The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (16 page)

We do not know if these rumours were true. We can be fairly sure that Sophia Charlotte did have an affair with the minister James Craggs the younger, as the contemporary sources are so unanimous, but probably not until after her husband’s death in 1717. The ease with which Sophia Charlotte attracted men
suggests that she was a beauty with sex appeal, although Liselotte cattily mused to Louise: ‘Perhaps she has got so fat from drinking English beer . . .’
¹⁴

The rumours of incest did not end with George’s generation. John Hervey, an intimate of Georg August and a diarist, made incredible claims regarding Melusine’s eldest daughter Louise. He wrote that she had an incestuous relationship with her father George, her half-brother Georg August and her nephew Frederick. Louise, he said, had ‘a thousand lovers’ and had been discarded by her husband because he had caught her with one of them. Much later in the century George’s great-great granddaughter Sophia claimed that her brother, the Duke of Cumberland, had raped her. It was easy in the light of these allegations for Victorian historians to look back at the previous century through the prism of later events, and to give credence to erroneous contemporary reports of a sexual relationship between siblings.

If we assume that Sophia Charlotte and George were not lovers and we take sexual jealousy out of the equation, then it is probably best to attribute the ongoing antipathy between Melusine and Sophia Charlotte to the latter’s difficult nature. She was volatile – a little like her nephew the Prince of Wales – tempestuous and argumentative. A newsletter of 1717 reported that Sophia Charlotte flounced from Hampton Court in a sulk after a disagreement, real or imagined, with Melusine: ‘Madame Kilmanseck [
sic
] came to town some weeks since on pretence to be with her husband, who has been indisposed, but as others say upon a difference with the Duchess of Munster [Melusine], and they add that when she complained to the king, he owned to her that the other was in the wrong, but he would not interpose . . .’
¹⁵
So George was aware of the antipathy between the two but he closed his eyes to it. Although he believed Melusine to be in the wrong in this instance, he refused to reprimand her.

We know that Sophia Charlotte was jealous of Melusine’s elevated status. In 1716 John Clavering, Mary Cowper’s brother, wrote to his sister from Hanover:

I cannot express the surprise we are in here at Mademoiselle Shulenberg [
sic
] being naturalized and made an English Duchess. The Countess de Platen [Sophia Charlotte’s sister in law] is mightily mortified, for you must know that we have two parties here more violent than Whig and Tory in England (which are the Schulenberg and Platen factions). Madame Kielmansegg [Sophia Charlotte] writes here that she’s very unwilling to give place to the new Duchess; therefore she will petition Parliament to be naturalized, that she may have a title equal to the other.
¹⁶

Sophia Charlotte’s ‘petitions’ were successful; George made her Countess of Leinster in 1721 and Countess of Darlington in 1722. But he made Melusine a duchess. Sophia Charlotte had to be content with a lesser title. Her behaviour can perhaps be attributed to the insecurity of being an illegitimate child in a royal family. Although George’s mother had embraced her, we can see from Georg August’s irreverent behaviour towards her, particularly his accusations of sexual promiscuity, that he did not treat her with the deference owed to an aunt. Perhaps Sophia Charlotte felt that Melusine was cherished by the king her brother, whereas she was forced to battle for his affection. She threw brilliant parties to entertain George, she was attentive to his intellectual and musical preferences and sought to bring the most dazzling minds to her soirees to divert him. In short, she loved him as a dear brother who was the source of much of her income, and was jealous of the attention he gave to Melusine. Like many of her contemporaries, she could not see why he was so enamoured of his mistress.

George was obviously fond of Sophia Charlotte, and it is in keeping with his loyal nature that he kept his half-sister so close to him for the rest of her life. He showed an equal concern for her children, though this must not lead us to deduce, as some contemporaries did, that he was their father. As far as circumstances allowed George was a family man; it would have been odd had he
not
looked after the interests of his nieces and nephews. Sophia Charlotte was his sister, she had many admirable qualities and he would not tolerate dissension, even from Melusine. His motto was, after all: ‘Never desert a friend, strive to do justice to every person, fear no one.’
¹⁷

George continued to prove a loving father to his illegitimate daughters. Trudchen, the youngest, was his favourite, perhaps because she was born in 1701 when he was divorced, more secure in his relationship with Melusine and enjoyed complete autonomy in Hanover as Elector. She had a happy, easy nature and adored her father as much as he did her. When her mother suffered bouts of ill health in the 1720s, it was Trudchen who accompanied her father on drives.
¹⁸

She was the happiest in marriage. She made a love match at the age of twenty-one to Albrecht Wolfgang zu Schaumburg-Lippe, the son of Joanne Sophie, and the pair lived very happily together in England. To Joanne Sophie’s evident delight, George paid a significant dowry. On 23 October 1721 the
Daily Journal
breathlessly reported: ‘On Thursday night last the Count de Lippe . . . was married to Miss Inhousen, niece of the Duchess of Kendal, upon which occasion his Majesty, the Prince and Princess wore favours.’

Trudchen and Albrecht had two sons, George Augustus and William, born in 1722 and 1724. George delighted in them, and ordered their portraits painted by a fashionable artist, La Fontaine. It is testament to the gentle Trudchen’s sunshine nature that even after the breakdown in their relationship with George, her half-brother
and sister-in-law, Georg August and Caroline, accepted the couple’s request that ‘August’ be included in their elder son’s name, and the Prince and Princess of Wales happily graced the child’s baptism. The
Evening Post
of 23 October 1722 told how on ‘Monday night last the son of the Countess de Lippe, niece to the Duchess of Kendal, was christened by the Bishop of Winchester, the King and the Prince stood Godfathers, and the Princess Godmother.’ Showing once again how Trudchen’s goodness transcended family disharmony, both Sophia Charlotte and Melusine stood as godmothers to William.
¹⁹

After the failure of his daughter Louise’s marriage sometime before 1714, George attempted to give her financial and social independence. In 1722 he ensured that she was granted an Imperial title, Reichsgräfin von Delitz, and the following year he gave her some money from the Hanoverian treasury. There is evidence that George attempted to keep at least some of his gifts to Louise a secret from Melusine. With the money present of 1723 he specifically requested that it should be drawn ‘without the knowledge of the Duchess of Kendal’.
²⁰

We only have Hervey’s say-so for Louise’s many lovers; but we know from Ernst August’s letters however that she was headstrong, and that George, a besotted father, let her have her own way.

In 1726 she achieved further independence when her father gave her a small but perfect palace with a particularly beautiful fountain in its garden at Herrenhausen. It became known as the Delitzsche Palais when she took up residence there. But not all the members of his family had such warm relations with George.

Sophia had so wanted her eldest child George and her best-beloved Liselotte to be close, but in adulthood they had obviously grown apart. Despite Liselotte’s move to France in 1671 with her marriage to the king’s younger brother, her correspondence was so voluminous that she managed to maintain a close relationship with
many of her relatives and friends. But George never wrote about her with any warmth, and it is apparent from his coolness towards her that he found her silly and irritating. Her correspondence is indeed peppered with childlike or vague statements, or the repetition of inane myths. It is easy to see why George preferred the company of the more serious Melusine. This is not to say that Melusine did not have a sense of fun. She was an excellent mimic, and created paper cut-out caricatures of the ministers George found infuriating, with which she entertained him in her apartments, and mocked them.

9.
A City out of Rubble

‘The Contagion of the building influenza . . . has extended its virulence to the country where it rages with unabating violence . . . The metropolis is manifestly the centre of the disease . . . Mansions arise daily upon the marshes of Lambeth, the roads of Kensington, and the hills of Hampstead . . . The chain of buildings so closely unites the country with the town that the distinction is lost between Cheapside and St George’s fields . . .’

Henry Kett
¹

London, Melusine’s new home, was the most exciting city in the world, the capital of a burgeoning empire. Eighteenth-century Britain has been called ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, and it was trade and the strength of the rich mercantile classes that led London to develop independently of the whims of the monarch or according to any grand design. Successful wars, colonial possessions, and trade – particularly the slave trade – had made her rich. The boom towns of Manchester and Birmingham had grown fat on producing materials for the wars with France. And when Britain acquired the lucrative slave contract – the exclusive right to export Africans to the Americas as slaves – from Spain in 1713, growth in the ports on the western seaboard surged.

London was an incredibly noisy, crowded city. In 1791 Horace Walpole wrote: ‘I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly, thinking there was a mob,’ but, he continued, it was just Londoners ‘sauntering or trudging’ along.
²
It was a common enough sight. During the first half of the century ten thousand new people arrived every year, and by 1750 London was home to 10 per cent of the country’s population, or roughly 600,000, equal to the entire population of Hanover. Public houses and coffee houses with their swinging, creaking signs were numerous. The accompanying chatter outside competed with the cries of tradesmen, soldiers, footmen and the fashionable promenaders. Livestock were driven through the streets, dogs roamed free, and the swarms of the populace were joined by horses and coaches. Puppet shows and theatre took place on street corners, as did gambling and fights at the cockpits, while the rich meandered in the city’s gardens and down the Mall.

London’s story is marked by purgings by fire; the most recent, the year before Melusine’s birth in 1666 – the ‘Great Fire of London’ – destroyed seven-eighths of the city as thirteen thousand buildings burned. Sir Christopher Wren was appointed ‘Principal Architect’ for the rebuilding, but although his plan for a marvellous new metropolis with the broad streets typical of many European cities was grand – it was apparently sketched while the city still smouldered – it was never realized. London’s ancient geography asserted itself and development of the devastated areas took place principally along the existing street plans. The year after the fire, Dryden glorified London in his poem
Annus Mirabilis: the Year of Wonders
:

More great than human now, and more August,

New deified she from her Fires does rise:

Her widening Streets on new Foundations trust,

And, opening, into larger parts she flies. (verse 295)

But Wren actually had little part in the rebuilding of the city as a whole. His most significant achievement was the reconstruction of St Paul’s Cathedral, which the fire had reduced to rubble. Wren began work nine years after the fire; it was completed thirty-five years later, in 1710. Its stunning dome remains an icon of the London skyline.

The beginning of the eighteenth century saw a blossoming of architectural brilliance in London. In 1711 Queen Anne commissioned the building of ‘fifty new churches’ to mark the electoral victory of her last High Church Tory ministry. Although only twelve materialized, they were designed by the ‘greats’ of the English baroque – Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, James Gibbs, John James, Thomas Archer and Henry Flitcroft. Their beautiful white steeples and porticoes added to the elegance and grace of early Georgian London.

London was a city in which elegant villas and vile, foul-smelling slums coexisted side by side. It was a city of light and dark, with dingy alleys for the poor and smart, broad streets leading into stylish squares for the rich. Only one bridge spanned the Thames – London Bridge. The next crossing was some 30 miles away by river, at Kingston-upon-Thames. (London Bridge remained the only crossing until Westminster Bridge was completed in 1750.) The river and the docks were the financial lifeblood of the city. Numerous churches dotted the cityscape, one for each tiny parish. It was a city where Palladian, baroque and medieval architecture sat together. Throughout George’s reign the city’s surrounding fields were gradually developed, a continuation of the building boom that had exploded in the wake of the Peace of Utrecht and the ending of the war. Georgian London was very much the creation of independent master builders, property speculators and architects. George’s reign was marked by constant building activity, particularly in the capital.

The grand Italianate Piazza of Covent Garden, built to designs by Inigo Jones between 1631 and 1637, was no longer fashionable and was already degenerating into seediness. It was only moments away from the newer houses favoured by the aristocracy and the recently wealthy. Building sites and the accompanying chaos and noise were everywhere; passers-by must tread carefully around them. The mass of building work added to the vitality and chaos of the city, bursting with an ever-expanding population.