Sex with the Queen (27 page)

Sophia Dorothea adapted herself to prison life by keeping busy. She oversaw the details of the kitchen, paid bills, and made contracts out of her substantial allowance. She was active in char-ities in the village of Ahlden, repaired the cottages of the poor, and paid for a village schoolteacher. She donated an organ, silver candlesticks, an altar cloth, and a pulpit cushion to the village church. When the village burned down, she paid for new build-ings and wider streets.

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After four years, she was allowed to receive visits and letters from her mother. But she was not permitted to see her children, although she wrote often to the elector begging for the privilege.

He never replied. Toward the end of his life her father, his con-science pricking him, often spoke of going to visit her to allevi-ate the conditions of her imprisonment, but Prime Minister Bernstorff, still in the pay of Countess Platen, always dissuaded him from the idea. One day in 1705 the duke decided resolutely that he would visit her the following day. But oddly enough, that night he suddenly died. At the death of the duke of Celle, all his property went to George Louis.

With a generous allowance to buy what she wanted, Sophia Dorothea dressed beautifully, as if waiting for Königsmark to make an unexpected visit. Her spies reported that she lived in front of her mirror, trying on gowns, dressing her hair.

Adorned in diamonds and brocade, she sat at table beneath a great stuffed bear, a reminder of the one Königsmark had taken as a pet. Her lover had written her once, “One favor I ask of the gods, that I may be with you always, in life and in death.”41 Was he still with her, silent and invisible yet ardently loving her in her dreary rooms? Or was he irrevocably gone, her rooms empty except for her own sad memories?

During the eternal prison days and endless prison nights, the aging captive must have remembered her own prescient words to Königsmark years before: “Without you life would be intolerable and four high walls would give me more pleasure than to remain in the world.”42 And Königsmark’s clairvoyant reply: “My lot is that of the butterfly burned by the candle; I cannot avoid my destiny.”43

The years passed; the princess grew stout and dyed her gray hair black. Realizing she would never be liberated for good be-havior, she undertook a secret correspondence with her daugh-ter, who had married the king of Prussia, begging her for help to escape. But Sophia Dorothea the younger had married a man even more brutal than her mother had. Frederick William of Prussia carried a large stick with a knot on the end to beat his family until they bled, as well as servants and ministers who dis-1 2 2

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pleased him. Knowing her husband wanted nothing to do with her mother, the queen of Prussia never tried to rescue her. She did her mother one favor, however, employing Eleonore de Knesebeck as her lady-in-waiting.

After her interrogation, Eleonore had been imprisoned in solitary confinement in the fortress of Schwarzfels where she would probably have remained until her death if she had not es-caped. After four years, a friend of hers disguised as a roofer made a hole in her ceiling, threw her a rope, and hoisted her up.

She then had to slide 180 feet down the castle wall to freedom. As she could no longer serve Sophia Dorothea, she was happy to serve her daughter. For her part, the younger Sophia Dorothea must have been eager to learn about her mother from her faith-ful maid.

Neither had Sophia Dorothea’s son, George, forgotten her.

One day in his teens, George went out hunting and galloped away from his retinue. His companions followed in hot pursuit and found him racing up to the fortress of Ahlden, his mother waving to him from a window. The governor of Ahlden refused the boy entrance, and when he returned home his father pun-ished him severely.

After Königsmark’s murder, Countess Platen lost much of her influence with the elector, who never forgave her for the mess she had gotten him in. Most of the court, aware that she had loved Königsmark and was bitterly jealous of the princess, knew that she had played a role in their disappearances. The dashing Königsmark and pretty princess had been popular, and now both were gone because of Platen. Few went to her parties after that, even fewer invited her to their own. In Celle she was absolutely detested. And how hard it must have been for her to cross the great hall, knowing what lay moldering beneath. How many times, after that night of blood and murder, did she look at her hands and shudder at the memories? As Lady Macbeth said, “Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

Four years after Königsmark’s murder, Elector Ernst August died, and the new elector, George Louis, commanded Countess t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 1 2 3

Platen to retire from court. Utterly defeated, she became ill with a disease that rendered her blind and hideous to behold. Perhaps it was the last stages of syphilis.

On her deathbed, in bone-shattering pain, she cried out that her blind eyes saw Königsmark’s ghost rise before her. Begging for divine forgiveness, she confessed her crime to a minister who spoke of it in her funeral oration. There were other deathbed confessions from the guards who had cut Königsmark down.

And finally the world learned what had happened to the vanished lover of Sophia Dorothea.

In 1714, when Queen Anne of Great Britain died childless, George Louis became King George I. The British parliament had skipped over fifty-seven other possible heirs rendered unfit by their Catholicism. But George’s Protestant religion was his only recommendation to his new realm. He was an unpopular king who never learned to speak a word of English, forcing his courtiers and ministers to communicate in German or French.

He cared little about his new kingdom and showed far greater in-terest in the British treasury, which he repeatedly raided, carry-ing bags of English gold to Hanover every few years.

Instead of bringing his new subjects a beautiful queen, George flaunted his two ugly mistresses, the good-natured Melusina von Schulenburg, whose youthful beauty had by now entirely disappeared, and Countess Platen’s daughter Sophia Charlotte von Kielsmansegge, the one she had tried to unload on Königsmark, who was as fat as Melusina was thin. Given his father’s affair with Countess Platen, it is possible that George was sleeping with his half sister. Hearing nothing of a wife, many Englishmen assumed their new king was a widower. Some, upon learning that he had locked up his wife in a castle for twenty years, assumed that she had gone stark raving mad.

George had a terrible relationship with his son and heir, the future George II, who never forgave his father’s treatment of his mother. For his part, whenever George looked at his son, he saw his detested wife—her dark eyes and hair, her shining complex-ion, her passion and pride. An English wit quipped, “George I 1 2 4

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could not have been such a bad man, for he never hated but three people: his mother, his wife and his son.”44

And so Sophia Dorothea would have been queen of Great Britain, had she not divorced her husband. She might, techni-cally,
have been
the queen of Great Britain, since the validity of her hurried and secretive divorce was unclear. King George, ter-rified that she might escape, sail to England, and proclaim her-self queen, had her watched more closely than ever.

In 1722 Sophia Dorothea’s mother and only friend, Eleonore of Celle, died at the age of eighty-two. And now the prisoner was alone. She inherited her mother’s property but found herself without a link to the outside world and, worse, with no one to love her. She lived on for four more years and then, after an im-prisonment of thirty-two years, she died November 13, 1726, at the age of sixty. Her last days were painful ones, her bright spirit burning away in fever. Screaming in agony, she called out for di-vine vengeance against her husband, her torturer, her execu-tioner. Before she died, she asked for quill and paper and wrote one last terrible letter.

When George heard the news of Sophia Dorothea’s death, he immediately made plans to attend a performance that eve-ning given by a troop of Italian comedians. The court of Hanover went into mourning for their former princess, but word came from London that the king forbade anyone to wear black. He tore up her will in which she left all her possessions to her children, claiming them instead for himself. He then is-sued orders to remove everything from Ahlden that had be-longed to her and burn it. He wanted nothing left to prove she had ever been there, wanted no relics of his martyred wife to prolong the story of her unjust imprisonment. He even neg-lected to bur y her body.

For two months her coffin lay in a room of the castle of Ahlden. Only at the persistent urgings of the superstitious Melusina, who saw the dead woman’s angry spirit circling the palace in the form of a crow, did George command her body to be tossed into the family crypt below the church of Celle, with no t h e s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y 1 2 5

religious service. But as hard as the king tried, he could not for-get the description of Sophia Dorothea’s deathbed, where in her last agony she screamed the most terrifying curses at him. As the months passed, he slept poorly and became nervous. He decided that he needed a rejuvenating visit to his native Hanover.