Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  But instead of giving up his mistress for his beautiful wife, George made things worse. In 1685, while Sophia Dorothea was on an Italian holiday with her father-in-law, Duke Ernest Augustus, George found an additional lover among his mother’s maids of honor.

  This new object of his desire, Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg, was freakishly tall and anorexically thin. The formidable and elegant Electress Sophia couldn’t fathom how her son could love a woman who looked like a scarecrow. “Look at that malkin and think of her being my son’s passion!” she exclaimed to a friend. Actually, many people found Melusine patient and pleasant, with a kind disposition, so if one were to look beneath the surface, the prince’s infatuation with her was not entirely surprising.

  When George’s wife, the princess, returned from her vacation to find that her husband had taken up with a second hideous mistress, she was livid. But Sophia Dorothea must have kissed and made up with George for just long enough to become pregnant again. Their daughter—also named Sophia Dorothea—was born in 1687. But after a particularly acrimonious celebration of the girl’s birth, where George nearly strangled his wife in public, the battling Hanovers wanted nothing more to do with each other.

  As heedless and selfish as she was lovely, in 1688 the princess commenced a torrid affair with a tall, handsome, and rakish Swedish mercenary in her husband’s army. By the time he fell shako over spurs for Sophia Dorothea, Count Philip von Königsmarck had left his boots on the floor of many a European lady’s boudoir. But his liaison with the Hanoverian princess was True Love.

  They exchanged lurid love letters and spent as much time in each other’s arms as possible. Finally, they planned to elope. But Königsmarck was waylaid, and the stories about his subsequent murder are as colorful as they are varied. What is certain is that he was ambushed—either on the open road or in the Leine Palace—and that he fought back valiantly, wounding one of his assailants. His body disappeared entirely.

  George had ignored his wife’s infidelity for eight years because Philip was such a crack soldier and one of the best swordsmen in Europe. But enough was enough. A kangaroo court found Sophia Dorothea guilty of “malicious desertion,” and on December 28, 1694, her marriage to George was legally dissolved—a relief to the princess as well, who was now officially rid of a husband she found revolting. Sophia Dorothea was “banished” to a lovely moated country home in Ahlden, where she lived out the rest of her days in what most of us would consider luxury. Although her children were taken away and raised by their paternal grandmother, Sophia Dorothea would not have been the recipient of any mother-of-the-year trophies, so this sacrifice was probably for the best.

  Meanwhile, of course, George continued to enjoy the charms of his two lovers. By then, Melusine—acknowledged since 1691 as George’s maîtresse en titre—had given him two daughters, who were immediately reborn as her “nieces.” She would give him a third daughter in 1701. Although he never acknowledged paternity of any of the girls, George did make sure they were very well provided for as they were growing up and they were included in his intimate family circle.

  In 1714, the news arrived that Queen Anne had died and the mistresses learned that George would become King of England.

  In England it was a common practice for places at court, army commissions, and even votes to exchange hands for money. The cost of living in London was extremely high and a courtier was expected to maintain a certain style of living. Anti-Hanoverian propaganda penned by British contemporaries who feared the influx of foreigners and resented the enthusiastic German co-opting of the unbridled traffic in patronage has been handed down through the centuries as fact. A twenty-first-century examination of the behavior of George I’s entourage has revealed that much of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reports, while they contain elements of truth, have also been exaggerated. Nevertheless, the accounts of the Germans’ rampant corruption, retailing of government offices and contracts, and zealous greed for British money were popularly believed at the time and are not entirely false. Although it should now be taken with a grain of salt, the anti-Hanoverian version of events is too delicious to omit.

  So . . .

  The two mistresses caught up with their lover before he reached the English Channel and were quick to voice their concerns about his sailing off to rule a bunch of unruly regicides. But George allayed their fears, assuring his darlings that “the king-killers are my friends.”

  Back in Hanover, the Germans had been accustomed to having their fingers in the government till. Once they reached the shores of England, George exhorted his entourage to continue this behavior with gusto! He encouraged them to take whatever they could get, stealing it hand over fist like everyone else.

  The thirty-nine-year-old zaftig Sophia Charlotte (dubbed “the Elephant” by the British) and the übersvelte forty-seven-year -old Melusine (whom they nicknamed “the Maypole”) enthusiastically obeyed their lover’s advice. They plundered the Treasury and the royal commissaries like pirates on the high seas. The story of George I and his monstrous mistresses is less about sex than it is about rape—the rape of English money, titles, and property, even of Queen Anne’s jewels and personal effects—by the pair of fraüleins.

  All but hanging out a shingle reading “Influence Peddlars,” the two Teutonic marauders made tens of thousands of pounds accepting bribe after bribe of money and jewelry, selling government offices in England, positions on the Continent, even colonial governorships in America. The king had settled an income on each of his women, but it wasn’t nearly enough. It was never enough. Melusine was receiving an allowance from George of £7,500 a year (almost $2 million today), but she coveted the household allowance, too. And when the post of Master of the Horse became vacant, she didn’t care whether her lover appointed a replacement—she demanded the salary.

  King George naturalized his mistresses as British subjects and ennobled them each to life peerages, first in Ireland and then in England. The Elephant was made Countess of Leinster and Countess of Darlington. As proof of the suppositions that she was George’s half sister, her letters of patent bore the words “consanguineum nostrum” (of our blood), and her Brunswick coat of arms included the bar sinister, the heraldic emblem for a royal bastard.

  George granted the Maypole a number of Irish estates, but everyone knew that collecting the rents on them was dodgy, and therefore the income was uncertain. So the king gave her four English titles, the loftiest being Duchess of Kendal, by which she is known today.

  Evidently, Kendal was a pro at taking everything but criticism. After she brought him to court, the journalist Nathaniel Mist was fined and imprisoned for publishing an anonymous letter in his Journal that read: We are ruined by trulls, nay, what is more vexatious, by ugly trulls, such as could not find entertainment in the most hospitable hundreds of old Drury.

  Although the Elephant was better liked among the English for her gregariousness, her good taste, and her sparkling conversation, of the two women, it was Melusine, Lady Kendal, who behaved like the morganatic wife of the king. She had apartments in St. James’s Palace and acted as George’s hostess at official events. Sir Robert Walpole remarked that she was “as much a queen of England as ever any was, though she would sell the king’s honor for a shilling.”

  And did. Lady Kendal was the Ken Lay of her day, becoming spectacularly rich off of speculative investments, bribes from wannabe government officials, salaries, rents, and annuities. She was also, perhaps, the first known political lobbyist, on the payroll of a collective of investors known as the South Sea Company, which concocted a historic stock swindle that included a proposal to take over the massive national debt at a five percent annual rate of interest.

  Bribery of public officials reached a peak when the Duchess of Kendal put the king on the South Sea Company’s payroll. Allegedly, George received what amounted to a hefty licensing fee for lending his name to the scheme.

  The premise had been concocted by the Earl of Oxford and a cadre
of cronies, who in 1711 took seed money from duties collected on various imported goods and funneled it into a company that had a charter to trade in the South Seas. The company told the public that King Philip V of Spain was enthusiastically cooperating with the venture, providing ships and free passage along Spanish-controlled trade routes to the Pacific, where gold and silver abounded. The more shares in the venture you purchased, the greater your percentage of the treasure to be plundered from this mythical Pacific paradise. No one bothered to ask if Philip was really involved.

  Preying on the national passion for wagering, shares in the speculative (and fictional) venture were sold hand over fist and the price soared, while the South Sea Company’s principals pocketed the cash. The company’s promoters made a windfall for themselves and their friends. The scheme, known as the South Sea Bubble, bilked the greedy, the hopeful, and the naïve out of millions. By August 1720, the shares reached a 1,000 percent dividend buoyed by a hysterical belief in the high return the investments would receive when the financed ships returned with treasures from the West. The Exchange Alley at Cornhill was mobbed by Londoners from all walks of life. Tories and Whigs found themselves in the same camp, united by avarice. King George himself amassed an enormous profit.

  And then suddenly, panic began to set in after it was rumored that the initial investors were starting to sell off their shares. Each of George’s lovers raked in huge profits by selling high, and his reign was seriously tainted by the scandal. When the list of people who had used undue influence to pressure investors to buy the bogus stock was read aloud in Parliament, right up at the top were his two mistresses, as well as most of his chief ministers and the secretaries of the Treasury.

  By the mid-1720s, the Maypole, now pushing sixty, evidently lost interest in collecting bribes and suddenly got religion. She began attending Lutheran services several times every Sunday in the vain hope, perhaps, of making up for lost time. But the ministers refused to give her the Eucharist because she was living in a state of adultery.

  Countess Darlington, the Elephant, died at her home in St. James’s Palace on April 20, 1725, and was buried four days later in Westminster Abbey.

  In June 1727, the sixty-seven-year-old monarch embarked on his fifth excursion to Hanover since the beginning of his thirteen-year reign as King of England. On June 9, his little entourage stopped en route in Delden, Holland, at the home of a friend, Count de Twillet. There George enjoyed an enormous supper, overindulging in a dessert of oranges and strawberries. Inexplicably, many historical accounts refer to “several water melons” as the lethal fruit. Whatever roughage he consumed, despite a dreadful bellyache the following day, the king was eager to get back on the road. When he reached Ibbenburen, he suffered an attack of apoplexy.

  A contemporary described the incident: “He was quite lethargic, his hand fell down as if lifeless, and his tongue hung out of his mouth. He gave, however, signs of life by continually crying out as well as he could articulate, ‘Osnabrück! Osnabrück!’ [the name of his birthplace].” This account does not appear to make it into other twenty-first-century discussions of the king’s final hours.

  A modern version of events has George reaching Osnabrück, lapsing in and out of consciousness along the way, and briefly raising his hat to acknowledge that he recognized his surroundings once he’d arrived at his birthplace. According to the Historical Register, his last words were in French—“c’est fait de moi” (I am done for!). He died in the early hours of the morning on June 11, 1727. George I was buried near his mother’s monument at the Leineschloss Church in Hanover.

  The Duchess of Kendal was not with the king when he died, having lagged behind at Delden for some unrecorded reason. When she received the news of her beloved’s demise, she became hysterical, tearing her hair and beating her breast like the heroine of a Greek tragedy. The duchess went into seclusion in Germany for three months. At that point the new king, George II, welcomed her back to England, where she lived out the remainder of her days on her various estates. She died in bed on May 10, 1743, at the age of seventy-six.

  GEORGE II

  1683-1760 RULED 1727-1760

  IN 1705, WHILE HIS FATHER WAS STILL ELECTOR OF HANOVER, the twenty-two-year-old George married Princess Caroline of Anspach in a match arranged by his grandmother, the dowager Electress. Caroline was not a classic beauty. Her features were somewhat coarse, but she was blond and blue-eyed and had fabulous boobs. Competent and pragmatic, Caroline soothed her husband’s childish temper tantrums and insisted that he learn the language when the family went off to England in 1714. And after George II became king, it was Caroline who acted as regent when he left the country.

  A talented soldier, George had distinguished himself at the Battle of Oudenarde in 1707, and his father was so jealous of his accomplishment that he pulled the plug on Junior’s military career. It was not until thirty-six years later, when he defeated the French at Dettingen in 1743, that he got to flex his martial muscles once more. George II was the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle.

  George is perhaps best remembered for his role in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. “The Young Pretender,” the grandson of James II (through James’s son by Mary of Modena), better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, took up arms against George II’s forces and made a bid for the English throne. Born in 1720, Bonnie Prince Charlie was raised in Rome, where his family enjoyed the protection of the Pope. Many of the Highland clans supported the Jacobites (James’s followers) and rallied to the cause, backing the restoration to the throne of the Catholic Stuarts. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s grandfather, James II of England, had of course also been James VII of Scotland.

  On April 16, 1746, the Young Pretender’s forces were decimated by the British army, led by the morbidly obese Duke of Cumberland, George II’s younger son. In retreat, Bonnie Prince Charlie fled to the Highlands. After fifty-eight years of uprisings and skirmishes, the Jacobite threat was finally extinguished.

  Having sat on the throne for thirty-three years, a constipated George II died at the age of seventy-two on October 25, 1760, while straining to use the toilet at Kensington Palace. The official cause of death was “an aortic dissection.” He was buried beside his wife in Westminster Abbey, having given specific instructions that the side of his coffin be removed so that their remains could be together. Frederick, the heir apparent, had suffered a burst abscess after receiving a blow from a cricket ball, dying on March 20, 1751, at the age of forty-four. So George II’s grandson, George III, succeeded him as King of England.

  GEORGE II and Henrietta Howard 1688-1767

  Although George II and his father never seemed to agree on anything, they shared one particular quirk: a passion for pulchritude. According to one of George II’s contemporaries, “not a woman came amiss to him if she were very willing and very fat.” The English derived as much entertainment from mocking the son’s choice of concubine as they had enjoyed scorning the father’s.

  And yet Lord Hervey, Vice Chamberlain of the Royal Household, observed of George II, “Though he is incapable of being attached to any woman but his wife, he seemed to look upon his mistresses as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a Prince rather than an addition to his pleasure.” When Queen Caroline died in 1737, her grieving husband avowed that he “never saw a woman worthy to buckle her shoe.” It didn’t mean he didn’t sleep with them, though, while she was very much alive.

  The plump and homely Henrietta Howard was the daughter of Sir Henry Hobart, who was killed in a duel when she was a little girl. By the time Henrietta was thirteen years old, she was orphaned. She became a ward of the Earl of Suffolk, and at the age of eighteen married the earl’s youngest son, Charles, an officer in the dragoons.

  They moved to London and Henrietta secured a position as a Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales. But Henrietta and her husband were so poor that they had been forced to chop off her hair and sell it to a wig maker so they could afford to come to court. Although her
marriage had been a love match, Charles Howard was straight out of a Central Casting call for profligate, boorish drunks. So it’s not surprising that when the Prince of Wales winked in Henrietta’s direction in 1723, she was grateful for his paltry offer of £2,000 a year (about $538,000 nowadays) to become his mistress.

  Henrietta was universally liked at court, amiable, and honest. And soon she was the acknowledged mistress of the Prince of Wales. According to Horace Walpole, “his time of going down to Lady Suffolk was seven in the evening: he would frequently walk up and down the Gallery looking at his watch for a quarter of an hour before seven, but would not go till the clock struck.” A courtier once suggested that perhaps the two were just talking, to which Walpole replied that this scenario was highly unlikely, as Henrietta was so deaf, and George’s “passions so indelicate.”

  But George Junior’s adulterous father just couldn’t tolerate his son’s extramarital happiness. In 1727, George I paid Henrietta’s inebriated no-account husband to stand under the prince’s window at Leicester House and shout for his wife. The gathering bystanders realized that the king had put Howard up to it, and enjoyed a laugh at both men’s expense.

  For Henrietta, however, the matter was deadly serious. Backed by George I, Howard was seeking a reconciliation that would have meant her dismissal from Caroline’s household and her enforced retirement to the country. Howard assumed custody of their young son, and Henrietta became a political pawn in the tug-of-war between the royal Georges. The king viewed her as an unpleasant influence on the prince’s politics and wanted her neutralized. For several tense weeks she feared being kidnapped.

  When George I died that year, Henrietta’s position became less precarious. Her lover was now the king. Howard was bought off with a £1,200 annuity (over $263,000 today); he and Henrietta were legally separated on February 29, 1728.