Sex with the Queen (26 page)

coldly informed her that both she and her maid were confined to their rooms.

Königsmark’s rooms were searched by the elector’s agents.

The count had sent many years’ worth of the princess’s precious letters to his sister Aurora for safekeeping but had kept those of the last six months with him. These were especially damning, not only revealing personal details of their sexual affair, but also their intended flight into enemy territory and the princess’s ha-tred of her father.

Her love affair, which had been known for years, had been a mere irritant, a potential for scandal. When Electress Sophia’s own daughter, the electress of Brandenburg, enjoyed love affairs with courtiers, her family pretended politely not to notice. A far more serious crime on the part of the princess was her plan to flee to Wolfenbüttel, which would cast Hanover into years of le-gal wrangling over her dowry and inheritance. This, not her adultery, was the unforgivable crime.

Count Platen, the prime minister of Hanover, met with the duke of Celle and showed him Sophia Dorothea’s letters. Pre-dictably, her father was furious, especially at her frequent de-scriptions of him as a brutal tyrant. He washed his hands of her, then and there, and when his wife begged him to have pity on his daughter, the duke angrily replied that he no longer remem-bered having a daughter.

As for Electress Sophia, she was delighted at no longer having a daughter-in-law. Though the family would smell faintly of scandal, with one fell swoop she could revenge herself on “that little clot of dirt” Eleonore of Celle, the impoverished nobody whom George William had preferred to Sophia’s blue-blooded majesty. With her only child divorced and imprisoned, Eleonore would be miserable forever. And best of all, as long as Sophia Dorothea’s father did not intervene, the elector of Hanover could imprison her and keep all of her money and lands.

By the evening after the murder, the princess knew that all was lost. Two weeks later Count Platen was sent to question her. He expected to find an abject woman begging for mercy, but instead t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 1 1 7

encountered a haughty princess demanding to know why she was being treated in a manner so inconsistent with her station.

Platen informed her, “The Elector has been aware of your rela-tionship with Count von Königsmark.”

“Where is Königsmark?” Sophia asked, suddenly frightened for her lover. “Has he been locked up too?”

“I regret to announce to Your Highness that Count von Königsmark died two weeks ago.”

And so, she realized, after he had left her chamber that night, humming a little tune, her caresses and kisses still warm on his skin, he had been mercilessly cut down. The noises from the hall. The blood on the floor. Sophia Dorothea fainted dead away. The count looked on her coldly until she came to.

“Murderers; they have murdered him!” she sobbed, trying to rise. “A family of murderers . . . ! Have pity and let me go! I can’t stay here any longer. . . .”35 She howled and wept piteously, all of which Count Platen recorded to use as evidence against her.

Her wish was granted; she was taken back to Celle, not to the palace because her father refused to see her, but to the castle of Ahlden some thirty miles away, home of the local magistrate. But

“castle” is a kindly word to describe the building; it was nothing more than an incredibly ugly brick house with two wings project-ing off the back.

During her interrogations Sophia Dorothea swore that she had never had sexual intercourse with Königsmark. Questioned separately, Eleonore de Knesebeck swore that her mistress’s liai-son with Königsmark, while admittedly romantic, had never been sexual. Threatened with lifelong imprisonment and tor-ture, Eleonore never swerved in her statements.

As punishment for her fidelity, Eleonore de Knesebeck was made the scapegoat for all her mistress’s sins.
She
had turned the princess’s heart against her husband. Foreign courts received an official explanation that stated Sophia Dorothea was separating from her husband “with whom she was no longer on good terms.”36 “The Princess at first displayed only some coldness to-wards her husband,” the statement continued, “but Fräulein von 1 1 8

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Knesebeck by degrees inspired her with such dislike to him that she begged from her father permission to return to her parents’

home. Her father was displeased, and warned the Princess to place confidence in her husband. But her dislike of her husband was so intensified by the machinations of Fräulein von Knese-beck. . . . Her corrupter, Fräulein von Knesebeck, was arrested at the wish of the Duke George William.”37

For three very good reasons there was to be no mention made of adultery with Königsmark. First, the scandal would taint the illustrious family name. Second, any mention of adultery, even if the act occurred years after the birth of legitimate children, would cast aspersions on their paternity, thereby threatening the line. And last, Königsmark had been brutally murdered and lay moldering under the floorboards of the great hall in the palace.

And indeed, in the months after the murder, Königsmark’s disappearance proved increasingly nettlesome. Ernst August staged magnificent balls and entertaining plays to distract his citizens from the mysterious disappearance of the flamboyant count. But soon foreign embassies were putting pressure on the elector to find Königsmark or explain his sudden disappear-ance. The mystery was the talk of every court in Europe—even the majestic Louis XIV deigned to express interest. The faint odor of scandal tainting the Hanoverian royal family was quickly rising to a stench. In an about-face, Ernst August decided to of-fer Sophia Dorothea one last chance. If she would dutifully re-turn to her husband and deny any knowledge of Königsmark’s fate, she would be spared imprisonment and divorce.

But Sophia Dorothea proudly declared, “If I am guilty of what I am accused of, I am not worthy of the Prince, and if I am inno-cent, it is he who is not worthy of me.”38

Never, ever, would George Louis touch her again, she vowed, shuddering in disgust at the thought. “We still adhere to our oft-repeated resolution never to cohabit matrimonially with our husband,” the princess affirmed in her divorce petition, “and that we desire nothing so much as that separation of marriage requested by our husband may take place.”39

The divorce decree of December 28, 1694, stated that Sophia t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 1 1 9

Dorothea would lose her title of electoral princess of Hanover.

Her name was removed from church prayers and erased from of-ficial documents and, indeed, no one at the court of Hanover was permitted to speak it. It was as if Sophia Dorothea had never existed and George Louis’s two children had sprung from the air. The document also decreed that the former princess would remain safely locked up in the prison of Ahlden, her money in the hands of her in-laws.

Now there was only the murder of Königsmark to fret about.

Hearing of her brother’s disappearance, Aurora von Königs-mark came flapping back to Hanover, making every effort to lo-cate him, and found herself once again banished by Ernst August. She then traveled to Dresden to inform personally the powerful elector Augustus of Saxony of her brother’s disappear-ance. Overcome with passion for her, the elector took the black-eyed beauty as his mistress and vowed to find her brother dead or alive. He icily wrote Ernst August that Königsmark, his personal friend and a major general in the Saxon army, had last been seen alive going into the elector’s palace but no one had seen him coming out. Elector Augustus demanded an explanation.

In response, the Hanoverian government coolly pointed out that Königsmark had just received his pay before he had gone missing and was “a debauched rambling sparke who kept irregu-lar hours, and consequently it is next to an impossibility to give an account what may become of him.”40

The Saxon elector pressed so hard that the guilty brothers of Hanover and Celle appealed to the Holy Roman Emperor in Austria, vowing they would remove their troops in the emperor’s war with France if Saxony did not quiet down about Königsmark.

The court of Vienna reproached the Saxon monarch for making such noise about a ne’er-do-well soldier when the more urgent obligations of war and international treaties were at stake. And so, with time, the efforts to locate Königsmark died, just as surely as he was dead himself. For nothing they did could bring him back to life, and the thick white blanket of quicklime was doing its job on the body lying in its dark bed beneath the floorboards.

Adulterous harem women in the sultan’s court at Istanbul 1 2 0

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were sewn into sacks and thrown into the Bosporus, disappear-ing under the waves. Baroque Europe was only slightly more civ-ilized; Sophia Dorothea was sewn into the sack of Ahlden and disappeared from sight. At twenty-eight her life had shrunk to the limits of two large rooms in the old gray fortress; her tiny retinue included a governor, a gentleman-in-waiting, and two or three ladies-in-waiting, all spies paid by Countess Platen.

They reported back to their employer every movement of the prisoner, every word she uttered. Perhaps to assuage his con-science, Sophia Dorothea’s father permitted her a respectable allowance and the right to inherit the property which, over the years, he had put in her mother’s name.

She was allowed no visitors and no correspondence with the outside world, not even with her mother for the first few years.

Her keepers told her that if she behaved well and made no trou-ble she would, at some point, be released. And she believed them. One day when a fire broke out, the obedient prisoner stood like a statue in the corridor, holding her jewel box; as the flames crept nearer, she declared she could not move without an order from the governor.

Treated as the most dangerous prisoner in the world, Sophia Dorothea was permitted carriage rides only six miles from the fortress while soldiers waving unsheathed swords rode beside her. The first year of her imprisonment she was not even allowed to walk outside. When doctors advised fresh air and exercise to improve her failing health, George Louis remembered the pre-diction made years earlier by the fortune-teller—that he would follow his wife to the grave within months—and commanded that she be permitted walks.