The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (32 page)

Melusine was furious on her daughter’s account. But for the most part she seemed only to wait for death when she would join George once more.

A remarkable anecdote is related by Horace Walpole:

In a tender mood George the First promised the Duchess of Kendal, that if she survived him, and it were possible for the departed to return to this world, he would make her a visit. The Duchess, on his death, so much expected the accomplishment of that engagement, that a large raven, or some black fowl, flying into one of the windows of her villa at Isleworth, she was persuaded it was the soul of her departed monarch so accoutred, and received and treated it with all the respect and tenderness of duty, till the royal bird or she took their last flight.
¹³

Hatton believes that, as so often with Horace Walpole’s scribblings, he took a remark and embroidered it. But his father or one of his other sources may have been party to an intimate moment between George and Melusine, where they whispered as lovers do of how they would manage when death took one of them away. George, playing the gallant lover who would never leave her, even in death, promised to return.

Melusine died on 10 May 1743. Horace Walpole wrote to his friend Horace Mann two days later:

The Duchess of Kendal is dead, 85 years old [
sic
] she was a year older than the late king. Her riches were immense, but I believe my Lord Chesterfield will get nothing by her death but his wife: she lived in the house with the Duchess, where he had played away all his credit.
¹⁴

She was buried, as she requested, in a vault at the South Audley Street Chapel in Mayfair. Her wealth at her death was roughly £60,000.

Melusine’s beautiful home, Kendal House, became a ‘place of public entertainment’ after her death, and seven years later in 1750
The Daily Advertiser
excitedly told its readers:

Kendal House, Isleworth, near Brentford, Middlesex, eight miles from London, will open for breakfast on Monday. The room for dancing is 60 feet long, and all the other rooms elegantly fitted up. The orchestra is allowed to be in the genteelest taste, being housed in an octagon in the Corinthian order. Ladies and gentlemen may divert themselves with fishing, the canal being well stocked with tench, carp and all sorts of fish; near are two wildernesses, with delightful rural walks, and through the garden runs a rapid river, shaded with a pleasant grove of trees, so designed by nature that in the hottest day of summer you are secured from the heat of the sun. Great care will be taken to keep out all disorderly people. There is a man cook and a good larder; all things are as cheap or cheaper than at any place of the kind.

Louise died in 1773. She was eighty-one years old and had lived in London for over half a century. Hervey tells us of her continued grace and wit as she grew older. She joined her mother in the chapel in South Audley Street.

Melusine and George’s last surviving daughter died five years later, on 16 September 1778. Young Melusine’s death was reported in the popular press, in
The London Chronicle, Lloyd’s Evening Post
and others. She left a legacy of £80,000.

Young Melusine was the last to enter the vault in the church in South Audley Street. After that it was sealed, at her request.

Melusine’s line did not endure. Trudchen’s eldest son George Augustus died when he was only twenty years old, reputedly in a duel while studying at the University of Leiden.
¹⁵
William became the Graf zu Schaumburg-Lippe on his father’s death and had a stunning military career. He was immortalized by Joshua Reynolds in a portrait now in the Royal Collection, painted sometime between 1764 and 1767. It shows a tall, dark, confident man sitting astride a cannon, in the midst of a battlefield. William married in 1765 and had two children, a son and a daughter. But his son died while still an infant and his daughter, Emilie, died when she was only three years old. Both Louise and young Melusine died childless, and with Emilie’s death in 1774, Melusine’s line died out.

It was Sophia Dorothea who trumped her rival with her status as ancestress to the British royal family. Melusine von der Schulenburg was the true love of Britain’s first Georgian king, but she did not propagate the dynasty.

Plates

The first known portrait of Melusine, painted
c
.1691, soon after her arrival at the Hanoverian court, to mark her position as a lady-in-waiting to the Electress Sophia.

Portrait of Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg, possibly painted soon after her arrival in England.

Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg, Melusine’s eldest and favourite sibling, a brilliant and charismatic general and diplomat. He retired to the beautiful Palazzo Loredan in Venice.

Sophia of Hanover, George’s mother. This image dates from 1714, the year of her death. Her relationship with Melusine was, at best, chilly.

George in his youth, depicted
c
.1680–81 during his visit to England, where he was greeted enthusiastically by his royal cousins.

George I, painted soon after his accession in 1714.

Sophia Charlotte, George’s illegitimate half-sister. Contemporaries believed that both she
and
Melusine were George’s mistresses.

Portrait of Melusine, painted during one of her and George’s visits to Hanover,
c.
1720.