Sex with the Queen (23 page)

After a life of hard living, by the age of thirty-four Countess Platen maintained her position as the handsomest woman at court with increasing difficulty. What she lost in looks she made up for in raiment—she hid her increasing plumpness under ex-quisite gold-embroidered brocades, gleaming silks, and the richest velvets, all adorned with snowy white lace. She wore so many fine large diamonds that she blazed like a galaxy—diamond pins in her hair; a diamond brooch on her breast; diamond ear-rings, rings, bracelets, and shoe buckles. Her toilette became more complex. She piled quantities of shining false curls on her head, spritzed herself with cloying French perfume, and painted on an astonishingly thick mask of makeup. And so when the sixteen-year-old Sophia Dorothea arrived at court—fresh, un-sullied, and luminously beautiful—Countess Platen cast her a lingering venomous glance.

Determined to vanquish her young rival, the countess set about finding George Louis a mistress and settled on the beau-tiful blond Melusina von Schulenburg, a poor girl of noble birth. The countess threw the two of them together constantly and coached Melusina on how to win over the prince. Though too slender to appeal to most men of the time, and nearly a head taller than George Louis, Melusina soon became the prince’s mistress. He was seen riding and hunting with his new love and appeared publicly at the theater with her. At the same time he pointedly neglected his wife. Countess Platen’s arrow had hit its mark.

Indignant to hear that her husband had a mistress, Sophia Dorothea complained to his parents and hers. Her mother was t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 1 0 3

sympathetic to her plight. But Count Bernstorff, her father’s prime minister, now firmly in the pay of Countess Platen, had been feeding George William stories of Sophia Dorothea’s pride and temper, her sharp tongue and wifely disobedience. Impa-tient at her protests, the duke of Celle advised his daughter harshly to ignore her husband’s infidelity, as such things were beneath the notice of a hereditary princess; furthermore, the situation was entirely due to her own bad temper. He suggested she imitate the noble example of her mother-in-law, Duchess Sophia, who was too great a lady to bother about her husband’s affair with Countess Platen.

The betrayed wife found more sympathy with her in-laws, who feared that a disruption of the marriage might stop the pay-ment of Sophia Dorothea’s dowry of one hundred thousand thalers a year. But when they asked George Louis to become more circumspect with his mistress, he became enraged and went out of his way to treat his wife brutally. She, in turn, went out of hers to publicly mock her husband and his mistress, ridiculing the disparity in their height, which particularly galled him.

Trapped in her palace like an animal in a cage, Sophia Dorothea led a miserable life until that night when Count Philip von Königsmark strutted into the ballroom and playfully greeted her. It was as if the clouds parted, the fog lifted, and a glorious ray of sunshine warmed her chilled soul. Her heart beat a little harder, her breathing came a little faster. The boring little court was suddenly alive with the sparkling Swede.

It was not only Sophia Dorothea who welcomed the visitor; Duke Ernst August clapped him on the back and made him a colonel of the guard. George Louis’s younger brothers adored the count and often brought him to Sophia Dorothea’s little sa-lon in the evening to cheer her up. Not surprisingly, the princess found she had much more in common with the sophis-ticated count than with her cold bumbling husband. Both were emotional and flirtatious; they loved music and dancing, litera-ture and art, all things French and refined. Their conversations became the high point of her every day. Before she knew it, the hereditary princess was falling in love.

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One evening at a costume ball, George Louis danced the first minuet with Countess Platen, who at forty labored under heavy brocades, heavy diamonds, and heavy makeup. For the second minuet, Sophia Dorothea got up and looked about for a partner.

A sharp contrast to the blowsy charms of the countess, at twenty-two Sophia Dorothea was dressed as Flora in a white gown with flowers in her hair. For her partner she selected Königsmark, who was magnificently dressed in rose and silver brocade. Every-one noticed how well suited the couple seemed, how beautifully they danced. Everyone, including the spiteful Countess Platen, who had her own designs on Königsmark and vowed to get him into her bed.

Königsmark was a true gentleman of the seventeenth century, boasting the talent to drink, gamble, ride, fight, and make love with great gusto. Possessed of exquisite courtly manners, he sported a flowing dark wig and sumptuous clothing. Sensual, hot-blooded, an urgent need for sex always throbbing painfully in his breeches, he could rarely turn down a woman’s offer. And when the opulent Countess Platen whispered in his ear an invi-tation to visit her that night, he eagerly accepted. Exhausted by her feverish embraces, he stumbled back to his rooms as the sun rose.

Though Königsmark enjoyed the voluptuous favors of Countess Platen by night, by day he found himself more and more bewitched by the princess. His military career as a merce-nary called him to new battlefields, yet he could not tear himself away from Hanover. So he stayed on, serving the duke for a small salary, spending his inheritance with reckless abandon, and making love to the vile Countess Platen while pretending it was the princess he held in his arms. Hemorrhaging money, he and his sister Aurora lived in a grand house across the Leine Palace garden from the apartments of Sophia Dorothea, where they kept fifty-two horses and twenty-nine servants.

Finally, after two years in Hanover, in a futile effort to forget his hopeless love, he volunteered for a military expedition to the Peloponnesus in 1690. It was a disastrous expedition, and of eleven thousand men who went, only one hundred thirty t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 1 0 5

returned. One of them was Königsmark, and he returned a changed man. Far away amidst the screams of men and horses, the smell of blood and gunpowder, he had realized his overpow-ering love for Sophia Dorothea, the unattainable hereditary princess.

Countess Platen welcomed her lover home from the wars with open arms, arms which remained open as he walked coldly past her to Sophia Dorothea. Smoldering with hatred, the rejected woman waged all-out war against the princess. She placed spies all over town and in the palace to report the princess’s every move. Displaying her malice as ostentatiously as she did her dia-monds, Countess Platen upstaged and insulted Sophia Dorothea at every opportunity, and always succeeded in outdressing her.

She schemed with Melusina von Schulenburg on how to keep George Louis utterly enthralled, to the disadvantage of his wife.

Meanwhile Königsmark’s visits to the princess, though pla-tonic, became more intense. Seated together in a corner of her salon, he whispered to her as she bent her head over her embroi-dery so the ladies-in-waiting at the other end of the room couldn’t see her blush. For a while the sheer intoxication of be-ing in the same room together was enough, as the sparks danced between them. Then the two began secretly sending love letters.

By examining the letters of Königsmark to Sophia Dorothea, we can tell with some certainty when their relationship was phys-ically consummated. His correspondence which began in July 1690 and lasted through April 1691, though filled with frilly ro-mantic verses, had a respectful tone and ended with “Your faith-ful servant.” But on April 30, he was more intimate, ending with

“Farewell my beloved brunette, I embrace your knees.”13

With the invaluable aid of Eleonore de Knesebeck, Königs-mark had slipped into the princess’s bed. “Knesebeck lives in the small room near mine,” Sophia Dorothea wrote her lover. “You can come in by a rear door and you can stay for twenty-four hours if you wish without the least risk.”14 By this she meant that the tiny bedroom of Eleonore de Knesebeck was visited by nei-ther courtiers nor servants. No one would find Königsmark hid-ing there.

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Sometimes the lovers met in the palace garden at night when Sophia Dorothea and her maid went out for air. “As for me, every evening Knesebeck and I walk together under the trees near the house,” the princess wrote. “We will wait for you from 10 o’clock to midnight. You know the usual signal. You must make yourself known by it. The gate in the fence is always open.

Don’t forget that you must give the signal and that I shall wait for you under the trees.”15 The signal was whistling a popular tune called “The Spanish Follies.”

During these night strolls, Sophia Dorothea and Eleonore would leave the palace gardens and dart into Königsmark’s house. It was a good ruse, because if they were detected they could say they had been visiting Aurora von Königsmark.

Consumed with anticipation of a sexual rendezvous, Königs-mark wrote, “I hope . . . that you will give me permission to come and see you in your apartments this evening. If you don’t agree to that, come and visit me tonight at my house. Let me know one way or the other. If you decide to come to me you will find that everyone in my household has retired. The door will be open. Come in boldly without being afraid of anything. I am dy-ing with impatience to see you. Answer quickly so that I may know what to expect.”16

Sometimes trysts went awry, either through misunderstand-ing or the unexpected appearance of Sophia Dorothea’s husband or in-laws. Early one morning, having waited in vain to be let into the palace, Königsmark reproached his mistress bitterly:

“Thursday, 2:00 in the morning: Your behavior is scarcely kind. You make an appointment and then leave people to freeze to death waiting for the signal. You should know that I was wait-ing in the streets from 11:30 to 1:00.”17

To prevent their letters from being read by spies, they wrote in code, but the code of children which could easily be deci-phered. Numbers referred to places and people. Königsmark was 120, Sophia Dorothea 201, Celle was 305. They had code names for individuals. George Louis was the Reformer, Eleonore de Knesebeck was La Confidante, and Countess Platen was the Fat One.