Sophia Dorothea owned a few pieces of fine jewelry and some small change. Where would they flee with so little money? Certainly they could not afford a long journey. And the longer the journey, the greater the risk they would be captured by Hanoverian agents. A sensible destination was the nearby duchy of Anton Ulrich von Wolfenbüttel, the man whose son had been Sophia Dorothea’s fiancé a dozen years earlier, and the enemy of the elector of Hanover. He would protect her and be glad to embarrass Ernst August.
At the end of June 1694 Königsmark deserted his post at Dresden and rode posthaste to dislodge his royal mistress from the iron grip of the House of Hanover. Forbidden to cross the border, he disguised himself and slipped into his house with the aid of a few faithful servants. But Countess Platen’s spies recognized him entering the city. Like a malevolent spider she sat silent and still, watching her prey become entangled in the unforgiving fibers of her web.
On July 1 Sophia Dorothea sent Königsmark a note asking him to visit her in her apartments that evening between eleven o’clock and midnight. The door would be opened when he whistled “The Spanish Follies.” But Countess Platen had intercepted the note before passing it on and was well aware of the rendezvous. She was informed as soon as Königsmark arrived in the princess’s chamber, disguised in a pair of shabby summer trousers, a worn white jacket, and brown cloak and carrying a short sword.
Countess Platen, the epitome of scandalized female virtue, raced to the elector and told him breathlessly that at that very moment the count was making love to the electoral princess. Ernst August, sick to death of Königsmark, wanted to go to his daughter-in-law’s apartments to confront the guilty pair, arrest the count and exile him once and for all.
But Countess Platen had other plans. She convinced her lover that it would be beneath his dignity as elector to involve himself personally in the scandal; he should sign an order for the guards to arrest Königsmark. Armed with the order, she took four guards into the great hall through which the count would have to retrace his steps and plied them with liquor until they became violently drunk. Perhaps, as she stewed in her bitter misery, Countess Platen pictured her lover, the only man she had ever truly wanted, so desperately wanted, making love to the woman she despised more than anyone else in the world.
The princess, having smoothed down her skirts, and the count, having pulled up his breeches, set to work packing trunks for her escape the following evening. They laughed to think of the reaction of George Louis, his parents, and Countess Platen when word got out that the two had run off together. In the depths of the night Königsmark bid his royal mistress farewell and went down the corridor humming a tune. He found that the door through which he had come had been bolted, the door which he had purposely left unbolted. Someone had locked it. But who? He stopped humming. Now he would have to go through the great hall to exit. Wary of a trap, he drew his sword.
As he passed the huge fireplace, the soldiers leapt out, one of them hitting him on the head with the flat of his sword. After wounding two soldiers, the count’s sword snapped. Defenseless now, he was run through the body by saber thrusts and gashed in the head by a battle-axe. As he bled on the floor, his last words were, “Spare the Princess; save the innocent Princess!”33 Upon hearing this, Countess Platen, with the pointed brocade toe of her diamond-buckled shoe, kicked the dying man hard in the mouth.
In her jealous fury, she had plotted his death. But now, seeing him lying there, his scarlet blood staining the floorboards, she was sorry. Certainly she was afraid. First she called for a cordial, which she tried to force down his throat. Then for bandages to stanch the grievous wounds. Vanquished, she realized her lover was dead, and that she had killed him as surely as if she had run him through herself.
She raced to the elector’s rooms. Panting, she told him that Königsmark had resisted arrest so violently that the guards, defending themselves, had accidentally killed him. The elector was horrified. The count had been a nobleman of Sweden, well known to its king, and Königsmark’s best friend was the elector of Saxony. The bon vivant of Europe, he had highly placed connections in France, England, and Denmark. Important people would come looking for him. How to explain this arrest gone wrong, this murder in the dead of night of one man by so many armed soldiers? It was best, the elector and countess decided, to do away with the body and feign innocence of his whereabouts. After all, he had been a rakehell adventurer rolling about Europe in search of booty, battles, and women. Anything could have happened to him. No one knew that he had been murdered by the elector’s guards except the guards themselves, and the elector made them swear to silence on pain of death.
But what to do with the mangled body? If they carried it outside, surely someone would see them struggling with their burden, and a fresh grave could easily be discovered. And so with the help of the guilty guards, the elector and his mistress pried loose some floorboards of the great hall and tossed the body into the darkness below. Quicklime was thrown on it to eat away the flesh and neutralize the smell. The floorboards were hurriedly nailed back on. This is how Countess Platen buried her greatest passion, her deadliest mistake, her only love. The bloodstains were scoured from the floor. But it is hard to wash away blood. Many spots do not agree to be bleached clean; they cling as mute witnesses to the life that was, to the violence done.
Sophia Dorothea had written Königsmark years earlier, “I belong so truly to you that death alone can part us.”34 And now, as she cheerfully burned papers and packed bags, she was unaware of the parting. At one point Knesebeck alerted her mistress to noises in the great hall but the princess didn’t think twice about it. She thought only of the morrow, a day of freedom and joy. In the morning she would wait for Königsmark’s note indicating where she and Knesebeck should find the waiting coach.
By noon she had not heard from him. Then Knesebeck told her that Königsmark had not returned home the night before and his servants were looking for him. They were worried because they had heard reports from palace servants of a commotion in the great hall during the night and had found traces of blood on the floor.
Sophia Dorothea waited patiently in her rooms. Surely some word must come. But that evening her children did not come by to wish her good night as usual. When she tried to leave her rooms to visit the elector, she was stopped. Electress Sophia coldly informed her that both she and her maid were confined to their rooms.
Königsmark’s rooms were searched by the elector’s agents. The count had sent many years’ worth of the princess’s precious letters to his sister Aurora for safekeeping but had kept those of the last six months with him. These were especially damning, not only revealing personal details of their sexual affair, but also their intended flight into enemy territory and the princess’s hatred of her father.
Her love affair, which had been known for years, had been a mere irritant, a potential for scandal. When Electress Sophia’s own daughter, the electress of Brandenburg, enjoyed love affairs with courtiers, her family pretended politely not to notice. A far more serious crime on the part of the princess was her plan to flee to Wolfenbüttel, which would cast Hanover into years of legal wrangling over her dowry and inheritance. This, not her adultery, was the unforgivable crime.
Count Platen, the prime minister of Hanover, met with the duke of Celle and showed him Sophia Dorothea’s letters. Predictably, her father was furious, especially at her frequent descriptions of him as a brutal tyrant. He washed his hands of her, then and there, and when his wife begged him to have pity on his daughter, the duke angrily replied that he no longer remembered having a daughter.
As for Electress Sophia, she was delighted at no longer having a daughter-in-law. Though the family would smell faintly of scandal, with one fell swoop she could revenge herself on “that little clot of dirt” Eleonore of Celle, the impoverished nobody whom George William had preferred to Sophia’s blue-blooded majesty. With her only child divorced and imprisoned, Eleonore would be miserable forever. And best of all, as long as Soph
ia Dorothea’s father did not intervene, the elector of Hanover could imprison her and keep all of her money and lands.
By the evening after the murder, the princess knew that all was lost. Two weeks later Count Platen was sent to question her. He expected to find an abject woman begging for mercy, but instead encountered a haughty princess demanding to know why she was being treated in a manner so inconsistent with her station. Platen informed her, “The Elector has been aware of your relationship with Count von Königsmark.”
“Where is Königsmark?” Sophia asked, suddenly frightened for her lover. “Has he been locked up too?”
“I regret to announce to Your Highness that Count von Königsmark died two weeks ago.”
And so, she realized, after he had left her chamber that night, humming a little tune, her caresses and kisses still warm on his skin, he had been mercilessly cut down. The noises from the hall. The blood on the floor. Sophia Dorothea fainted dead away. The count looked on her coldly until she came to.
“Murderers; they have murdered him!” she sobbed, trying to rise. “A family of murderers…! Have pity and let me go! I can’t stay here any longer….”35 She howled and wept piteously, all of which Count Platen recorded to use as evidence against her.
Her wish was granted; she was taken back to Celle, not to the palace because her father refused to see her, but to the castle of Ahlden some thirty miles away, home of the local magistrate. But “castle” is a kindly word to describe the building; it was nothing more than an incredibly ugly brick house with two wings projecting off the back.
During her interrogations Sophia Dorothea swore that she had never had sexual intercourse with Königsmark. Questioned separately, Eleonore de Knesebeck swore that her mistress’s liaison with Königsmark, while admittedly romantic, had never been sexual. Threatened with lifelong imprisonment and torture, Eleonore never swerved in her statements.
As punishment for her fidelity, Eleonore de Knesebeck was made the scapegoat for all her mistress’s sins. She had turned the princess’s heart against her husband. Foreign courts received an official explanation that stated Sophia Dorothea was separating from her husband “with whom she was no longer on good terms.”36 “The Princess at first displayed only some coldness towards her husband,” the statement continued, “but Fräulein von Knesebeck by degrees inspired her with such dislike to him that she begged from her father permission to return to her parents’ home. Her father was displeased, and warned the Princess to place confidence in her husband. But her dislike of her husband was so intensified by the machinations of Fräulein von Knesebeck….Her corrupter, Fräulein von Knesebeck, was arrested at the wish of the Duke George William.”37
For three very good reasons there was to be no mention made of adultery with Königsmark. First, the scandal would taint the illustrious family name. Second, any mention of adultery, even if the act occurred years after the birth of legitimate children, would cast aspersions on their paternity, thereby threatening the line. And last, Königsmark had been brutally murdered and lay moldering under the floorboards of the great hall in the palace.
And indeed, in the months after the murder, Königsmark’s disappearance proved increasingly nettlesome. Ernst August staged magnificent balls and entertaining plays to distract his citizens from the mysterious disappearance of the flamboyant count. But soon foreign embassies were putting pressure on the elector to find Königsmark or explain his sudden disappearance. The mystery was the talk of every court in Europe—even the majestic Louis XIV deigned to express interest. The faint odor of scandal tainting the Hanoverian royal family was quickly rising to a stench. In an about-face, Ernst August decided to offer Sophia Dorothea one last chance. If she would dutifully return to her husband and deny any knowledge of Königsmark’s fate, she would be spared imprisonment and divorce.
But Sophia Dorothea proudly declared, “If I am guilty of what I am accused of, I am not worthy of the Prince, and if I am innocent, it is he who is not worthy of me.”38
Never, ever, would George Louis touch her again, she vowed, shuddering in disgust at the thought. “We still adhere to our oft-repeated resolution never to cohabit matrimonially with our husband,” the princess affirmed in her divorce petition, “and that we desire nothing so much as that separation of marriage requested by our husband may take place.”39
The divorce decree of December 28, 1694, stated that Sophia Dorothea would lose her title of electoral princess of Hanover. Her name was removed from church prayers and erased from official documents and, indeed, no one at the court of Hanover was permitted to speak it. It was as if Sophia Dorothea had never existed and George Louis’s two children had sprung from the air. The document also decreed that the former princess would remain safely locked up in the prison of Ahlden, her money in the hands of her in-laws.
Now there was only the murder of Königsmark to fret about. Hearing of her brother’s disappearance, Aurora von Königsmark came flapping back to Hanover, making every effort to locate him, and found herself once again banished by Ernst August. She then traveled to Dresden to inform personally the powerful elector Augustus of Saxony of her brother’s disappearance. Overcome with passion for her, the elector took the black-eyed beauty as his mistress and vowed to find her brother dead or alive. He icily wrote Ernst August that Königsmark, his personal friend and a major general in the Saxon army, had last been seen alive going into the elector’s palace but no one had seen him coming out. Elector Augustus demanded an explanation.
In response, the Hanoverian government coolly pointed out that Königsmark had just received his pay before he had gone missing and was “a debauched rambling sparke who kept irregular hours, and consequently it is next to an impossibility to give an account what may become of him.”40
The Saxon elector pressed so hard that the guilty brothers of Hanover and Celle appealed to the Holy Roman Emperor in Austria, vowing they would remove their troops in the emperor’s war with France if Saxony did not quiet down about Königsmark. The court of Vienna reproached the Saxon monarch for making such noise about a ne’er-do-well soldier when the more urgent obligations of war and international treaties were at stake. And so, with time, the efforts to locate Königsmark died, just as surely as he was dead himself. For nothing they did could bring him back to life, and the thick white blanket of quicklime was doing its job on the body lying in its dark bed beneath the floorboards.
Adulterous harem women in the sultan’s court at Istanbul were sewn into sacks and thrown into the Bosporus, disappearing under the waves. Baroque Europe was only slightly more civilized; Sophia Dorothea was sewn into the sack of Ahlden and disappeared from sight. At twenty-eight her life had shrunk to the limits of two large rooms in the old gray fortress; her tiny retinue included a governor, a gentleman-in-waiting, and two or three ladies-in-waiting, all spies paid by Countess Platen. They reported back to their employer every movement of the prisoner, every word she uttered. Perhaps to assuage his conscience, Sophia Dorothea’s father permitted her a respectable allowance and the right to inherit the property which, over the years, he had put in her mother’s name.
She was allowed no visitors and no correspondence with the outside world, not even with her mother for the first few years. Her keepers told her that if she behaved well and made no trouble she would, at some point, be released. And she believed them. One day when a fire broke out, the obedient prisoner stood like a statue in the corridor, holding her jewel box; as the flames crept nearer, she declared she could not move without an order from the governor.
Treated as the most dangerous prisoner in the world, Sophia Dorothea was permitted carriage rides only six miles from the fortress while soldiers waving unsheathed swords rode beside her. The first year of her imprisonment she was not even allowed to walk outside. When doctors advised fresh air and exercise to improve her failing health, George Louis remembered the prediction made years earlier by the fortune-teller—that he would follow his wife to the grave within months—and command
ed that she be permitted walks.
Sophia Dorothea adapted herself to prison life by keeping busy. She oversaw the details of the kitchen, paid bills, and made contracts out of her substantial allowance. She was active in charities in the village of Ahlden, repaired the cottages of the poor, and paid for a village schoolteacher. She donated an organ, silver candlesticks, an altar cloth, and a pulpit cushion to the village church. When the village burned down, she paid for new buildings and wider streets.
After four years, she was allowed to receive visits and letters from her mother. But she was not permitted to see her children, although she wrote often to the elector begging for the privilege. He never replied. Toward the end of his life her father, his conscience pricking him, often spoke of going to visit her to alleviate the conditions of her imprisonment, but Prime Minister Bernstorff, still in the pay of Countess Platen, always dissuaded him from the idea. One day in 1705 the duke decided resolutely that he would visit her the following day. But oddly enough, that night he suddenly died. At the death of the duke of Celle, all his property went to George Louis.
With a generous allowance to buy what she wanted, Sophia Dorothea dressed beautifully, as if waiting for Königsmark to make an unexpected visit. Her spies reported that she lived in front of her mirror, trying on gowns, dressing her hair. Adorned in diamonds and brocade, she sat at table beneath a great stuffed bear, a reminder of the one Königsmark had taken as a pet. Her lover had written her once, “One favor I ask of the gods, that I may be with you always, in life and in death.”41 Was he still with her, silent and invisible yet ardently loving her in her dreary rooms? Or was he irrevocably gone, her rooms empty except for her own sad memories?
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