The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow

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СКАЧАТЬ dogged devotion won her no part at all in her husband’s political strategising. He acknowledged the sharpness of her mind but denied her any active role in his schemes. She was ‘without influence’ in family affairs and allowed no say in the making of even the most significant decisions. When Ernst decided to disinherit his many younger sons in order to consolidate all the family possessions in the hands of George, the eldest, Sophia could do nothing to protect their interests. Angry and betrayed, three of the brothers left Ernst’s court and signed on as soldiers in the Imperial service. Within a few years, all had died in battle, to the despairing grief of their mother. She was equally powerless when Ernst began to make marriage plans for the favoured George. Ernst had long before decided that his eldest son would marry his cousin, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, thus uniting two branches of the family dukedoms into a single greater state.

      For all its desirability as a political alliance, it was obvious to anyone who knew them that George and Sophia Dorothea were hardly well matched. Sophia Dorothea, who was only eleven when the marriage was first proposed, had been brought up from her earliest days in a relaxed atmosphere of indulgence and luxury. Her father, a very different man from his single-minded brother Ernst, had married for love a woman considered beneath him in the complicated gradations of princely hierarchy, and had sacrificed the opportunity for further aggrandisement as a result. Sophia Dorothea, the only child of this love match, grew up into a beautiful woman – sophisticated, conscious of her attractiveness, and considered very French in her tastes. She loved to be amused and entertained, and was said to be obsessed by fashion. Lively and good-looking, she had no shortage of suitors. Her prospective mother-in-law regarded her balefully; she was sure she would not find a soulmate in her reserved and cautious eldest son.

      Sophia, who described herself as ‘a nearly stupidly fond mother’, was devoted to the silent and watchful George.6 She admired her son’s deep sense of responsibility and his formidable devotion to duty. Others found him harder to appreciate. His cousin, the Duchess of Orléans, thought him ‘ordinarily neither cheerful nor friendly, dry and crabbed’. She complained that ‘his words have to be squeezed out of him’, that he was suspicious, proud, parsimonious and had ‘no natural good-heartedness’.7 Sophia maintained that those who thought her son sullen simply did not understand him; they did not see that, beneath his undemonstrative surface, he took things much to heart, and was far more sensitive than he was prepared to show. But she knew him well enough to suspect that he was not the best partner for the outgoing Sophia Dorothea, who loved playful conversation, sought out cheerful company and had a taste for extravagant entertainments. The prospective bride’s mother had similar misgivings; but neither could persuade their respective husbands to take their concerns seriously.

      George himself had little to say on the subject. It was widely supposed that he would have been happy to be left alone with his mistress, a sister of the Countess von Platen, who had – as it were – continued the family business, becoming the son’s lover, as her sister was the father’s. However, obedience, not self-fulfilment, came first in the young George’s mind. He had seen Sophia Dorothea, and had apparently been impressed by her good looks; but there is little doubt that he would have taken her anyway, regardless of any personal qualities, once his father had wished it. His mother once remarked that ‘George would marry a cripple if he could serve the House of Brunswick’.8 In 1682, the ill-matched couple did the bidding of their fathers, and were married. Sophia Dorothea was sixteen, her groom five years older.

      At first they seem to have made the best of things, and in 1683 Sophia Dorothea gave birth to a son, George August. Such speedy provision of a healthy male heir raised her immeasurably in Ernst’s eyes, and for a few years Sophia Dorothea’s life was probably not unpleasant. Under the eye of her satisfied father-in-law, she enjoyed court life at the elaborate palace of Herrenhausen, relishing the parties, masques and concerts Ernst August laid on there to magnify his grandeur. She saw very little of her husband. George’s great passion was the army, which took him away on active service for long periods. When Ernst August took his entire court to Italy for a year, Sophia Dorothea went on the extended holiday without her husband. Reunited with George on her return, she conceived a daughter who was named after her. But thrown back into each other’s company, the strategy of polite coexistence the couple had maintained with some success began to fall apart. Bored and frustrated, Sophia Dorothea began to behave badly; she picked quarrels, caused scenes and was outspokenly impatient of the etiquette that ruled court life, apparently driven both to dominate and to despise the circumstances in which she lived. One observer called her ‘une beauté tyrannique’.9

      Her unhappiness was given an edge of anger when she discovered that her taciturn husband had taken another mistress, and one whom he seemed genuinely to love. Melusine von Schulenberg had none of Sophia Dorothea’s physical attractions – she was tall and thin, nicknamed ‘the scarecrow’ by George’s mother – but she was calm, malleable and good-natured, in contrast to Sophia Dorothea’s more febrile character. She sought to manage George’s moods, and make his life easier, whilst his wife seemed only to cause him difficulties. Sophia Dorothea was bitterly humiliated by her husband’s public preference for a woman far less beautiful and of lower social status than herself, and she refused to adopt the wronged wife’s traditional stance of dignified resignation. She scolded her resentful husband, made scenes at court, and complained to her father-in-law. In doing so, not only did she earn the lasting resentment of George’s mother (who could not see why she should not submit quietly to marital infidelity, as she had done), but also made enemies of the powerful Platen women, who disliked Sophia Dorothea’s wilder accusations against mistresses and their wiles. Unhappy, rejected and isolated amongst people who were embarrassed and annoyed by her indiscreet outbursts, Sophia Dorothea was in a very vulnerable state. It is perhaps not surprising that she was so quickly persuaded to do the very worst and dangerous thing she could have done in such circumstances: fall in love with another man.

      It was at this inauspicious moment that ‘the famous and beautiful’ Count Philip von Königsmark arrived at the Hanoverian court. He was a Swedish aristocrat, rich, handsome, clever, witty and assured, an archetypal sophisticated bad boy who had gambled, fought and drunk his way across Europe before enlisting as an officer in the Hanoverian service. He was everything Sophia Dorothea’s dour husband was not, and was obviously attracted to her. They enjoyed each other’s company, and when he left to join the army, he began to write to her. Soon the letters they exchanged were those of lovers. At first, they were careful – ‘If I were not writing to a person for whom my respect is as great as my love,’ wrote Königsmark, ‘I should find better terms to express my passion’ – but as their relationship grew more intense, they became less discreet.10

      When Königsmark returned, they snatched meetings in corridors, and exchanged glances in ballrooms. People noticed. They became the object of gossip, spread avidly by the Platens. Eventually, even Sophia Dorothea’s mother heard the talk, and begged her daughter to break off the affair. She refused, and for over two years sustained her love for the count through occasional meetings and lengthy correspondence, in which she did not hesitate to declare the strength of her feelings, even confessing she would like to abandon her empty, unsatisfactory life. ‘I thought a thousand times of following you,’ she wrote, ‘what would I not give to be able to do it, and always be with you. But I should be too happy and there is no such bliss in this world.’11

      Yet for all her declaration of its impossibility, the idea of starting a new life with Königsmark became an obsession for her. By 1694, both her parents were aware that she wanted to end her twelve-year marriage. Rumours of an impending elopement transfixed the court. Königsmark’s recent appointment as commander of a Saxon regiment seemed to offer the couple both the resources and the opportunity to run away together.

      Then in July events came to a sudden and СКАЧАТЬ