3,000 per annum to maintain her own kitchen to feed George and their guests, and was allocated a great deal of beer, sherry, claret, bread and candles. Sophia Charlotte was typically jealous of Melusine’s allowance, and badgered George for an equal amount. She too was awarded £3,000 to maintain her own kitchen.
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