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

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The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I Page 15

by Gold, Claudia


  Bonet, the Prussian envoy, has left us with a very telling description of the ‘cloak and dagger’ way in which George’s business was conducted during the first year of his reign:

  It is at present a secret that the first knowledge of all affairs comes to the [English] ministers of State from Bernstorff and Bothmer, but it is uncertain how much longer this can be continued when this fact becomes known: to avoid causing embarrassment every evening the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Townshend go, under cover of night, to the house of the latter, and this quadrumvirate rules all . . .

  On George’s household, Bonet continues: ‘he has not yet nominated a Keeper of the Privy Purse, where he has between £26,000 a year, in order that none can enter so easily into the secrets of his expenses and outlay; Baron Bothmer does the office in secret.’16

  George was financially austere compared with his father, and the ministers he had inherited from Ernst August had amassed their fortunes before George became Elector. Bernstorff had grown rich through the generosity of George’s uncle, Duke George William, and not through service to Hanover. All hoped to do well in England. Görtz even asked Sir John Vanbrugh for a house in his capacity as comptroller of the Office of Works. He was taken aback when Vanbrugh, a little shocked at his audacity, replied that there was none in George’s gift.17

  If the hard evidence for bribes is a little thin (Brydges provides us with the only solid report, verified by his account books), enough credible contemporaries – Walpole, Townshend, Craggs etc. – spoke of it for us to assume that there is truth in the claims. In 1716 Townshend accused Robethon of ‘having nothing in his view but raising a vast estate for himself’. Townshend’s accusations grew: the following year he circulated reports that Robethon had requested £40,000 from George’s English ministers to be shared out amongst the members of the Hanoverian Chancery – £20,000 for Bernstorff, £10,000 for Bothmer, and £5,000 each for himself and Schütz.18 Perhaps Townshend’s tales were motivated by sour grapes, and his claim that Bothmer would not ‘be satisfied till he has got the Ministry and Treasury into such hands that will satisfy his avarice’.19

  It was not so much that bribes were being taken that offended the English ministers, but that they were being taken by Hanoverians. They preferred to keep the age-old system of patronage firmly within British hands. When Bothmer purchased an estate in Mecklenburg in 1723 its possible cost (some thought as much as £36,000) prompted feverish speculation amongst ministers who resented that the property had probably been paid for with British bribe money.20 For the Germans it was an easy way of supplementing income in comparatively expensive England. Even the affable James Craggs the younger, a staunch Hanoverian who held several posts with both George and Georg August and who had joined the Whig Hanoverian Club before George’s accession, found the Hanoverians gratuitously greedy – ‘I have remarked that there is no distinction of person or circumstances. Jacobites, Tories, Papists, at the Exchange or in Church, by Land or Sea, during the Session or in the Recess, nothing is objected to provided there is money.’21

  But although the Germans tried their utmost to exploit the system, they were not as successful as their detractors claimed. There was a political motive behind much of the criticism. The Germans were vilified by the Tory press and pamphleteers because they were foreign, and because they were not Stuarts. As much as anything, the taking of bribes provided an excellent excuse to attack them. But it must be admitted that in their satirizing of Melusine for her venality, they had a point. She was as willing as the next to take money for favours.

  In July 1716 Mary Cowper recorded in her diary: ‘Everybody believes that the Duchess of Munster [Melusine] had 5,000l. for making Lord St John [the father of the Tory Lord Bolingbroke, who had fled to France] a Lord.’22 Melusine, together with young Melusine, was also suspected of using her influence, in return for hard cash, for obtaining the Order of the Garter for the dukes of Kent and Newcastle.

  Although she was as assured as possible of George’s affections, given that they were unmarried and their children illegitimate, Melusine was insecure about her finances all her life. Her parents had lifted themselves out of genteel poverty with a great deal of effort, and these actions defined her attitude to money. She spent a lot because she was extremely generous, particularly towards her family, and she gave a lot to charity. She and Johann Matthias were obliged to support their financially inept brother Daniel Bodo, with his obsessive alchemy experiments and his squandering of the family fortunes.

  She gave presents of money to her sisters’ husbands who had acknowledged the paternity of her daughters. But forever in her mind was the thought that George might cast her aside and that she and the girls would be destitute. That is not to say that George was not concerned for her financial future. An Imperial diplomat estimated that her pension from George was £7,500 per annum, paid from his Hanoverian and not his English resources. According to the same source she also had ‘another secret pension, as also further perquisites . . .’23 Furthermore contemporaries gossiped that on Kielmansegg’s death, Melusine received the salary of Master of the Horse, although this is unlikely as Sophia Charlotte’s husband had received no salary from the post during the time that he had held it. In 1722 George granted her the patent for the Irish coinage, which she sold for £10,000 to William Wood – this would lead to one of the greatest scandals of George’s reign. And in 1723 George wrote a will, witnessed by Walpole, leaving her £22,986.2s.2d. We have evidence that George told Melusine about the bequest.24 But despite a generous annual allowance from George her fear of poverty led her to accept money and presents from often suspect individuals. It is unlikely that she betrayed her feelings to George, but they are evident in the surviving letter of Johann Matthias to their mutual friend Fabrice, as described above. Her lack of security made her unhappy, and it caused the sibling she was closest to to worry for her.

  Sophia Charlotte was also ridiculed for accepting bribes and frittering away her money. She was said to have received £40,000 from her mother, Klara Platen, which quickly disappeared in a flurry of fripperies.

  On arrival in England she and her husband Johann Adolf lived in grand style, as befitting his position as Master of the Horse, but because he was not English he was unable to draw the salary his post commanded. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Sophia Charlotte’s regular correspondent, gossiped that the gorgeous jewellery she inherited from her mother was worth a fortune, but Hatton argues that it was not as valuable as has been suggested. When Johann Adolf died in 1717 her circumstances changed. George gave her a pension of £2,000 a year, but she was obliged to give up her official apartments to move to a house in Great George Street, near St James’s Park.25 Her staff was relatively small, and she must have been helped enormously by her £10,000 lottery win.26 She had five children to support and obviously considered any cash that came her way in return for favours as a vital part of her income in her reduced circumstances.

  Sophia Charlotte evidently enjoyed herself in England, and kept a lively salon. Despite her reputation for greed, she was liked by nearly everyone, with the notable exceptions of Melusine and Caroline. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu certainly preferred the more exuberant Sophia Charlotte to Melusine, and said of her:

  She had a greater vivacity in conversation than ever I knew in a German of either sex. She loved reading, and had a taste of all polite learning. Her humour was easy and sociable. Her constitution inclined her to gallantry. She was well bred and amusing in company. She knew how both to please and be pleased, and had experience enough to know it was hard to do either without money.

  Liselotte remarked in a letter to Louise in 1716: ‘Does Mme de Kielemansegg now speak English as well as she does French? Few Germans write French as well as she does . . .’27

  Melusine’s perceived venality quickly permeated the popular consciousness. A story exists, possibly apocryphal, of Melusine and Sophia Charlotte taking a carriage ride together soon after their arrival in England, and being confronted
by an angry crowd. Evidently Melusine, in her heavily accented English, asked the mob: ‘Good people, why do you plague us so? We have come for your own goods.’ She meant for their benefit but the crowd replied: ‘Yes, and for our chattels too.’28

  As Melusine’s reputation for corruption grew, so her detractors’ pens grew sharper. The Duke of Wharton referred to her as ‘the Concubine, who had hoarded up heaps of Treasure, while she was Mistress’ to George.29

  Alexander Pope attacked Melusine in his poem ‘Phryne’, which means ‘Toad’ in Greek. Here, she is seen as the conduit to power, accepting bribes from any who care to make use of her. The academic Kathleen Mahaffey notes that ‘few of the court circle would have failed to recognise this character [Phryne] as belonging to . . . Melusina . . . the chief port of entry for all who desired preferment and access to the King.’ The poem is worth quoting in full:

  Phryne had Talents for Mankind,

  Open she was, and unconfin’d

  Like some free Port of Trade.

  Merchants unloaded here their Freight,

  And Agents from each foreign State,

  Here first their Entry made.

  Her Learning and good Breeding such,

  Whether th’ Italian or the Dutch,

  Spaniard or French came to her;

  To all obliging she’d appear:

  ’Twas Si Signior, twas Yaw Mynheer,

  ’Twas S’il vous plait, Monsieur.

  Obscure by Birth, renown’d by Crimes,

  Still changing Names, Religions, Climes,

  At length she turns a Bride:

  In Di’monds, Pearls, and rich Brocades,

  She shines the first of batter’d Jades,

  And flutters in her Pride.

  So have I known those Insects fair,

  (Which curious Germans hold so rare,)

  Still very Shapes and Dyes;

  Still gain new Titles with new Forms;

  First Grubs obscene, then wriggling Worms,

  Then painted Butterflies.

  The line ‘At length she turns a Bride’ reflects the court gossip that Melusine eventually married George, although whether Pope meant in Germany or later in England is not clear. Both rumours were given credence by contemporaries. Melusine is portrayed as extreme in her greed, the most corrupt in an age of tremendous corruptibility and bribery.

  The poem probably dates from 1719 or shortly after, when Melusine was created Duchess of Kendal, as Pope satirizes her ‘Still changing Names’. The image of Melusine as ‘the first of batter’d Jades’ is particularly harsh. It was not printed, probably deliberately, until after George’s death. Pope was too wise to risk publishing something so disparaging during George’s lifetime.

  Sophia Charlotte did not escape Pope’s pen either. He vilifies her in his poem, ‘Artemisia’, George’s ‘queen’ who came with him to England. Here George is set in unflattering comparison with the Persian king Xerxes, whom Artemisia accompanied on his attempted invasion of Greece. In satirizing both Sophia Charlotte and Melusine, Pope was obviously influenced by the contemporary gossip that both were George’s mistresses:

  Tho Artemisia talks, by Fits,

  Of Councils, Classicks, Fathers, Wits;

  Reads Malbranche, Boyle, and Locke;

  Yet in some Things methinks she fails,

  ’Twere well if she would pare her Nails,

  And wear a cleaner Smock.

  Haughty and huge as High-Dutch Bride,

  Such Nastiness and so much Pride

  Are oddly join’d by Fate:

  On her large Squab you find her spread,

  Like a fat Corpse upon a Bed,

  That lies and stinks in State.

  She wears no Colours (sign of Grace)

  On any Part except her Face;

  All white and black beside:

  Dauntless her Look, her Gesture proud,

  Her Voice theatrically loud,

  And masculine her Stride.

  So have I seen, in black and white

  A prating Thing, a Magpye hight,

  Majestically stalk;

  A stately, worthless Animal,

  That plies the Tongue, and wags the Tail,

  All Flutter, Pride, and Talk.30

  Another writer who turned a disparaging eye on Melusine was the Tory Jonathan Swift, who despised her and attacked her in both poetry and pamphlets. Some contemporaries believed that she was the ‘cushion’ in his bestseller Gulliver’s Travels, though literary critics today believe that Swift was using the allegory of Gulliver’s Travels as a general indictment on the cabal of corrupt king’s favourites and Whig ministers.

  A century later the satirists’ descriptions were swallowed whole and regurgitated as fact. The Morning Chronicle of February 1818, in its section entitled ‘Political Questions’, reported:

  George the First, being a gallant person, and devoted to what was called the fair sex in Westphalia, where, among witches, fair is foul, and foul is fair, brought with him to England two ugly fiends to serve him for mistresses, and to make part of his official establishment. One of them was created Duchess of Kendal, the other, Countess of Darlington, to reward their merits in their respective departments, and to encourage the surrender of prudery in younger and handsomer subjects. All this is too notorious to be disputed . . .31

  The pseudonymous Captain Samuel Brunt’s A Voyage to Cacklogallinia: with a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of that Country of 1727 also attacked the king’s mistress. It portrayed Robert Walpole as a rooster, and Melusine as a hen.

  The Hanoverian ministers in general and Melusine in particular were perceived to be ‘sucking England dry’ of money and titles. But if George turned a blind eye to bribery, he scrupulously adhered to the rule that no German could receive a British title. Titles were awarded to his close entourage, but only following their naturalization as British subjects, and then only for life. George’s brother Ernst August became Duke of York in 1716 and young Melusine took the title Countess of Walsingham in 1722.

  At the same time Louise was made a countess of the Empire – she received no English title – becoming the Gräfin von Delitz. Trudchen was felt too young to receive a title, but as she achieved one through her marriage to Albrecht Wolfgang zu Schaumburg-Lippe in 1722, it was not deemed necessary.

  Unsurprisingly, given the rampant corruption in which the Hanoverians engaged so enthusiastically, George’s first English ministry was rife with faction and discontent, as Whig intrigued against Whig. There were at least two very unhappy members. The most coveted roles of Secretary of State for the North and for the South had gone to Charles Townshend and James Stanhope respectively. One Secretary of State, or ‘Foreign Minister’, was responsible for Northern Europe – the Dutch Republic, Sweden, Denmark-Norway, Poland, Russia, the German states. The other was responsible for Southern Europe – France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian states and the Ottoman Empire. Charles Montagu, Lord Halifax, was appointed First Lord of the Treasury and the Tory Lord Nottingham became Lord President. Robert Walpole, Townshend’s brother-in-law, became Paymaster (until 1715) and the Duke of Argyll Groom of the Stool to the Prince of Wales.

  But George, largely because he disliked their arrogance and self-obsession, sidelined both the great war hero Marlborough and his son-in-law Charles Spencer, third Earl of Sunderland, who had been a secretary of state under Anne. Marlborough, who irritated George with his vaunting of his great victories, was given the relatively lowly post of Captain-General and Sunderland got Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, which was also a demotion.

  In his description of the English court after George’s accession the Prussian envoy Bonet writes to his master of Marlborough’s greed:

  The man who has been most ardent in his [the king’s] growing displeasure is the duke of Marlborough, who has but his personal merit, and little credit throughout the country due to his insatiable avarice, which renders his riches, and even his friendship and faithful duties useless to soci
ety, since the former are buried, and the latter dispensed only for money.32

  Both Stanhope and Marlborough were extremely bitter at their marginalization. Stanhope believed he should be Secretary of State in Townshend’s place and he and Marlborough formed a cabal to oust Townshend.

  As early as November 1714 Oxford gleefully wrote: ‘Germans and Whigs divided amongst themselves . . . two parties . . . now hang out their colours in battle array. Nothing but the fear of the Tories keeps them from outraging each other.’33 Townshend and Walpole, who disliked the German ministers’ intervention in English affairs, led one faction, and Sunderland, Marlborough and their good friend William Cadogan another. They attempted to discredit Townshend in the eyes of the king and to replace him with Sunderland as Secretary of State.

  By the summer of 1716 Walpole feared that the machinations against them had reached a crisis. Some of the Germans had made it clear that they favoured the Sunderland faction, and when George went on the first of his visits to Hanover in July – George and Melusine made five visits to Hanover throughout the reign, in 1716, 1719, 1720, 1723 and 1725 – taking Melusine, Bernstorff, Robethon and secretary Stanhope with him, Walpole and Townshend were dismayed. Once Sunderland managed to join the king later in the summer the pair knew they were doomed. Mary Countess Cowper suggested in her diary that everything had been decided even before George and Melusine left London. On July 16 1716 she wrote: ‘A new scheme was let out by the Duke of Marlborough’s friends for the State of the Nation in the next sessions of parliament. By that it was resolved, first, that my Lord Townshend should be turned out (the Duchess of Munster had given me a hint that that was resolved upon before she left London) . . .’34

 

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