The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (2 page)

Although she lived only 300 years ago, the sources are problematic. We have the opinions of those who loathed her and laughed at her foreignness, the coffee-house wags and the court gossips, and the testimonies of those who were indebted to her, whose views were naturally biased. She wrote charming notes to the court glitterati and was forthright in sending instructions and admonitions to the king’s ministers. But very little about her personal life comes from Melusine’s own lips. The reason is the Königsmarck affair.

In 1694 George divorced his wife Sophia Dorothea of Celle in circumstances that scandalized Europe. The princess was conducting an indiscreet love affair with a Swedish mercenary, Count
Philip von Königsmarck, and it was the letters between the lovers that left no room for doubt.

Count Philip was subsequently murdered, probably on the orders of George’s father, and the unfortunate Sophia Dorothea was denied access to her children and locked in Ahlden Castle for the rest of her life. A shocked and humiliated George instructed his mistress that they must never write anything of an intimate nature to one another. Unusually, as her status as
maîtresse en titre
– the king’s official mistress – was established both in Hanover and England, no letters survive between the pair. Frustratingly the biographer can only surmise her most intimate thoughts.

Until recently only three portraits of Melusine were known. One is in the British Museum. It is a delightful print of her head and shoulders, etched in her youth; it dates from about 1691. The second, in a tiny room in the sleepy convent of Barsinghausen, shows a haughty and imposing Melusine, in her late forties or early fifties, richly but soberly dressed. The other, in Hanover, is a sumptuous three-quarter-length portrait, which was probably painted in the early 1720s. But as I researched this book, an archivist at Celle Castle told me there was another painting of Melusine in the castle’s storage block.

I went out of the spring sunshine to find her. Celle Castle has portraits of queens on its walls, but Melusine in consigned to the vaults. A grave curator accompanied me to a dismal basement and slid her out from amongst hundreds of paintings that may never be displayed again. And there she was, a little faded and in poor condition, but unmistakably Melusine – regal, elegant, her left hand resting on the royal ermine.

2.
The Mermaid and the Girl

‘Dear lady . . . Please believe me when I say there will be nothing I will not strive to do for your sake, however difficult it might be.’

The Count of Lusignan to the Fairy Melusine

A medieval story tells of a count of Poitou who falls in love with a golden-haired maiden called Melusina. She consents to marry him on one condition: that she can spend one day each week in complete solitude. The count agrees until at last, after many years, his curiosity demands satisfaction. He spies on his wife in her bath, and sees that her lower body is transformed into a serpent’s tail. Later, when misery strikes his house with the death of one of their sons, he attacks Melusina with the words: ‘Away, odious serpent, contaminator of my honourable race.’

Whatever her parents were thinking as they named her, Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg was always known by her second name.

She was born at Emden, a prosperous town on the estuary of the river Ems, just two miles from the North Sea, on Christmas Day 1667, the second surviving daughter and fourth child of Count Gustav Adolph and his first wife, Petronilla Ottilia.

The Schulenburgs were minor aristocrats, well-entrenched and respectable. Their forebears had been ennobled in the thirteenth century. Family legend claimed celebrated generals, marshals and bishops among their ancestors. But despite past glories, by the time of her parents’ marriage the family was poor and their estates in ruin. Melusine’s early childhood was spent in relative poverty, in a ramshackle castle.

Her father was named after his father’s hero, Gustav Adolph, the legendary king of the Swedes. Gustav studied in Helmstedt, where he was a less than model student. In the autumn of 1653 he was fined a swingeing amount for a now unknown misdemeanour.
After his studies he served in the Swedish army, before turning to the civil service, where his rise was meteoric.

He entered the service of the Elector of Brandenburg, where his talents were rewarded with promotion after promotion. In 1683 he was created Privy Councillor, one of the highest honours in the Electorate. Administrative brilliance brought diplomatic responsibility; he successfully undertook emissaries to Lüneburg in 1682, to Dresden in 1685, and to Leipzig in 1690.

But credit for a turn in the Schulenburg fortunes lies with Melusine’s mother, Petronilla. She was a daughter of the Holstein family, another of the myriad of minor aristocrats whose tiny principalities formed the intricate patchwork of separate regimes that occupied the territory we now call Germany, all owing allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. (Germany consisted of over 300 tiny city-states, and the number was ever-changing.) Petronilla’s financial management was spectacular. Within a few short years she managed to pay off her husband’s stupendous debts, to reorganize his estates and to finance the building of the castle at Emden, which became their family home.
¹
It was Petronilla who enabled Gustav Adolph to pursue his brilliant career in the service of the Elector of Brandenburg.

Meanwhile the Schulenburg family was growing. Between 1659 and 1674 Petronilla produced nine children, six of whom survived infancy. Melusine’s eldest sister, Margarete Gertrud, was born in 1659, followed two years later by her eldest brother, Johann Matthias. Daniel Bodo joined the nursery the following year. Melusine was born in 1667, followed swiftly by her sister Sophie Juliane in 1668, and by Anna Elisabeth in 1673.

When Melusine was only six years old Petronilla Ottilia died, probably due to complications in childbirth. Her youngest daughter, Charlotte, was born on 11 April 1674 and Petronilla died nine days later. Charlotte would live for less than two years.

The children’s grief must have been terrible. Their father was frequently absent from home and their primary relationship was with a mother who had created a loving domestic environment where the siblings’ deep affection for one another was nurtured. Melusine and her siblings were close all their adult lives. Later, her sisters would accept maternity of her illegitimate children, she would support them financially when necessary, and the family regularly took holidays together, despite being scattered across Europe. Petronilla was considerate, not only to her own children but to the children of the estate’s tenants, ensuring that even the poorest children received an education at the local school she established.
²

At her funeral Petronilla’s grief-stricken widower dedicated a Latin song to her.
³
But two years later his grief had abated enough to marry again, to the nineteen-year-old aristocrat Anna Elisabeth von Stammer, who was twenty-five years his junior. Melusine was only eight years old when her father’s new young wife took over the running of the household. There was a mere eleven years between them. Anna Elisabeth gave birth to four children, two of whom survived infancy. Frederick William, born in 1680, became one of George I’s intimate circle through his sister’s intercession.
⁴
Another sister, Johanna Auguste, was born in January 1687.

Though he may have lapsed into bouts of bad behaviour as a student, Gustav, who had been a pupil of the humanist John Caselius, nevertheless prized education for girls and boys alike. Although only his sons attended the university at Helmstadt, all the children enjoyed the services of a tutor. Melusine received a solid but not particularly inspiring education; she studied arithmetic, literature, music, drawing and dancing. Like most German aristocrats, to whom everything French was the epitome of good taste, Melusine spoke the language fluently.

Many aristocratic families sought positions for themselves and their children outside of their principality; the Schulenburgs were
no exception. By the end of the 1680s Gustav decided that, with no imminent marriage prospect, Melusine must be found something to do. Johann Matthias and Daniel Bodo were long gone. They went to school in Magdeburg in 1676, when Melusine was nine. The brothers returned home briefly before continuing their education at Helmstadt, and then in 1680 they spent two years at the University of Saumur in Brittany. When their studies were completed they went to Paris, where Johann Matthias ran up such huge debts that he was forced to remain longer than Daniel Bodo – who returned to the family home in 1684 – to pay them off.
⁵
Daniel Bodo then pursued his own military career, and by 1687 Johann Matthias, Melusine’s favourite sibling, had entered the service of the Emperor and was gone for good. He would eventually become one of the most famous field marshals of the age.

Margarete Gertrud, eight years older than Melusine, had become a mother-figure to her younger siblings after their own mother’s death. She married the diplomat Friedrich Achaz, a Schulenburg cousin twelve years her senior, in the summer of 1681 and they moved to Vienna. Of those siblings close to Melusine in age only Sophie Julianne remained at home, but by 1690 her marriage to Rabe Christoph von Oeynhausen, a courtier at Celle who at some point served as Master of the Hunt and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, had been arranged. The remaining children were very young. Anna Elisabeth was six years her junior and in 1690 her half-brother Frederick William was ten and her half-sister Johanna August only three. It was time for Melusine to fly the nest.

Why did she remain unmarried? It is likely that no one sufficiently distinguished asked for her hand in marriage. To her father’s delight, he managed to obtain a position for Melusine as a maid of honour to the universally admired Sophia, Duchess of Hanover, wife of Ernst August of Hanover. Gustav probably hoped that this position would attract a glittering marriage. But the romance that Melusine embarked on when she arrived in Hanover was not what her father had envisaged. The year was 1690, although the exact date, as with so much of her life, is unrecorded. She was twenty-two.

3.
Venice of the North

. . . one of the most agreeable places in the world.

– Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Hanover was a walled town spanning two sides of the river Leine, with fortified towers, only one of which – the Beginenturm – now survives. It was filled with half-timbered dwellings in the Saxon style, or brick patrician houses with distinctive red-gabled roofs. Broad streets ran parallel to the river and out through the city walls to the countryside beyond. There was a paved market square, a windmill, and four churches – amongst them the strange and glorious Market Church, towering above the square and proudly displaying its pentagon alongside the Star of David.

The Market Church stands next to the gorgeous mass of red-brick gables that was the Town Hall. Hanover’s churches, most of which had become Lutheran during the Reformation, reflected the religious tolerance of the principality, which allowed for freedom of worship. Religion played an important part in the lives of most of the population, despite the beginnings of the Enlightenment and the enthusiasm with which the ruling family embraced its principles. The city was less than a kilometre from city gate to city gate. Its population barely topped ten thousand.

Appearances are deceptive. By 1690 the ambitions of Hanover’s rulers, Sophia and Ernst August, had turned a city-state that was previously a footnote on the international stage into a dynamic entity with aspirations to greatness. It was Ernst August’s and Sophia’s determination to create a royal dynasty that would ensure that Melusine would not become the mistress of a minor princeling, but of an elector of the Holy Roman Emperor. Elector was the highest rank in the Holy Roman Empire below the Emperor himself. The chosen few – there were only seven until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 – were empowered to choose the
emperors. To secure the honour, the ruler had to ensure that his dominion was large and wealthy enough to provide the Emperor (at the time Leopold I) with troops and finance for his wars, and ostentatious enough to advertise it.

It was a gamble. The Treaty of Westphalia, which brought an end to the Thirty Years War, allowed for the creation of another elector, and the Hanoverian princes, fuelled by a wild ambition, craved the glory this would bring to their house. Melusine entered a court that was feverish in the pursuit of this single aim. All were expected to act in the service of the rulers’ ambitions. The dazzling possibility of the electoral cap overshadowed everything.

The ducal family – Ernst August, Sophia and their children – lived in splendour. Their two main residences were the Leineschloss, a small castle on the river Leine in the centre of the city, and the pretty summer palace of Herrenhausen two kilometres away. The family divided their time equally between the two houses, and moved their enormous household between them. The Hanoverian stable boasted six hundred horses and accompanying coachmen, horse-doctors, grooms and ostlers. Dancing and fencing masters taught the ducal family; twenty cooks fed them; musicians and players entertained them; a legion of pages, gentlemen of the bedchamber and ladies in waiting served them.

During the 1680s the sophisticated Sir William Dutton Colt, English envoy to Hanover, wrote that in ‘all Germany there is not a finer court’. He and his secretary, Larrocque, rhapsodized that Hanover had achieved the apex of fine culture and the intellect. Even the indefatigable courtier and acid-tongued English diarist Lady Mary Wortley Montagu agreed and praised it as ‘one of the most agreeable places in the world’.

Its chief musician was the renowned composer Agostino Steffani, its philosopher and historian the brilliant polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Hanover was a state of benign
autocracy and religious tolerance, whose Protestant rulers encouraged freedom of worship. Catholics, Calvinists, Huguenots and Jews were employed, adding to the richness of the intellectual and artistic tradition that Sophia had worked hard to establish since she arrived in Hanover in 1679. Like many of his contemporary German princes, Ernst August employed his own Hofjude, or Court Jew, the financier Elieser Lefmann Berens-Cohen. His role was essential to the smooth running of the state.