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

by Gold, Claudia

  Even Liselotte was worried for her cousin, and wrote a typically vague letter to Louise in September 1714:

  It is hard to believe that the English could ever be content with any king, let alone ours. I feel just as children do when they say ‘J’aime papa et mama’. I love our Elector, who has now become King, and the King of England here, and his mother, are dear to me too. I wish our Elector could have another kingdom, and our King of England his own, for I confess that I don’t trust the English one iota, and fear that our Elector, who is now King, will meet with disaster. If his rule in England were as absolute as our King’s here, I have no doubt that right and justice would reign, but there are altogether too many examples of the unfair way in which the English treat their kings. But my meal has arrived. Today I am eating earlier than usual because of the hunt.19

  Although the Jacobite ranks in Scotland would eventually swell to 10,000 men, George and his ministers perceived rebellion in the south to be the greater threat. George’s spies reported that James was planning to invade and the king responded by suspending Habeas Corpus on 21 July 1715, ‘to impower his majesty to secure and detain such persons as his majesty shall suspect are conspiring against his person and government’. Arrest followed arrest – Lord Lansdowne and Lord Dupplin amongst others – and warrants were issued for the arrests of the Earl of Jersey, Sir William Wyndham and Thomas Forster. Wyndham and Forster declared for James at Warkworth and Alnwick, then joined the Scottish Jacobites. But the rebellion quickly fizzled out.

  The Pretender’s resources were pitiful and Louis XIV, although he promised all, delivered nothing – no military or financial aid was forthcoming to his cousin’s campaign. When the French king died in September 1715, to be replaced by his five-year-old great-grandson, James’s venture seemed lost.

  However the Scots, France’s ancient allies against the English, took up James’s cause, and on 6 September 1715 the Earl of Mar raised James’s standard at Braemar. Although union between Scotland and England had been achieved in 1707, many Scots felt ignored and disaffected. When the Earl of Mar declared that the Pretender would restore the ‘ancient free and independent constitution’ of Scotland, James’s cause, despite his Catholicism, became the perfect excuse for a rebellion.

  It was a lost cause. The Pretender was still in France, and without a strong leader the disparate army surrendered to Hanoverian troops on 14 November. The English Jacobite army was left in tatters; only the Scots remained. James’s half-brother, the Duke of Berwick, remarked: ‘I shall always consider it a folly to think that he [James] will be able to succeed in his undertaking with the Scotch alone.’20

  James, realizing he had no hope of a successful invasion of England, headed for Scotland. But his Scottish supporters were on the run and he left again for France at the beginning of February.

  George and his Whig ministers were brutal in their reprisals. Twenty-eight were hanged, and hundreds sent to exile in Britain’s colonial territories, chiefly the Americas. The Earl of Nottingham, the sole Tory in George’s Cabinet, begged for mercy for the rebel peers. George had wanted to execute them all, but Nottingham’s intercession ensured that only two, Lords Derwentwater and Kenmure, were hanged. Nottingham then departed the king’s service, leaving the Whigs as George’s sole British advisers.

  The Whigs were dominated by huge personalities, particularly Charles, second Viscount Townshend, and Robert Walpole. They were brothers-in-law whose families were neighbours in their native Norfolk – Townshend had married Walpole’s sister Dorothy in 1713. She was his second wife. The alliance facilitated a close political partnership between the pair, who otherwise had little in common. Townshend, an astute politician, was refined, charming and hard-working. His contemporary John Mackay called him a ‘Gentleman of Great Learning, attended with a sweet Disposition; a Lover of the Constitution of his Country; is beloved by every Body that knows him’.21

  Walpole was loud, coarse, fat, rude and brilliant. An early member of the Whiggish political and literary Kit-Kat club, he was obsessed with politics. He was the son of a wealthy squire and was originally meant for the Church, but the death of his older brother made him his father’s heir and destined him for other things. Melusine’s brother Frederick William, not easily impressed, was struck by Walpole’s skilful handling of his fellow politicians, which he communicated in his extensive missives to Baron Görtz, one of George’s Hanoverian ministers. Walpole was extremely attractive to women and had many mistresses, despite his two marriages. We know the name of at least one – Carey Daye – with whom he had a daughter, named Catherine. Walpole embraced life and always lived beyond his means. He was constantly dogged by debt.

  During the last years of George’s reign, Walpole would preside over an oligarchy. He would realize Melusine’s full political potential and ultimately save her from absolute disgrace.

  7.

  Germans in England

  England is a mad country.

  – Liselotte to Louise, 23 April 1715

  In spite of an unfamiliar country, new and forthright ministers, political upheaval, riots and an invasion, family life went on. Theirs was no longer a young family. Melusine was forty-six when she arrived in Britain, George fifty-four, Louise twenty-two and young Melusine twenty-one. Only Trudchen remained too young, at thirteen, to fully enter society, a detail that has led some historians to overlook her, and even to speculate that Melusine had only two daughters, or ‘nieces’.

  Melusine initially lived with George and the girls in St James’s Palace, together with Caroline, Georg August and their daughters the princesses Anne, Amalie and Caroline Elizabeth. Their eldest child, Frederick, remained in Hanover as a mark of George’s continued commitment towards the principality. He was determined to rule both his dominions and gave his directions to the Hanoverian Chancery in London. Young Frederick became the charge of his great-uncle Ernst August, who took care of his upbringing and education. About ninety Hanoverians – ministers, courtiers and servants – accompanied Melusine and George to London, staffing George’s bedchamber, his kitchen and his Hanoverian Chancery. They had come with the king only as an interim measure until the places in his household could be filled by Englishmen. Most of them would return to Hanover in 1716.

  St James’s Palace had been built by Henry VIII on the site of a leper hospital dedicated to St James the Less. Not the most comfortable royal household, it had been meant to be only a temporary replacement for Whitehall after it burned down in 1697, but it remained the royal residence in central London and it is still the palace to which ambassadors are formally called.

  It was universally loathed for its small, labyrinthine rooms. Daniel Defoe called its apartments ‘mean’. In 1734 James Ralph, in his publication on the buildings of London and Westminster, declared that: ‘so far from having one single beauty to recommend it . . . ’tis at once the contempt of foreign nations, and the disgrace of our own.’1 St James’s did not impress either the family or their visitors. J. Gwynn, the author of London & Westminster Improved of 1766 lamented that the royal family should ‘reside in a house so ill-becoming the state and grandeur of the most powerful and respectable monarch in the universe’.2

  It was difficult to house the entire family and their staff under its roof, and many of George’s English and Hanoverian servants were lodged instead around Whitehall and in Somerset House. Most of the Hanoverians who had come over with Melusine and George were found rooms in surrounding houses. St James’s saw a frenzy of building as kitchens, cellars and sculleries were put in to feed the new royal family.

  Despite the inadequacy of the palace, Melusine’s apartments were ‘lavishly furnished’ and her rooms the best St James’s could offer.3 The palace was dark and dank, but its location near the river was wonderful and Melusine and the girls used their early days in London well, exploring the parks, which were the envy of Europe. St James’s Park in particular was a magnet for those wanting to be seen:

  [It] contains several avenues
of elm and lime trees, two large ponds, and a pretty little island; in a word, this is an enchanting spot in summer time. Society comes to walk here on fine, warm days, from seven to ten in the evening, and in winter from one to three o’clock. English men and women are fond of walking, and the park is so crowded at times that you cannot help touching your neighbour. Some people come to see, some to be seen, and others to seek their fortunes; for many priestesses of Venus are abroad, some of them magnificently attired, and all on the look-out for adventures, and many young men are not long in repenting that they have become acquainted with such beautiful and amiable nymphs . . .4

  Court was a round of public and private parties, of jostling for power between the Hanoverian and the English courtiers, of familial rivalry, corruption and bribery.

  The English had high hopes of a social renaissance with a new monarch. The latter years of Queen Anne’s court had been so dreary that many had stayed away. In 1711 Swift wrote to Stella, after one particularly dull afternoon:

  There was a drawing room today at Court; but so few company, that the Queen sent for us into her bed-chamber, where we made our bows, and stood about twenty of us around the room, while she looked at us round with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her, and then she was told dinner was ready, and went out.5

  The queen was so bloated and ill with dropsy that she could barely move, and every movement achieved was at the expense of great pain. She was steeped in grief for her dead children and her dead husband. There were none of the glamorous parties or intrigues that had marked the beginning of her reign at the height of her relationship with her magnetic favourite, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. After the death of Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, even Sarah stayed away, sparking a shattering fall from grace and the installation of Sarah’s cousin, the Tory Abigail Masham, later wife of Robert Harley (the Earl of Oxford), as Anne’s new favourite. The historian G. M. Trevelyan wrote of Anne’s tedious life: ‘for a dozen weary years the invalid daily faced her office work . . . In order to do what she thought right in church and state, she slaved at many details of government . . .’

  The reporting of early eighteenth-century court life is comparable to our own fascination with celebrity. Court notices, with their accompanying descriptions of the royal family, the aristocracy and other ‘persons of note’, were today’s equivalent of gossip columns, recording the appointments, the illnesses, the parties and the holidays of the major characters. For example, on 18 May 1722 the Daily Journal reported: ‘On Tuesday the Duchess of Kendal gave a magnificent entertainment to most of the Foreign Ministers etc at her apartment in St James’s House.’ The same column, reflecting what typically economically minded and sensation-hungry Londoners wanted, lists stock prices and convicted criminals to be executed the following Monday:

  Yesterday the dead warrant came to Newgate for the execution of the following malefactors on Monday next at Tyburn, viz; John Bootini, a youth, for a rape on a young girl, and giving her the foul disease, Thomas Smith alias Newcomb for felony and burglary, Leonard Hendry for felony, Jeremiah Rand for a street robbery, Richard Whittingham for felony and burglary. John Hawkins and George Simpson for robbing the Bristol Mail; the two last are afterwards to be hanged in chains near the place where they committed the acts . . .

  But if the British aristocracy and gossip-hungry Londoners expected George and Melusine to head a more exciting court, they were to be disappointed. A newsletter dated 4 September 1714 happily speculated: ‘His Majesty brings with him 17 sets of fine coach horses. We hear the king will keep here a noble and splendid court.’6 But Melusine and George, immensely private, did all they could to avoid the trappings of kingship.

  George and Melusine always preferred the intimacy of family life and close friends to a large and impersonal court, and this desire strengthened as they grew older. Melusine had begun to correspond with various English women whose husbands were important politically while still in Germany, and she created a good impression with all who knew her personally. But she was far more comfortable in informal surroundings, presiding over small dinner parties, attending the opera with her daughters or one or two ladies, or drinking coffee in her rooms. The newspapers are full of reports of outings to the opera or theatre with one of her ‘nieces’, and she was in the habit of spending evenings with just one or two ladies. Lady Bristol, one of Caroline’s Ladies of the Bedchamber, for example, wrote in her diary of seeing a great deal of Melusine in 1715. ‘I go to the opera a Saturday with Madam Shulenberg and her niece . . .’ she reported, and later in the year: ‘I went to court, where I was received more graciously than ordinary. And stayed till three a clock, and am to be at half an hour after four with Madam Shulenburg to drink coffee before we go together to the opera . . .’7

  Similarly the conscientious George took his duties to the state extremely seriously. But as far as he was concerned those duties did not include providing entertainment for his courtiers and visiting dignitaries. He would provide no public spectacle with a levee and a coucher – the public putting to bed and getting up of the monarch – open to high-ranking courtiers, and he refused to dine in public.

  Some English sovereigns had been happy to receive courtiers and ministers in their bedchamber – George was not. Instead he received them in a private closet beside his bedchamber. Entrance was strictly controlled and by arrangement with his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber only. Even peers must wait their turn.

  George, if not exactly a misanthrope, only desired the company of trusted friends, family and servants. He saw the frivolities associated with monarchy as distractions from the business of government and he did his utmost to avoid them. English courtiers and foreign observers obviously thought his habits strange. Even the dying Queen Anne, they muttered, had kept a court more fitting to monarchy than this new Hanoverian king.

  The Prussian envoy Bonet, in a private report for George’s daughter and son-in-law, described the awkwardness George felt at being on ‘show’. George, he reported to his master:

  is not seen at his lever, nor at his dinner, nor at his supper, nor at his coucher. Only during some minutes is he seen as he returns from the chapel, and this by stopping in a passageway to the chamber, which is lined on one side and the other with a double hedge of courtiers who touch all walls, of the type of whom there are not ten people of whose faces he takes note, and to whom he might speak . . . As His Majesty never appears in public, one may not speak to him of business except in a formal audience . . .

  Bonet, shocked that a monarch could be so reticent about showing himself to his people, continued:

  Withdrawn into his palace of St. James, rather into one room and one cabinet, the other apartments being for the Courtiers, His Majesty never ventured out to Kensington, to Hampton Court or to Windsor, which are spacious, more commodious, and which have a more royal air. In this room, he slept and ate, and in the neighbouring cabinet he gave audiences. He has made no plan to designate certain days for business, and others for recreation and for the examination of those who are presented to him in audiences.

  He goes on to observe that English courtiers rarely had the opportunity to get near their king: ‘He had established some lords as his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, who would have served at table, and some other lesser gentlemen to dress him, but he never wanted to receive the services of either one or the other, and he wanted to receive only the service of his Turks and of his German valets de chambre.’

  George, he continues:

  stayed alone every morning in this chamber until midday when he passed into the cabinet in order to give audiences to the ministers of State of the two nations until two o’clock, when he went to his table for dinner; after dinner, he walked alone in the Garden of St. James, or he went to the rooms of the duchess of Munster, and in the evening to the circle of the Princess [Caroline], until midnight, or else to the opera, where he went incognito in a hired chaise, or to the rooms of Madame
de Kielmansegge [Sophia Charlotte] . . . and it happened very rarely that his ministers of State spoke to him in the afternoons.

  Both George and Melusine had brought their trusted servants from Hanover, and they very much kept to their inner circle – the girls, the extended family and old friends. If anything Melusine, during the early years of the reign, was more gregarious than George, ensuring that she visited and received the noblewomen who could be useful to the king, and taking outings with her daughters.

  Two of George’s servants served to excite the most interest: the Turks Mehemet and Mustapha, who had served George in Hanover. As a trusted friend and confidant, Mustapha was party to his most private disappointments and pleasures. We know of George’s pitiful despair over his sister Figuelotte’s death, for example, only because Mehemet told Mary Countess Cowper, a Lady of the Bedchamber to Caroline and the wife of William Cowper, George’s Lord Chancellor, and a prolific keeper of her diary, who recorded it. This scene provides us with an image of George as a man of passion, far removed from the taciturn soldier of the popular imagination.

  Coxe, the early biographer of Robert Walpole, comments on the importance of these Turkish servants: ‘Their influence over their master was so great, that their names are mentioned in a dispatch of Count Broglio to the King of France, as possessing a large share of the King’s confidence.’ He continued: ‘These low foreigners obtained considerable sums of money for recommendations to places.’

  Nor did their influence escape Alexander Pope, who mentioned Mehemet in his Moral Essays, ‘Epistle II, to a lady’:

  From peer or bishop ’tis no easy thing

  To draw the man who loves his God, or king,

  Alas! I copy (or my draught would fail)