The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (3 page)

But it was also a court of secret sexual machinations and bitter familial rivalry. To understand the family and court that Melusine encountered in 1690, we have to tell the story of the woman who first employed, protected and finally despised her – the Electress Sophia.

Sophia came of an illustrious lineage. Her parents were the tragic king and queen of Bohemia. She was the granddaughter of James I of England and the great-granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots. Eventually this genetic inheritance would bring her eldest son George to the Crown of Great Britain as George I – after England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the country would not accept a Catholic monarch. The historian Alvin Redman tells us:

In 1658, nine years after the head of Charles I had dropped into the basket at Whitehall, she [Sophia] brought as her dowry, unknowingly and unpredictably, the reversion of the Crown of Great Britain. She was a handsome woman, shrewd and accomplished, and fortunately for the Hanoverian succession she was the only daughter of the luckless Elizabeth Stuart who was a Protestant . . .
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Amazingly, considering that Sophia was the twelfth child, she was the closest Protestant to the throne. All her older siblings save Louise were dead by 1682, and of their descendants some were illegitimate, some dead, and the rest married into Catholic families.
Louise, meanwhile, converted to Catholicism in 1657 and became the abbess of Maubuisson.

Nevertheless Sophia was brought up in the uncertainty of exile in a foreign court, away from her father’s homeland. She was to have a profound influence on Melusine’s life, yet she could barely bring herself to address her and rarely spoke of her to others. The reasons for this are clear; due to her tumultuous upbringing, Sophia craved familial stability and marital fidelity, ideals that she believed were profoundly threatened by the existence of her son’s mistress.

When Sophia’s mother Elizabeth was sixteen years old she was married to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine and head of the German Protestant Union. It was this marriage that would ultimately destine the heirs of their twelfth child Sophia for the throne of Great Britain. Frederick and Elizabeth were the same age and, unusually for royal dynastic marriages, their relationship was an extremely happy one. They set up court at Heidelberg, Frederick’s capital, where they lived an extravagant lifestyle of parties, plays and masquerades. Then, in 1619, politics and wars of religion began to destroy their idyll when the citizens of Protestant Bohemia, having dethroned their Catholic monarch, invited the Calvinist Frederick to take the Crown.

The Jesuits foretold that Frederick would reign for only one season, ‘then his rule would melt away like the winter snow’. The new king ruled for only one year and one day before the Catholic Imperial forces defeated him at the battle of Bílá Hora near Prague on 7 November 1620. Everything was lost. Not even Frederick’s rule of the Palatinate could be salvaged, despite the (admittedly lukewarm) intervention of his father-in-law King James. His beloved Palatinate was overrun by the Bavarians, his nobility massacred or their lands confiscated, and the population forcibly converted. Henceforth Frederick and Elizabeth, monarchs in exile,
were dubbed the ‘Winter King and Queen’, recalling the priests’ prophecy. Frederick’s acceptance of the Bohemian throne was arguably the start of the catastrophic ‘Thirty Years’ War’, a conflict between the German princes and the Emperor. It destroyed the fabric of German society, devastated entire communities, and by the war’s end in 1648 had reduced the population from 21 million to an estimated 13 million; some historians believe that Germany lost up to half of her pre-war population.
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Still others have speculated that the widespread destruction of German society led to later aggressive German nationalism, ‘the soil of despair which alone can have fed the seeds of virulent German pride that sprouted from the recovery of a later age’.
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Sophia was her parents’ penultimate child and she spent her childhood watching Frederick and Elizabeth’s desperate efforts to recover their kingdom. When Frederick died in 1632 the onus fell on Elizabeth to restore their children to their birthright. Sophia recalls in her extensive memoirs her mother’s insistence on etiquette and decorum as she strove to recreate the Palatinate court in exile in The Hague. She was never allowed to forget that she was a princess who, through marriage, could expect to become a queen.

The peace settlement of 1648 that marked the end of the Thirty Years War restored the Rhine Palatinate to Sophia’s eldest brother, Karl Ludwig. He set up court at Heidelberg with his wife, the tempestuous Caroline of Hesse-Cassel, and the pair invited Sophia to join them. But although she adored her brother and his children (particularly her niece Elisabeth Charlotte, or Liselotte as she was called by the family) she was drawn into a drama that led her to seek marriage and her own household at any cost.

Karl Ludwig had fallen in love with a lady-in-waiting to Caroline, Louise von Degenfeld. Caroline felt hideously betrayed, particularly as she had befriended and protected the girl. Louise, young and pretty, had also attracted the attentions of Karl Ludwig’s brother,
Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the romantic hero of the Cavaliers of the English Civil War, on one of his rare visits to Heidelberg. Caroline, to discourage the amorous prince, encouraged Louise to sleep with her in her own bedchamber for the duration of his visit. She had no idea that Louise and her husband had already fallen in love. When Caroline found out about the affair she became violent and in a fit of rage nearly severed one of Louise’s fingers with her teeth. Karl Ludwig was determined to leave Caroline and marry Louise, but Caroline refused to be put aside. Their hysterical rows culminated in a desperate Caroline accusing her husband of incest with his own sister, Sophia. It was not the last time that Sophia would be obliged to refute an allegation of incest.

Karl Ludwig divorced Caroline and married Louise morganatically in 1658. They went on to have fourteen children, nine of whom survived infancy. On their marriage Louise was created a Raugravine – effectively a landless countess – and their children, who became raugraves and raugravines, were regular visitors to the Hanoverian court. But Caroline, slightly unhinged by the betrayal, refused to accept her new status and leave. She stayed with the household.

Sophia’s quest for a husband and escape from the emotionally draining and volatile Heidelberg court was not straightforward. She was courted at first by her cousin, the future Charles II of England, but she declined him. In her memoirs she wrote that Charles had told her, with breathtaking tactlessness, that she was more beautiful than Lucy Walter, his current mistress (indeed the two were startlingly similar in looks). She added: ‘he had shown a liking for me with which I was most gratified . . . [but I had] sense enough to know that marriages of great kings are not made up of such means’.
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Furthermore it was not at all clear during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate that Charles would ever ascend the throne, and this may have influenced Sophia’s decision.

Marriage negotiations with Adolf Johann of Zweibrücken also came to nothing, to Sophia’s relief. However desperate she was to have her own household, she found the prospective bridegroom extremely unattractive. Then in 1656 salvation seemed to arrive in the shape of Duke George William of Brunswick-Lüneburg, whose large estates were in north Germany. This family was a branch of the ancient Guelph dynasty. When he asked Sophia to marry him, she accepted.

But having secured Sophia’s hand the duke got cold feet. He found he was too attached to his bachelor lifestyle and to his frequent trips to Venice, the playground of the German aristocracy. But as he did not want to disappoint Sophia or lose face with Karl Ludwig, he persuaded his youngest brother, Ernst August, to marry her instead.

Ernst August had drawn Sophia’s interest from their first meeting. Three years earlier he had visited Heidelberg with his brother, where he had played duets and danced with the princess. They even corresponded after he left the court. But the pragmatic Sophia refused to entertain him as a prospective bridegroom. As the youngest of four sons he could hardly hope to be a ruling prince, and Sophia had been brought up by her mother to expect a glorious marriage.

German rulers rarely practised primogeniture, the inheritance of the entire estate by the eldest son. As every estate was subdivided among the inheriting sons every few years, Germany eventually fragmented into numerous tiny city-states. Duke George, the brothers’ father, was no exception, dividing the duchy into two on his death: his son Christian Ludwig was given Lüneburg-Grubenhagen while George William inherited Calenberg-Göttingen – known unofficially as Hanover.
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As an inducement to take his place as bridegroom to Sophia, George William offered Ernst August a sweetener. He agreed never
to marry, effectively removing any children he might have from the succession. He pointed out that their brother Christian Ludwig had no children, and that their other brother Johann Friedrich (dubbed the fat duke) was also unmarried. So it was likely, he suggested, that Ernst August and his children by Sophia could hope to rule either one or both of the duchies.

Despite the lack of certainty that Ernst August would ever become a ruling prince, the agreement between the brothers was enough for Sophia and she enthusiastically agreed to swap her bridegroom. She was impressed by his lineage: he was descended from the legendary Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who had married the English Princess Matilda in 1168. Sophia had inherited a love of all things English from her mother. Furthermore she was twenty-eight years old – almost past marriageable age by contemporary standards. She also found him extremely attractive. They married on 30 September 1658 at Heidelberg.

Sophia was not vain – she thought herself far too thin – but she evidently delighted in her marriage to the urbane and handsome sybarite Ernst August. She was overjoyed by the passion she found between them and never tired of relating how delighted Ernst August had been with her on their wedding night. Her memoirs are peppered with references to their sex life; after the birth of her second child she returned to the marital bed within two weeks and caught a severe chill. But despite the inconvenience her memoirs record that she had gone there willingly, without coercion and with ‘la plus grande joie du monde’.
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Sophia and Ernst August initially lived with George William in Hanover. When Ernst August succeeded to the prince-bishopric of Osnabrück, they moved to the castle of Iburg. Elisabeth Charlotte, always known as Liselotte, the only daughter of Karl-Ludwig and Charlotte, was frantic to escape the incendiary atmosphere of the
Heidelberg court, and joined her aunt Sophia on her marriage. In 1671 she left Sophia’s care to marry Philippe I of Orléans, the only brother of Louis XIV of France. Liselotte’s extensive and gossipy correspondence with princes and princesses throughout Europe, and particularly with Sophia, forms one of the richest historical sources of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is from her letters that we know so much about Sophia’s family.

Meanwhile Sophia’s marriage gamble had already begun to pay off. The death of Ernst August’s brother Christian Ludwig in 1665 removed the first obstacle to their ambitions. On Christian Ludwig’s death, Ernst August and George William united against their other brother, Johann Friedrich, and took the duchy of Celle for George William. But a complication had arisen in George William’s personal life that upset Sophia and Ernst August profoundly and threatened their plans. George William had fallen deeply in love with a beautiful French Huguenot, Eléonore d’Olbreuse. Voltaire wrote that Eléonore ‘brought grace to Germany . . .’

Despite the threat that Eléonore posed, even Sophia found her beautiful and wrote of her: ‘She was grave and dignified, spoke little and behaved pleasantly . . . Altogether I found her amiable.’
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Sophia’s attitude quickly changed however when she discovered the nature of the relationship. Her brother-in-law’s new love would not consent to be his mistress. She was planning marriage. Sophia wrote, in alarm: ‘I noticed at once the understanding between the Duke of Celle and Mll [sic] d’Olbreuse by the looks they exchanged, and realised that she was determined to lead him far. She kept him well in hand, impressing on him the warmth of her supposed affection for him on the one hand, and the strict propriety of her conduct on the other.’
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Sophia went further, referring to Olbreuse as the ‘concubine’, and, clearly irritated at having to accept her as a sister-in-law, complained that it ‘went against honour, for a king’s daughter such as I’.

George William had never expected to marry, and had entered into the 1658 convention with Ernst August on that premise. But Eléonore demanded marriage and the respectability it bestowed. She eventually agreed to a lesser ‘marriage of conscience’, which would render any children of the match illegitimate. In a hasty letter to her brother the Elector Palatine Sophia wrote: ‘the marriage of conscience between Duke George William and the Olbreuse was made public, although the consecration was done secretly, without candles or witnesses. This is all I have time to say.’
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Nevertheless, George William was at pains to stress to his anxious brother and sister-in-law that he would uphold his side of the bargain and deny any future heirs an inheritance.

Later, Sophia recorded the terms of the arrangement in her memoirs:

As the affection I bear for my brother made me resolve never to marry, for his advantage and his children’s; and as I shall never desist from this resolution; and as Mlle d’Olbreuse has decided to come and live with me, I hereby promise never to leave her. I undertake to give her two thousand crowns a year during my lifetime, and six thousand crowns a year after my death; while she, on her part, will promise to be as satisfied with this arrangement as I am. Having taken this decision with my brother’s agreement, he has promised to sign it.