Behind the Palace Doors (23 page)

After being dismissed from the queen’s service, Sarah vindictively trashed her apartments at St. James’s Palace, ripping out everything—right down to the doorknobs. In retaliation, Anne ordered a temporary halt to construction of the Marlboroughs’ magnificent new home, Blenheim Palace, stating angrily “that she would not build the Duke a house when the Duchess was pulling hers to pieces.”

The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough left England in disgrace in 1713, not to return until the day after Queen Anne died less than two years later. By then it had been ages since Mrs. Morley had been able to write confidently, “I really believe one kind word from dear Mrs. Freeman would save me if I was gasping.”

House of Hanover

GEORGE I

(
reigned 1714–1727
)

GEORGE II

(
r. 1727–1760
)

GEORGE III

(
r. 1760–1820
)

GEORGE IV

(
r. 1820–1830
)

WILLIAM IV

(
r. 1830–1837
)

VICTORIA

(
r. 1837–1901
)

Following the death of Queen Anne in 1714, her Protestant cousin George, sovereign of the German duchy of Hanover, succeeded her as King George I. Although the late queen had closer relatives, including her exiled father, James II, and his son, James Edward Stuart, the Act of Settlement of 1701 barred these Catholic Stuarts from inheriting the throne. Instead, the law decreed that the crown would pass to the Protestant descendants of James I’s daughter, Elizabeth (see Stuart family tree,
this page
). Thus, Elizabeth’s grandson came to Britain from Germany and established the royal House of Hanover. George I would rule until his death in 1727
.

George I was accompanied by a rather eccentric retinue when he came from Hanover to claim the British throne in 1714. Among them were the king’s stalk-thin mistress, Melusine von der Schulenburg, whom the English immediately dubbed the Maypole, and his enormous half-sister, Sophia von Kielmansegg (also rumored to have been his mistress), who came to
be known as the Elephant and Castle.
^*
Then there were George’s Turkish servants, Mehomet and Mustafa, and his dwarf, Christian Ulrich Jorry. The only person missing from this odd mélange was the new king’s wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle. She was stuck back in Germany—imprisoned in a castle for cheating on the husband she hated.

The marriage had not been a good one—arranged, like so many royal unions, for reasons of state. Sophia Dorothea was horrified when she learned she was to be wed to her boorish cousin from the neighboring duchy of Hanover. And with good reason. Her intended was, according to his own mother, “the most pigheaded, stubborn boy who ever lived, and who has round his brains such a thick crust that I defy any man or woman ever to discover what is in there.”

George wasn’t overly enthused about the arrangement, either. But Sophia Dorothea’s fat dowry had its compensations. “He does not care for the match itself,” his mother reported, “but one hundred thousand thalers a year have tempted him as they would have anybody else.”

The woefully mismatched couple were wed on November 22, 1682. “There were priests and prayers and benedictions,” wrote historian William Henry Wilkins, “all the pomp and heraldry and the pageantry of Courts; yet when all was stripped away this marriage was nothing but a shameless bargain, and a young girl’s life [she was sixteen] was sold to a man steeped in
selfishness and profligacy and who did not even make a pretext of loving her.”

Almost as soon as he said “I do,” George abandoned his bride and took up with his emaciated mistress, Melusine, by whom he had three daughters. Sophia Dorothea was left alone and isolated in the scheming court at Hanover. Her harridan of a mother-in-law hated her, while her father-in-law’s grasping mistress, Countess Clara von Platen, actively conspired against her. “I believe all my troubles will come through her,” Sophia Dorothea wrote of Clara. And she was right.

Living in this lonely, oppressive atmosphere made Sophia Dorothea more than receptive to the attentions of a dashing Swedish officer named Philip Christoph von Königsmarck. The relationship began innocently enough, with Königsmarck’s flattering flirtations, but quickly evolved into a passionate affair that proved disastrous.

Both lovers unwittingly prophesied their doom in the letters they exchanged. “I am ready to cast at your feet my life, my honour, my future, my fortune,” Königsmarck wrote in one slightly overwrought missive. In another letter, Sophia Dorothea declared that life without him would be intolerable, “and imprisonment within four walls pleasanter than to go on living in the world.” As it turned out, his life would be sacrificed and she would find herself locked away.

The lovers were dangerously indiscreet, and their plans to run away together revealed them to be hopelessly naïve as well. This was a matter of state, the powers of which would be activated against them should they ever attempt to flee.

It has been said that Clara von Platen, furious over Königsmarck’s rejection of her advances, informed George and his father, the elector of Hanover (who was also her lover), about the affair. She also allegedly arranged for the ambush of Königsmarck outside Sophia Dorothea’s apartments on the night of July 1, 1694. Though this is just one of several theories about
what happened that night, what remains certain is that Königsmarck was never seen again. One widely circulated story held that George ordered the body of his wife’s lover hacked to pieces and buried beneath the floorboards of his palace. His treatment of Sophia Dorothea was arguably even crueler. She was shut up in a castle prison, deprived of her children, for the rest of her life.

Such was the situation when Queen Anne, Britain’s final Stuart monarch, breathed her last and George, as her nearest
Protestant
relative, was proclaimed king. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he became the object of ridicule. There was just something vaguely absurd about the dull, remote German who couldn’t even speak the language of his new subjects. “The King’s character may be comprised in very few words,” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “In private life he would have been called an honest blockhead.”

King George was horribly out of his element in his new kingdom, with its vicious party politics and the gross irreverence shown the sovereign. The statesman Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, was one wickedly precise commentator on the king’s peccadillos. “The standard of His Majesty’s taste,” he wrote, “as exemplified in his mistresses, makes all ladies who aspire to his favour … strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and dignity of the ox. Some succeed, and others … burst.”

George I ruled Britain for just under thirteen years, an effective but uninspiring monarch who never warmed to his people nor they to him. “His heart was in Hanover,” William Makepeace Thackeray wrote of the king. “He was more than fifty-four years of age when he came amongst us: we took him because we wanted him, because he served our turn; we laughed at his uncouth German ways, and sneered at him.”

Then they forgot him.