Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  In between arguments, they did manage to have two children. In 1683, after Sophia Dorothea gave birth to a son and heir, George Augustus, things became more cordial. Sophia Dorothea endeavored to ingratiate herself with her in-laws and George Ludwig promised to swear off adultery. His paramour was Sophia Charlotte von Kielmannsegg, the married daughter of his father’s mistress, the blowsy Countess Platen. Although the countess had numerous lovers, it was widely assumed by all but the related parties that the woman Platen had placed in the prince’s bed was her daughter by Duke Ernst Augustus, making the happy couple half siblings.

  In 1685, Sophia Dorothea took off on an Italian holiday with her father-in-law. While she was away, George found a new lover among his mother’s maids of honor—Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenberg—as freakishly tall and anorexically thin as Frau von Kielmannsegg was short and portly.

  When the princess returned from her vacation to find that her husband had taken up with a second hideous mistress, she was livid; but the royal couple must have kissed and made up just long enough for Sophia Dorothea to become pregnant again. Their daughter—also named Sophia Dorothea—was born on March 16, 1687. But during the particularly acrimonious celebration of the little girl’s birth, after George nearly strangled his wife in public, the battling Hanovers wanted nothing more to do with each other.

  Sophia Dorothea’s complaints about her husband’s infidelities were ignored, even by her own father, whose prime minister had for some strange reason filled his head with stories about his daughter’s less sympathetic wifely qualities, including her arrogance and her sharp tongue.

  Sophia was indeed far from the perfect wife. As heedless and selfish as she was lovely, in 1689 she commenced a torrid epistolary affair with a tall, handsome, and rakish Swedish mercenary in her father-in-law’s army. By the time he fell shako over spurs for the princess, Count Philipp Christoph von Königsmark had left his curly black wig and shiny boots on the floor of many a European lady’s boudoir. Sophisticated and cultured, and as flirtatious as his inamorata, he enjoyed literature and dancing and all the refined and elegant trappings of polite and elegant society. His previous paramours even included the scheming and jealous Countess Platen, Ernst Augustus’s mistress. However, his liaison with the Hanoverian hereditary princess, his soul mate and fellow sensualist, was True Love, and by 1690 he had dropped the countess like a contaminated object and become Sophia Dorothea’s paramour in every way. Their romance was filled with clandestine trysts, coded correspondence, secret signals, and a trusted confidante to act as a go-between.

  The couple spent as much time in each other’s arms as possible and exchanged lurid love letters. The count wrote to his beloved, “I embrace your knees” and expressed a longing to “kiss that little place which has given me so much pleasure.” But around 1692 the latter letter, and many others, found its way into the hands of Sophia Dorothea’s father-in-law, most probably through the machinations of the spurned Countess Platen.

  That year, Ernst Augustus had finally been granted his dearest wish, the honor of becoming an Elector. With his newfound status, he began to care more about keeping up appearances and therefore had to do something about the von Königsmark affair, which had become too indiscreet to ignore. Countess Platen convinced him to exile the count, but no sooner was he banished than the handsome Swedish mercenary got himself a new post with the Elector of Saxony. However, at an officers’ party one night in Dresden, von Königsmark became a bit too voluble under the influence and dished the dirt on the Hanoverian royal family. Naturally, the trash talking got back to his former employer.

  The one most injured by von Königsmark’s mockery around the punch bowl was the tall and skeletal Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenberg. She ran to her lover, tearfully complaining that his wife’s banished paramour had mortally insulted her. George Ludwig confronted Sophia Dorothea, who promptly let him have it, insisting that the real sex scandal was his affair with Melusine! A pitched battle ensued between the royal spouses and George Ludwig tried to choke his wife to death. Shoving her to the floor, he vowed never to see her again. Unlike his earlier promise to quit committing adultery, this pledge he kept.

  With nothing left of her marriage, Sophia Dorothea and von Königsmark elected to throw caution to the winds and scheduled an elopement. Arriving at the Leine Palace, von Königsmark made straight for his lover’s boudoir; after enjoying a passionate reunion, the count planned to come back for her the following day.

  But Countess Platen discovered the plan and reported it to Ernst Augustus, who had his guards waylay von Königsmark as he left Sophia Dorothea’s bedroom. The stories about the count’s 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. The count was slain; his body disappeared entirely. Most historians believe it was buried right under the bloodstained floorboards of the corridor where he may have been summarily dispatched, his corpse covered in quicklime to eradicate the stench of decay and hasten decomposition.

  A hysterical Sophia Dorothea was detained in her rooms, under house arrest. Adultery could not be mentioned since it cast doubt on the legitimacy of her children (and therefore, their inheritance), although they had been born long before Sophia Dorothea first met von Königsmark.

  George Ludwig had ignored his wife’s infidelity for years because von Königsmark was such a crack soldier and one of the best swordsmen in Europe. And it’s possible that if neither spouse had flaunted their respective extramarital liaisons, the royal marriage might have clattered along tolerably well, or at least as well as most other arranged unions between two first cousins.

  But enough was enough. A kangaroo court found Sophia Dorothea guilty of “malicious desertion”—a far greater crime than adultery, since desertion would create problems with the collection of her annual dowry installments. And on December 28, 1694, her marriage to George Ludwig was legally dissolved—a relief to the princess, who was now officially rid of a husband she found revolting. “We still adhere to our oft-repeated resolution never to cohabit matrimonially with our husband, and that we desire nothing so much as that separation of marriage requested by our husband may take place,” she had averred during the divorce proceedings.

  All traces of Sophia Dorothea’s existence in Hanover were expunged. Her name was obliterated from government documents and was no longer uttered in the clergy’s recitation of prayers for the royal family. Her former in-laws did, however, continue to pocket her annual dowry installments.

  On February 28, 1695, Sophia Dorothea was “banished” to a lovely moated country home in Ahlden, where, after the first, exceptionally restrictive year of her incarceration, she lived out the rest of her days in what most of us would consider luxury, attended by a modest retinue. She was given the new title duchess, or princess, of Ahlden. 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, George Ludwig continued to enjoy the charms of his two lovers. By then, Melusine—acknowledged since 1691 as his maîtresse en titre—had given him two daughters, who were immediately reborn as the prince’s “nieces.” She would bear a third daughter in 1701. Although he never acknowledged paternity of any of the girls, he did make sure they were very well provided for as they were growing up and they were included in his intimate family circle.

  George Ludwig became the Elector of Hanover on the death of his father in 1698. He promptly dismissed Countess Platen from court. On her deathbed she confessed to her complicity in the murder of Count Philipp Christoph von Königsmark, and the details of his brutal, bloody demise came to light, exonerating George Ludwig, who in any case had always been assumed to have been ignorant of the plot. Nonetheless, his wife’s adulterous affair and the strange case of von Königsmark’s disappe
arance, as well as Sophia Dorothea’s subsequent imprisonment, had been the talk of European courts for years.

  Yet even as she remained under lock and key, Sophia Dorothea’s existence remained a problem. George Ludwig was actively campaigning to be placed on the short list for succession to the English throne. According to the 1701 Act of Succession, all future rulers of England had to be Protestants descended from the Stuart line. George Ludwig’s accession was a long shot at the time because Queen Anne, who ascended the throne in 1702, seemed exceptionally fertile. Anne ultimately endured seventeen pregnancies but none of her children survived into adulthood. George Ludwig’s mother, the Dowager Electress Sophia, was a granddaughter of the Stuart king James I, and a Protestant to boot, so her claim—as well as George Ludwig’s if his mother predeceased him—was genuine. However, his divorce from Sophia Dorothea was both a political and a religious embarrassment, especially in England. She could very well manage to attack George Ludwig’s character, adding fuel to the cause of the Jacobites, who wanted to see the Catholic descendants of James II and his second wife, Mary of Modena, on the British throne.

  But on April 12, 1714, the House of Lords resolved that a request be sent to Queen Anne to issue a proclamation offering a reward to anyone who apprehended and brought to justice the Jacobite “Pretender” James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of James II and Mary of Modena. Anne signed the proclamation on June 21, paving the way for a Protestant successor—which meant that George Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, was next in line for the throne; his mother had died just weeks earlier, on June 8.

  Less than two months after the issuance of the proclamation, on August 1, 1714, Queen Anne died.

  If Sophia Dorothea had remained married to George Ludwig, she would have been Queen of England. Some historians believe that her divorce papers might not have been ironclad; this would explain why, after George Ludwig’s accession as George I of England, she was watched even more closely for fear that she might escape Ahlden and demand to share his throne. Their daughter, Sophia Dorothea the younger, had become Queen of Prussia, but her own husband was such a tyrant that he forbade her to help her mother in any way.

  On November 13, 1726, lonely and all but forgotten, Sophia Dorothea died at the age of sixty, some say of a possible stroke or heart attack, while others claim she suffered a fever. She had been a prisoner for thirty-one years with the exception of a few months in 1700, when Ahlden lay in the path of a French invasion. After the danger had passed, her father sent her back to the castle.

  Evidently, as she lay dying in agony, Sophia Dorothea scrawled a letter to her ex-husband, cursing him from the grave. On her death the court of Hanover went into mourning, but George sent word from London that no one was to wear black. Sophia Dorothea had inherited her mother’s property in 1722 upon Eleanore’s death and willed it to her children, but George destroyed the will and appropriated her property for himself. Then he ordered all her personal effects at Ahlden to be burned. He insisted on her ignominious burial at Ahlden, but the ground was too waterlogged, so her coffin sat around in a dreary chamber for two months until his superstitious mistress Melusine claimed to see Sophia Dorothea’s unfettered spirit flying about in the guise of a bird.

  In May 1727, Sophia Dorothea was finally interred within the family crypt in the Old Church at Celle, where visitors honoring her martyrdom to true love still place flowers on her unprepossessing lead coffin.

  That June, the sixty-seven-year-old monarch embarked on his fifth excursion to Hanover since the beginning of his reign as King of England. On June 20, his little entourage stopped en route in Delden, Holland, at the home of a friend, Count de Twillet, where George enjoyed an enormous supper, overindulging in a dessert of oranges and strawberries. 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].” 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 22, 1727, and was buried near his mother’s monument at the Leineschloss Church in Hanover.

  Some believe the catalyst for George’s sudden fatal illness was not a surfeit of fruit but an incident that occurred on June 19, 1727, when he received a mail delivery as he traveled to Hanover. It was his wife’s ghostly epistle. George suddenly remembered that decades earlier a fortune-teller had prophesied that if he were in any way responsible for his wife’s death he would die within a year of her demise.

  With the exception of Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenberg, very few people mourned the passing of George I. As King of England, his political agenda often favored his Hanoverian interests; in 1720 he had been personally involved in England’s worst financial disaster, the South Sea Bubble; he had never bothered to learn more than the rudiments of the English language; and he had master-minded an attempt on his own son’s life.

  George and Sophia Dorothea’s son succeeded his father on the British throne, ruling as George II. He ordered Hanover’s records unsealed and discovered 1,399 pages of love letters—only a fraction of those exchanged—between his mother and Count von Königsmark. His idyll was shattered: his mother was no saint and had indeed been an adulteress. But George also recognized that his father had behaved dreadfully to her. Had Sophia Dorothea lived, George II would have liberated her from Ahlden and installed her as the Dowager Queen of England.

  In any event, the lesson was not fully learned. George II took mistresses as well, although for a while he did his best to be discreet about it—which, in his view at least, was his way of respecting the feelings of his purportedly beloved wife, Caroline of Anspach.

  EMPEROR PETER III 1728-1762

  RULED RUSSIA: 1762

  and

  SOPHIE FRIEDERIKE AUGUSTE

  OF ANHALT-ZERBST,

  A.K.A. CATHERINE II [CATHERINE THE GREAT]

  1729-1796

  RULED RUSSIA: 1762-1796

  married 1745-1762

  “. . . In the very first days of our marriage I came to a sad conclusion about him. I said to myself, ‘If you allow yourself to love that man, you will be the unhappiest creature on this earth.’ ”

  —Grand Duchess Catherine Alexeyevna, later Catherine the Great

  LET’S DISPENSE WITH THE PRELIMINARIES: THERE WAS NO horse. Yes, when she was a little girl and couldn’t fall asleep at night, boisterous young Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst would stick her pillow between her legs and ride it like a stallion. But, contrary to the royal equivalent of urban mythology, she did not die in the process of making love to one.

  In 1739, ten-year-old Sophie, a blue-eyed, fair-skinned blonde, met her future husband (and second cousin), eleven-year-old Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. At the time, Karl Peter, a good-looking, well-mannered boy, had just become an orphan, and more than anything was a kid starved for affection.

  The children’s relatives—one of whom was Karl Peter’s aunt Elizabeth, the childless Empress of Russia—already assumed they would eventually marry. Three years later, in November 1742, Elizabeth summoned the fourteen-year-old Karl Peter to Russia and named him her heir. Part of the deal was that the youth convert to Russian Orthodoxy. He did so, more as a matter of expediency than from any religious conviction, and took a new name: His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Peter Fyodorovich.

  Aware that Peter was now an even more excellent catch, Sophie’s ambitious mother, Johanna, kept in touch with the Russian empress. And on New Year’s Day 1744, Johanna received a letter from Elizabeth inviting her to bring Sophie to Moscow. Although the lengthy journey was billed as a casual visit from distant relations, no one was fooled: it was an audition for the role of f
uture Empress of Russia.

  On her arrival, deliberately timed to coincide with Peter’s sixteenth birthday, the fourteen-year-old Sophie was much impressed with the majesty and bearing of Empress Elizabeth, though less so with her future spouse. Rather small for his age and brimming with nervous energy, Peter was all gangly angles, with a long, pale face, straight nose, and firm chin.

  Although she quickly proved herself to be ambitious, determined, confident, and a quick study in all that would be expected of her from deportment to religious conversion, including full mastery of the Russian language, Sophie soon realized that the royal marriage was not in fact a foregone conclusion. Given little guidance on how to survive and thrive at the Russian court, Sophie’s trial lasted for months, during which her every word and gesture was watched, appraised, and reported to the empress.

  Eventually, the poor teenager broke under the stress of performing to perfection and late nights spent cramming Russian vocabulary. She came down with pleurisy and was confined to bed for weeks. However, she had passed the test. On May 3, 1744, a few weeks after her fifteenth birthday, Sophie wrote to her father, Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, to request his consent to her betrothal, although she may have neglected to tell her papa that her new fiancé only had two topics of conversation: soldiers and his toys (which happened to be toy soldiers). She would later write that she was only marrying Peter because her mother told her to do it. In truth, it was not daughterly devotion but the crown of Russia that was so devilishly attractive.

  For Peter’s part, he acknowledged that he would have to marry someone, so it might as well be his pretty second cousin.

  On June 28, in a lavish service during which Sophie flawlessly recited copious amounts of Russian liturgy, she was formally admitted into the Orthodox Church and took a new name: Grand Duchess Ekaterina (Catherine) Alexeyevna. An opulent engagement ceremony followed Catherine’s conversion. All summer Russia celebrated with fêtes and balls—including Empress Elizabeth’s famous Tuesday evening cross-dressing “Metamorphoses” masquerades, secretly detested by all but the empress and Catherine, because each looked splendid in knee breeches and hose.