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

by Gold, Claudia

  Townshend was stripped of his post and offered the relatively lowly position of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He reluctantly accepted, as he and Walpole were determined to maintain the veneer of Whig unity. However he only lasted four months. George, exasperated by his obvious antagonism, dismissed him in the spring. Walpole and many of their colleagues resigned in protest, creating a political schism.

  Townshend, one of the ablest politicians of his generation, was not lightly demoted or dismissed by George. Why then did he fall? He was demoted in the first instance because he disagreed with the king on foreign policy and was vocal in his belief that British resources should not be used to aid Hanoverian foreign policy. Bernstorff, for instance, in 1716 had no compunction in advising George to order the English fleet in the Baltic to fight against the Russian Tsar’s forces to oust the Russians from Mecklenburg, a territory next to Hanover – an action that infuriated Townshend. This was very obviously a Hanoverian and not a British problem. But Stanhope and Sunderland were more amenable to enabling the king and his German advisers to use British resources in Hanoverian matters.

  Secondly, George, already on poor terms with his son, perceived the beginning of an alliance between Townshend, Walpole and Georg August. As we shall see in the next chapter, it was not something that they deliberately set out to achieve, but even so it allowed the personal antagonism between the king and the Prince of Wales to explode into the political sphere.

  Most importantly, Townshend had earned the loathing of Melusine. It was only with his dismissal that he belatedly realized the extent of her power. In the summer of 1716 he wrote to a Dutch friend: ‘I believe the duchess of Munster [Melusine], Mr Bernstorff, and Mr Robethon could give a much more exact and authentic account of the real causes that produced this event [his demotion and dismissal].’

  In 1716 George, wanting to honour Melusine, had created her Duchess of Munster following her naturalization. As such she was elevated to the Irish peerage. She had obviously lobbied for it: her need for security made itself far more apparent in England than it had in Hanover. On 12 June Mary Countess Cowper recorded in her diary: ‘Mademoiselle Schulenberg here about her title . . .’ and on 26 June she wrote: ‘At night I go out with my Lord to take the air, then to Mademoiselle Schulenberg to wish her joy.’35 But Melusine soon discovered that Irish peerages were distinctly inferior to English ones, and she was furious. She blamed Townshend for her meagre title; he had suggested it to the king.

  Historians have condemned her for being petty over her Irish peerage. Though this attitude does not seem consistent with the image we have of her in Hanover – calm, collected, self-assured – England was a very different environment. In Germany she was used to getting her own way – in Walpole’s words she had become a ‘queen’. The only person who had challenged her authority there was George’s mother, Sophia, and the pair had learned to avoid one another. Whilst in the principality, Melusine had utter confidence in George’s loyalty to her, and any dealings with the Hanoverian courtiers – she had been on intimate terms with most of them since her early twenties – were smooth. All knew the state of affairs and were sensible enough to treat her with respect. There was little opportunity for Melusine to ‘meddle’ in politics, even if she had been inclined to. George and his mother each had very defined areas of interest, leaving no room for Melusine.

  By contrast, in England Melusine’s fluent English and easy, diplomatic manner were of enormous use to George. She had a great deal more scope for exerting influence, but this greater freedom brought with it a correspondingly higher chance of failure and disgrace. Less secure, she sought titles and wealth.

  It is telling that the English politicians whom both Melusine and George initially favoured were Stanhope and Sunderland, both of whom were charming, urbane, and showed the new monarch and his favourite much respect. Walpole and less markedly Townshend, although both brilliant politicians, were gruff and plain-spoken, Walpole to the point of using gratuitously filthy language. Melusine, a stickler for good manners, and used to the benign dictatorship that was Hanover, was not impressed. Already poorly disposed towards the pair, she used the excuse of her second-rate title to bring Townshend down.

  In the late summer Walpole, furious, wrote to Stanhope:

  We conceive that there is reason to believe that the designs of Lord Sunderland, Cadogan etc were carried further, and better supported than we did imagine whilst you were here, and that all the foreigners were engaged on their side of the question; and in chief that the Duchess of Munster enter’d into the dispute with a more than ordinary zeal and resentment against us, insomuch that by an account we have of a conversation with the King at the Duchess of Munster’s, they flatter themselves that nothing but the want of time and the hurry the king was in upon his going away [to Hanover] prevented a thorough change of the ministry . . . That the Duchesse of Munster was very angry at her not being an English Dutchesse is most certain, and that she imputes the whole to my Lord Townshend, and has express’d a particular resentment against him . . .36

  Townshend and Walpole, at Melusine’s instigation, were out. It would take a crisis to bring them back.

  Melusine was instrumental in the rise and fall of George’s English ministers. She promoted one over the other with great success, depending on where her interest took her. Townshend fell through her contrivance, and later she championed Stanhope against Bernstorff, again with success.

  One of the reasons behind her new influence was that George liked to garner his information from ‘other hands than by his ministers’,37 and here Melusine played a crucial role, not previously available to her. Whilst they were still in Hanover she had already familiarized herself with the major British courtiers and their wives, who had flooded into the principality to secure favour with the putative new regime. Melusine’s surviving letters show that she was charming and gracious. She had established a friendly correspondence with many of the court ladies and was on good terms with the venomous gossip Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had learned German and spent time in Hanover in the 1710s to ingratiate herself with the new monarch and his entourage. Montagu was a regular correspondent of Melusine’s, although she was vicious about her behind her back. In 1715 Melusine replied to her:

  I fear I have no words strong enough to assure you of the joy I felt . . . that you (have done me) the honour of writing to me, assuring you that no one could be more grateful than I am for the goodness you show me, and that you will do me great pleasure and honour by coming here when you please. You can be well persuaded that the soonest will be the most agreeable to me; I thus flatter myself with having the honour very soon of being able to tell you in person how much I love you and how much I am, my dear madam, Your very humble and very obedient Servant, M. de Schoulenbourg

  It is up to me to make many apologies for such a scribble, but as I am very busy I hope you will not look at it too closely.38

  On arrival in England, once Melusine had fully acquainted herself with the workings of English government, little was done without her knowledge and, often, approval. She and George had supper together most nights, and it was at supper that Melusine, in her quiet and gentle way, would put the requests of George’s ministers to him. In the summer of 1719 Sunderland wished to journey to Hanover to see the king while he was there. Stanhope wrote to him from Hanover: ‘I have mentioned to the Dutchess your lordships coming over and she has promised and judges it most proper to open it herself first to the king.’39 And the Prussian envoy reported that Melusine frequently ‘broke the first ice’ with George.40 As we shall see, after the catastrophic South Sea Bubble Melusine was instrumental in maintaining Walpole in power, and in 1723 she lent her support to Townshend to prevent his fall. In an amazing volte-face, Townshend was able to write to Walpole in that year that Melusine is ‘the good duchess and . . . fast friend’ to whom ‘we have sworn an eternal and inviolable attachment’.41 Although she could never bring herself to like him, they had become useful to one ano
ther.

  In 1716 Walpole said: ‘Nobody can carry on the king’s business if he is not supported at Court.’42 It was Melusine’s intercession on Walpole and Townshend’s behalf during the last five years of George’s reign that was so vital to their political health, and earlier in his reign, it was only because of Melusine’s intercession that Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, whose husband had so fallen in George’s esteem, was granted a private interview with the new monarch.

  However, Melusine’s unique access to the king was resented. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote bitchily that Melusine ‘was so much of his temper that I do not wonder at the engagement between them. She was duller than himself, and consequently did not find out that he was so; and had lived in that figure at Hanover almost forty years (for she came hither threescore) without meddling in any affairs of the Electorate.’43

  But this kind of petty gossip would pale in comparison with what was to follow. The summer of 1716 saw the beginnings of a terrible quarrel between George and his son. It led to Georg August and Caroline being forced from St James’s, to the removal of their children from their care and, most importantly for political life in Britain, to the establishment of a separate court of the Prince of Wales in direct opposition to that of his father the king.

  12.

  A Battle

  God prosper long our noble King

  His Turks and Germans all

  A woeful christ’ning late there did

  In James’s house befall.

  – ‘An Excellent New Ballad’

  The mores that governed royal family life were very different from those of families further down the social scale. We may be tempted from our vantage point of the twenty-first century to see George’s familial relationships as extremely dysfunctional. His father had paraded his mistresses in front of his mother, George had broken with all but two of his siblings over the issue of primogeniture, and one of his brothers may have tried to poison their father because he felt cheated of his inheritance. George and his eldest legitimate son could not stand one another, and by all accounts he was awkward in the company of his daughter Sophia Dorothea when she was a child, only opening up to her when she was safely married into the Prussian royal family and he could hide behind his letters.

  This ‘dysfunction’ crossed the generations, with rumours of incest abounding in connection to both George and his mother. And when George argued with his son and threw him out of St James’s Palace without his children, Caroline, who was given the choice to stay, abandoned them to be with her husband. George’s children were similarly unfeeling towards their own children. Georg August’s relations with his eldest son, never easy (the boy had been left behind in Hanover when the royal family came to England in 1714), suffered a comparable rupture to George’s split with Georg August in 1717; and Wilhelmine’s memoirs are peppered with beatings and verbal abuse from her mother.

  The explanation for the dislike bordering on hatred often found between kings and their sons is very simple: the son, who desires autonomy in his father’s lifetime and is never given it, resents the very air his father breathes. Crudely, he wishes him dead. It was this longing for power that would never be granted while both generations were alive that also poisoned all peripheral familial relationships.1 Melusine managed to an extent to soothe the ever-bickering Hanoverians, but in this case she was powerless.

  Georg August’s personality was very different to George’s; he was volatile, outspoken, exuberant, a man who showed his passions to all. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu noted: ‘The fire of his temper appear’d in every look and Gesture, which being unhappily under the Direction of a small understanding was every day throwing him upon some indiscretion.’2 He craved power during his father’s lifetime and George was reluctant to grant it.

  The origins of the specific breach between George and his only legitimate son that began in the summer of 1716 and would last for nearly four years can arguably be found twenty-two years earlier in 1694, when George divorced the disgraced Sophia Dorothea and ordered her incarcerated with no hope of release. Georg August was only eleven years old when he saw his mother for the last time, and although George would have argued passionately that her removal was vital to the security of their house – to which Georg August was the heir – it is unlikely that her bemused young son would have cared for such justifications.

  George probably remained silent on the matter and offered no explanation to his children. Georg August never forgave his father. Although Sophia Dorothea, as with most women of her class, probably had little to do with his day-to-day care or upbringing – evidence from George’s mother’s correspondence suggests that the young prince was closer to his paternal grandparents than to his parents – she was after all his mother, and he retained a frustrated devotion to her until just after George’s death.3 The often unreliable chatterer Horace Walpole tells us that when George died in 1727, the new king at once hung two portraits of his mother in prominent positions.4 In 1732 he made enormous efforts to suppress the publication of a scandalous book about her life, the anonymous Histoire secrète de la duchesse d’Hanover.5 Horace Walpole also tells us that the prince made at least one failed attempt to see his mother in her Ahlden prison, running away from a hunting trip nearby in a desperate dash to reach her. But he was caught and brought back to his father. And Walpole again tells us that he had it from the lips of Henrietta Howard, the prince’s mistress, that should his father predecease his mother he would give her all honours, bringing her to England in state or possibly making her regent of Hanover.6

  Even before the family reached England, relations between George and his son, the newly fashioned Prince of Wales, were cool. Melusine’s friendship with Caroline helped, and George obviously liked his daughter-in-law enormously – the king was always beguiled by a pretty face, and the canny Caroline went out of her way to charm him – but all the court noticed that the king and his son could barely tolerate one another. Bonet reported to his Prussian master and mistress:

  It is true that there is a manifest coolness between the King and the Prince; they do not speak to one another; they have never gone to one another’s apartments; they have never eaten together; they have never been together in the Royal or private houses, nor in the promenades, nor at the hunt, but only in Council, at Chapel, and in the evening in the circle of the Princess, without speaking: But this coolness must be anterior to their arrival in this Kingdom, nothing having occurred here that could have caused it.7

  Bonet commented on the prince’s lack of freedom, either of thought or action:

  He [Georg August] has not the liberty, because he must be obedient to the King, and report everything to him as the centre: that his conduct is considered more closely than that of a subject of inferior rank: And if he may not have even a footman who is not in agreement with His Majesty: he is permitted still less to take a part contrary to the measures of the King.8

  George made himself amenable to everyone in his family and close circle except Georg August. He allowed his daughters by Melusine great freedom, and there is real affection in his letters to the young Sophia Dorothea and obvious warmth between them in their occasional meetings in Hanover, and once at her home in Berlin. His closest friends, particularly Melusine’s brother Frederick William, who was one of George’s intimates, bore witness to his good character – his loyalty, his diligence, his dry humour – and Melusine’s other brothers and sisters seemed to have genuinely liked him. But he showed no softness towards his son, despite the total fidelity that Georg August displayed towards his father both in Hanover and, at first, in England, and his willingness to take the lead socially, letting the more reticent George and Melusine off the hook. Georg August had excelled himself in the battle of Oudenarde in 1708 – where he was part of Marlborough’s forces – and it is possible that George was jealous of the success of a son he did not care for.

  The row began in the summer of 1716 when George and Melusine returned to Hanover for their first holida
y since their arrival in England. George was reluctant to leave his son as regent in his absence. Georg August was devastated; he believed it showed how little his father valued his abilities and exposed his total lack of trust in him. But George’s biographer Ragnhild Hatton argues convincingly that the king was actually following the same pattern his own father assumed regarding his training for leadership. George, like Ernst August, adopted a ‘slowly, slowly’ approach, including his son in Cabinet meetings and gradually preparing him to rule while not giving him any genuine autonomy. George believed in Ernst August’s methods and reproduced them with his own son. But it is feasible that George, less voluble than his father, failed to communicate his rationale to Georg August.

  George did give Georg August some responsibility in his absence. His son was created ‘guardian and lieutenant of the realm’ and George left him a warm letter of instructions. Phrases such as ‘all imaginable regard’ for his advice during the king’s absence abound, but, as George explained, he could not entrust him with full powers because he was concerned for precedent, ‘lest in the future great inconveniences to our posterity should follow’.9