The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (10 page)

George’s youngest brother Ernst August was also in the inner circle. He was fourteen years George’s junior and he saw his eldest brother as something of a father figure. According to Sophia he followed George ‘like a dog’ and regularly stayed with them at Göhrde. Ernst August never questioned primogeniture, not simply because of his loyalty to George, but because he was probably homosexual and as such, unlikely to have children. Primogeniture and the resultant loss of inheritance was therefore not an issue for him. He remained fiercely devoted to George and Melusine and
was one of only two of George’s siblings who remained on speaking terms with the Elector.

Melusine was pivotal to the maintenance of friendly relations between George and the rest of his family. This would continue until George’s death. Melusine and Figuelotte kept up a regular correspondence, George’s only sister pragmatically making the leap of forming a friendship with the mistress once the wife was removed. More important was her relationship with his legitimate children. George was a formal and distant parent with the son and daughter he had with Sophia Dorothea. Though Liselotte’s judgement of him is perhaps unfair, in March 1707 she wrote to the raugravine Louise: ‘It is not surprising that the old gay good humour is no longer to be found at Hanover. The Elector is so cold that he freezes everything into ice. Neither his father nor his uncle were of that nature.’
⁹

Young Sophia Dorothea and Georg August were not allowed to mention their mother’s name in their father’s presence, which must have had a terrible impact on such young children. Hatton repeats a story, possibly apocryphal, of how, on his father’s death, Georg August put up a portrait of his mother. She notes that: ‘His presumed change of attitude to her memory (he became noticeably less enthusiastic about his mother) in his own reign has been attributed to his reading of a document after 1727 in the Hanover archives which convinced him of her adultery.’ The children were obviously sheltered from the ‘Königsmarck’ affair. It is unclear if any explanation was ever given as to their mother’s complete removal from their lives.

But while George could be reserved towards his legitimate children, Melusine was warm and loving. Her friend Joanne Sophie, Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, described her desire ‘to do all the good she can’.
¹⁰
She might have added that this was particularly true when her ‘goodness’ facilitated George’s well-being. Melusine’s
kindness was possibly tinged with pragmatism: it served her interests to be on good terms with George’s legitimate children and it pleased him.

Although for years Melusine had patiently stayed in the shadows to avoid embarrassing her illustrious lover, his children by Sophia Dorothea liked her and accepted her as one of the family. Georg August, like his sister, was very fond of Melusine. This is extraordinary considering George’s treatment of his mother and is testament to Melusine’s empathetic nature.

In 1705 Georg August married the attractive and clever Princess Caroline of Ansbach in Hanover. Although the court was grieving for George’s uncle, George William, who had died in late August, mourning was temporarily suspended to enable the prince and his new bride to celebrate their marriage.
¹¹
The courtship and marriage had fairytale beginnings when the young prince journeyed incognito to Ansbach to propose.

The following year young Sophia Dorothea, now nineteen, left court to marry Figuelotte’s son, the volatile and not entirely sane Frederick William of Brandenburg-Prussia. And in 1707 Melusine shared George’s delight when Caroline gave birth to George’s first grandchild – a boy, Frederick Louis. This child would receive all of the love and attention that George had never given his own son.

Relations between the Electorates of Hanover and Prussia had become, with young Sophia Dorothea’s marriage, even more personal. The marriage tested Melusine’s skills as an unofficial diplomat and conduit to George as she maintained a friendly correspondence with Sophia Dorothea, the new Prussian queen, who had been encouraged to think of Melusine as a stepmother. (Her own daughter Wilhelmine in turn thought of Melusine as a grandmother.) This relationship exemplified the way in which Melusine’s role was changing as she began to prove her usefulness
to both foreign diplomats and family members. She gradually moved away from an exclusively domestic role to become an unofficial gatekeeper and counsellor, best able to deal with the less approachable George.

The young Sophia Dorothea actually enjoyed a welcome renaissance in her relationship with her father when she left Hanover after her marriage. George, often shy, felt freer to express his affection via correspondence rather than in person, and the forty-five letters to her found in the Prussian archives are full of warmth.
¹²
He addresses her as ‘ma chère Fille’ (my dear daughter), he worries over her health, he sends his physician, La Rose, to attend her at the births of her children, and he assures her of his ‘véritable tendresse’ (true tenderness) for her.
¹³
Sophia wrote in delight: ‘With even greater pleasure I could now witness, how much her father loves her – which has been concealed from us so far due to his frosty nature; but now everything finally emerges.’
¹⁴
Even his mother thought him at times cold towards his legitimate children.

By contrast he lavished his huge reserves of affection on the children – his daughters by Melusine, and eventually his grandchildren – who were present in Hanover. His brother Ernst August’s letters are filled with comments about the girls – Louise, young Melusine and Trudchen – managing to twist their father around their little fingers, and George’s obvious delight in their precocity. It was George, and not the comparatively strict Melusine, who allowed his daughters to hunt from an early age, who listened with rapt attention to their remarks on the day’s political events, and who eventually sheltered Louise from a string of failed love affairs.

Louise was beautiful, wild and independent, and Melusine – increasingly strait-laced as she aged – disapproved. Louise married Philipp von dem Bussche-Ippenburg, a Hanoverian courtier, in 1707. She was only fifteen years old. Ernst August’s letters suggest that Louise forced the marriage against her parents’ wishes because
the couple believed themselves to be deeply in love. There is a vague implication that they may already have slept together. Melusine was furious, not least because Louise had been promised to her dear friend and George’s, Alexander von Hammerstein.
¹⁵
Hammerstein was the same age as George, and it is unlikely that the young Louise found him an appealing prospect. Even so, Melusine could not even bring herself to speak to Louise, but George came to his daughter’s defence and obviously talked his mistress round. The marriage took place.
¹⁶
But to Melusine’s annoyance the haughty von dem Bussche family approved of neither the alliance nor her daughter. They took years to properly acknowledge Louise.
¹⁷
George, at Louise’s cajoling, had shoehorned Melusine and the von dem Bussche family into accepting the match at least superficially. When it failed at some point before 1714 her father, perhaps feeling guilty at acting against Melusine’s wishes, ensured that Louise obtained a divorce. She would never marry again, preferring the freedom of an independent life and lovers rather than a husband. Of Melusine’s three daughters, her relationship with Louise remained the most uneasy.

Melusine offered her own lover her complete loyalty and consistently provided a tranquil haven from the upheavals of the outside world. She was calm when William III died in 1702, making Sophia Queen Anne’s heir. She provided solace to George’s racking grief when Figuelotte died while visiting Hanover in 1705. George’s servant Mehemet later recalled how his master had barricaded himself in his room, kicking at the walls while he grieved for his only sister. George loved Figuelotte, and considering the fractured nature of his relationship with his other siblings (with the exception of Ernst August) their relationship was extremely important to him. The death of his uncle, George William, in the same year was perhaps sweetened by the change in status and influence it effected. The unification of Hanover and Celle brought vast
increases in population, territory and income. Hanover’s population doubled to roughly 400,000, and her territory increased from 7,000 square kilometres to nearly 20,000.
¹⁸

Melusine put herself entirely at the disposal of her princely lover. She was very much a ‘helpmeet’, ready to perform the duties of a consort alongside the more informal diplomatic role she had become so proficient at performing. For example, in 1713 she had supper in Hanover, probably at the Leineschloss, with the sisters of Princess Ursula Katherina Lubomirska, mistress of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and king of Poland. The Holy Roman Emperors were adept at recognizing their Electors’ affairs of the heart. Ursula was created a Reichsfürstin, or Princess of the Empire, by Emperor Leopold I soon after the birth of her son in 1704 and Melusine became a Princess in 1722, in acknowledgement of her high standing with George.

She lived an extremely privileged lifestyle, a round of parties, balls, salons and the hunt at the Leineschloss, Herrenhausen and Göhrde. For holidays, there were the spa towns of Bad Pyrmont and Wiesbaden, and occasional visits to Vienna. Such a lifestyle demanded exquisite clothes. Sumptuary laws which strictly controlled the clothing that could be worn by each class or profession had caused costume to become synonymous with status. Even though the rules had relaxed by the end of the seventeenth century, high fashion and superb fabrics were still the province of the aristocracy and the wealthy. All fashionable life centred upon the court, and attendance required high standards of costume. For members of the royal family and their courtiers, such as Melusine, it was expected that they wear only the best. And the best, typically, was French.

The court enthusiastically embraced the emulation of French dress. The pomp of Louis XIV’s Versailles had created a certain stiffness in clothing, with increasingly elaborate and impractical wigs. When Liselotte’s son, Philippe duc d’Orléans, became regent
in 1715 for his five-year-old nephew Louis XV, fashion in France underwent a radical change, favouring a less formal style, which reverberated throughout Europe. But, as the costume historian Aileen Ribeiro has shown, as with all seismic shifts, the old continued to coexist alongside the new for a considerable time. Those who clung to the older fashions were not without their critics. In 1711, three years before Melusine and George came to England, Jonathan Swift, the Tory propagandist who was to become such a critic of the new king and his mistress, bitchily said of the Duchess of Grafton that she wore at dinner ‘a great high headdress such as was in fashion 15 years ago and looks like a mad woman in it’.
¹⁹

Elaborate curls and, if a woman could achieve them, cascades of ringlets were de rigueur in Hanover, as we can see from Melusine’s and Sophia Dorothea’s portraits from the 1680s and 1690s. Because a woman’s coiffure and dress was so elaborate, even when the so-called ‘freer’ style of the French Regency took hold, women such as Melusine needed assistance dressing. Stays needed to be laced tightly, hair needed to be curled, and help was needed to put on the heavy dresses themselves. Court costume was predominantly the so-called open-robe. The shape was made up of a bodice joined to an overskirt, with the skirt open to show a petticoat beneath. Petticoats were worn over wide hoops, which grew so wide as the century progressed that in France in the 1720s, gentlemen complained they had no room to sit at the theatre because the ladies’ skirts took up all the room.
²⁰

The ‘mantua’, a formal court gown of the beginning of the century, began as a loose-fitting negligee, almost like a male nightgown. It developed to have wide pleats at the back with a small train. In 1712 the author of
The Present State of France
remarked that ‘The Quality trail behind ’em a long tail of gold or silk, with which they sweep the churches and gardens.’
²¹
This fashion certainly found its way to Hanover.

The styles were elegant, but the fabrics and the finish were what made these dresses gorgeous. Elaborate patterned damasks, woven silks, fur petticoats, embroidery in gold and silver thread, delicate floral patterns, striped or plain silks, painted silks, lace, muslins – the list of materials is mouth-watering. In 1724 Mrs Delany wrote adoringly of Lady Sunderland’s – an English courtier’s – dress that it was ‘the finest pale blue and pink, very richly flowered in a running pattern of silver frosted, and tissue with a little white . . .’
²²

Wide hoops made the skirts swing as women walked. With the swing, a tantalizing view of ankle and shoe was revealed. The stockings beneath were brightly coloured. The delicate shoes, made of silk, leather or damask, had an attractive heel of up to three inches. It was the first time fashion had allowed the foot to be on show, and many found it remarkably alluring.

Underwear was always fine linen edged with lace or linen at the neck and sleeves, which remained visible beneath the gown. Stays were laced over the linen shift, and the gown was placed on top. For riding there were attractive riding habits with long sleeves and waistcoats, and for walking out of doors there was the ubiquitous cloak, usually hooded. The cloak served three purposes; for warmth, to cover increasingly low-cut dresses, and for its comfortable fit over the large hoop.

Dress was about theatre and show, and most women wore masks when walking out of doors. Some used them to enhance their allure with mystery, but others were more practical, sporting a mask to hide a disfigurement (many had suffered from smallpox). In 1717 the author of the poem
The Art of Dress
wrote: ‘When for the morning Air abroad you steal, the Cloak of Camlet may your Charms conceal; . . . That, with a Mask, is such a sure Disguise, T’would cheat an Argus, or a Spaniard’s Eyes.’
²³