Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  During the eternal prison days and endless prison nights, the aging captive must have remembered her own prescient words to Königsmark years before: “Without you life would be intolerable and four high walls would give me more pleasure than to remain in the world.”42 And Königsmark’s clairvoyant reply: “My lot is that of the butterfly burned by the candle; I cannot avoid my destiny.”43

  The years passed; the princess grew stout and dyed her gray hair black. Realizing she would never be liberated for good behavior, she undertook a secret correspondence with her daughter, who had married the king of Prussia, begging her for help to escape. But Sophia Dorothea the younger had married a man even more brutal than her mother had. Frederick William of Prussia carried a large stick with a knot on the end to beat his family until they bled, as well as servants and ministers who displeased him. Knowing her husband wanted nothing to do with her mother, the queen of Prussia never tried to rescue her. She did her mother one favor, however, employing Eleonore de Knesebeck as her lady-in-waiting.

  After her interrogation, Eleonore had been imprisoned in solitary confinement in the fortress of Schwarzfels where she would probably have remained until her death if she had not escaped. After four years, a friend of hers disguised as a roofer made a hole in her ceiling, threw her a rope, and hoisted her up. She then had to slide 180 feet down the castle wall to freedom. As she could no longer serve Sophia Dorothea, she was happy to serve her daughter. For her part, the younger Sophia Dorothea must have been eager to learn about her mother from her faithful maid.

  Neither had Sophia Dorothea’s son, George, forgotten her. One day in his teens, George went out hunting and galloped away from his retinue. His companions followed in hot pursuit and found him racing up to the fortress of Ahlden, his mother waving to him from a window. The governor of Ahlden refused the boy entrance, and when he returned home his father punished him severely.

  After Königsmark’s murder, Countess Platen lost much of her influence with the elector, who never forgave her for the mess she had gotten him in. Most of the court, aware that she had loved Königsmark and was bitterly jealous of the princess, knew that she had played a role in their disappearances. The dashing Königsmark and pretty princess had been popular, and now both were gone because of Platen. Few went to her parties after that, even fewer invited her to their own. In Celle she was absolutely detested. And how hard it must have been for her to cross the great hall, knowing what lay moldering beneath. How many times, after that night of blood and murder, did she look at her hands and shudder at the memories? As Lady Macbeth said, “Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

  Four years after Königsmark’s murder, Elector Ernst August died, and the new elector, George Louis, commanded Countess Platen to retire from court. Utterly defeated, she became ill with a disease that rendered her blind and hideous to behold. Perhaps it was the last stages of syphilis.

  On her deathbed, in bone-shattering pain, she cried out that her blind eyes saw Königsmark’s ghost rise before her. Begging for divine forgiveness, she confessed her crime to a minister who spoke of it in her funeral oration. There were other deathbed confessions from the guards who had cut Königsmark down. And finally the world learned what had happened to the vanished lover of Sophia Dorothea.

  In 1714, when Queen Anne of Great Britain died childless, George Louis became King George I. The British parliament had skipped over fifty-seven other possible heirs rendered unfit by their Catholicism. But George’s Protestant religion was his only recommendation to his new realm. He was an unpopular king who never learned to speak a word of English, forcing his courtiers and ministers to communicate in German or French. He cared little about his new kingdom and showed far greater interest in the British treasury, which he repeatedly raided, carrying bags of English gold to Hanover every few years.

  Instead of bringing his new subjects a beautiful queen, George flaunted his two ugly mistresses, the good-natured Melusina von Schulenburg, whose youthful beauty had by now entirely disappeared, and Countess Platen’s daughter Sophia Charlotte von Kielsmansegge, the one she had tried to unload on Königsmark, who was as fat as Melusina was thin. Given his father’s affair with Countess Platen, it is possible that George was sleeping with his half sister. Hearing nothing of a wife, many Englishmen assumed their new king was a widower. Some, upon learning that he had locked up his wife in a castle for twenty years, assumed that she had gone stark raving mad.

  George had a terrible relationship with his son and heir, the future George II, who never forgave his father’s treatment of his mother. For his part, whenever George looked at his son, he saw his detested wife—her dark eyes and hair, her shining complexion, her passion and pride. An English wit quipped, “George I could not have been such a bad man, for he never hated but three people: his mother, his wife and his son.”44

  And so Sophia Dorothea would have been queen of Great Britain, had she not divorced her husband. She might, technically, have been the queen of Great Britain, since the validity of her hurried and secretive divorce was unclear. King George, terrified that she might escape, sail to England, and proclaim herself queen, had her watched more closely than ever.

  In 1722 Sophia Dorothea’s mother and only friend, Eleonore of Celle, died at the age of eighty-two. And now the prisoner was alone. She inherited her mother’s property but found herself without a link to the outside world and, worse, with no one to love her. She lived on for four more years and then, after an imprisonment of thirty-two years, she died November 13, 1726, at the age of sixty. Her last days were painful ones, her bright spirit burning away in fever. Screaming in agony, she called out for divine vengeance against her husband, her torturer, her executioner. Before she died, she asked for quill and paper and wrote one last terrible letter.

  When George heard the news of Sophia Dorothea’s death, he immediately made plans to attend a performance that evening given by a troop of Italian comedians. The court of Hanover went into mourning for their former princess, but word came from London that the king forbade anyone to wear black. He tore up her will in which she left all her possessions to her children, claiming them instead for himself. He then issued orders to remove everything from Ahlden that had belonged to her and burn it. He wanted nothing left to prove she had ever been there, wanted no relics of his martyred wife to prolong the story of her unjust imprisonment. He even neglected to bury her body.

  For two months her coffin lay in a room of the castle of Ahlden. Only at the persistent urgings of the superstitious Melusina, who saw the dead woman’s angry spirit circling the palace in the form of a crow, did George command her body to be tossed into the family crypt below the church of Celle, with no religious service. But as hard as the king tried, he could not forget the description of Sophia Dorothea’s deathbed, where in her last agony she screamed the most terrifying curses at him. As the months passed, he slept poorly and became nervous. He decided that he needed a rejuvenating visit to his native Hanover.

  George arrived at the German border on June 19, 1727. After a large dinner and a short rest, he ordered his departure for three A.M. Stepping into his carriage to set out for Osnabrück, the king was handed a letter by a stranger who stepped forward and begged to present it to His Majesty personally. Used to receiving petitions from his subjects, George took it into the coach. A couple of hours later, as the summer sun rose over green fields, he opened the letter. It was from his dead wife, cursing him for his cruelty. She promised to meet him before the tribunal of God a year and a day after her death. For decades he had tried so hard to repress the shrill voice that had called to him of his guilt. Yet as the coach lumbered forward, that voice came clearly now, rending the early morning air with a clarion cry of vengeance from beyond the grave.

  The king dropped the letter and began to shake violently. His tongue hung out of his mouth. “I’m finished,” he panted to his chamberlain. When the coach arrived at the town of Linden,
the king was bled, but insisted on continuing the journey. “To Osnabrück!” he cried over the rising chorus of protest. “Nach Osnabrück!” When the coach arrived there, his servants opened the door and thought he had fallen asleep. But he had suffered a stroke and was near death. They brought him into the palace to die in the very bed in which he had been born. And the fortune-teller’s prophecy, given forty years before—that if he were in any way responsible for his wife’s death, he would follow her within the year—had proved correct.

  Britain did not grieve for its unloved king. The only one who truly mourned was Melusina von Schulenburg, now the wealthy duchess of Kendal. For four decades she had loved him and was perhaps the only person ever to have loved him. The good-hearted Melusina was comforted by frequent visits of her dead lover in the form of a little bird who flew into her rooms regularly and fed from her hands.

  Certainly the king’s son did not grieve. George II, knowing that his father had burned his mother’s will, now in turn burned his father’s will and claimed all his property. One morning, shortly after George I’s death, Lady Suffolk visited the royal chambers and saw two portraits of a beautiful woman wearing the royal robes of a generation earlier—portraits of Sophia Dorothea which the new king had kept hidden from the wrath of his father. If Sophia Dorothea had survived George I, her son would have released her from prison instantly and installed her as queen dowager of Great Britain.

  George II, eager to solve the mysteries of his parents’ divorce more than thirty years earlier, commanded that he be shown the secret Hanoverian records and, after reading them, set them on fire, watching the evidence of his mother’s adultery burn to cold ash. But neither Sophia Dorothea’s husband nor her son had burned all the evidence of her love for Königsmark. His sister Aurora, safely out of Hanover, had taken with her some two hundred of their love letters—1,399 pages in all—which she passed down in her family as cherished possessions. Today they are preserved at the University of Lund, Sweden.

  In 1754 another packet of sixty-four letters mysteriously came into the possession of Frederick the Great of Prussia. These “not very honorable souvenirs” of his grandmother, as he called them, are also at Lund.45 None of the letters of the last six months of the love affair—those confiscated by Elector Ernst August and used as evidence against the princess—has ever been found.

  It is possible that Königsmark, who had energetically bounced around the courts of Europe, resurfaced even after death. Decades after his murder, workmen repairing the floor of the great hall in the Leine Palace reportedly found a nearly decomposed skeleton, covered in quicklime. The rumor quickly spread that the corpse had a ring bearing the Königsmark coat of arms. The Leine Palace, that place of secret lovemaking and sudden death, was destroyed by Allied bombs in World War II.

  The castle of Ahlden, the cage in which Sophia Dorothea sighed and remembered for thirty-two years, is now an antiques auction house. Her remains lie in the crypt of St. Mary’s Church at Celle. The visitor enters through a trapdoor next to the altar. It is a small, low space, with thick walls and the smell of mildew. Lead coffins are pushed together three rows deep, imposing coffins set atop wide legs, ornamented with engravings of angels and coats of arms upon their lids. On the side, away from the great ones, is a low, narrow coffin, very plain and utterly alone. In it is all that is left of Sophia Dorothea. Even in death she was punished; her coffin had to be lower than those of her exalted relatives.

  And yet, it is the only one on which visitors place fresh flowers daily; the glorious caskets of her relatives remain eternally unadorned. All their palaces, built to sing their praises forever, were reduced to rubble by the firebombing of 1943. But the unhappy tale of a miserable girl still moves us. We make pilgrimage to her crypt to lay flowers on her small, mean coffin.

  Perhaps her spirit had her day at the tribunal of God with George Louis, and a loving reunion with her Königsmark. As he had written her so many years earlier, “It is better to die than to live without being loved.”46

  5. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIA: THE UNCHASTE EMPRESSES

  Hard-hearted you are, you gods! You unrivaled lords of jealousy—scandalized when goddesses sleep with mortal.

  —HOMER, THE ODYSSEY

  MYSTERIOUS AND PERPLEXING, RUSSIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN A nation of exaggerated contradictions. A land of gentle kindness and vindictive cruelty, of medieval piety and reckless debauchery, of opulent splendor and wretched filth. Forests glitter with snow; precious gems sleep deep beneath black earth, and rolling plains stretch endlessly toward the horizon. Tempestuous and scintillating, the Russian soul is easily angered and quick to forgive. It is the greatest of nations, the worst of nations, encompassing the unexpected, the vast, and the priceless.

  In the late seventeenth century Russia remained secluded in a heavy pall of Orientalism. Men wore long robes and long beards; women were sequestered in a terem, a Russian version of the harem, and prevented from contact with unrelated men. Russian Orthodox superstition ruled every aspect of life, and foreigners—those frightening non-Russian, non-Orthodox heathens—were kept securely in their own area just outside of Moscow, lest they infect God-fearing natives with their devilish ways.

  For some thirty years before his death in 1725, Peter the Great single-handedly wrenched Russia’s gaze from east to west, a Herculean task well suited to a giant six feet eight inches tall in a world where the average man measured five foot four. This arduous effort was continued for another thirty-four years, starting in 1762, by Catherine the Great, the most extraordinary Russian monarch ever, who was, in fact, German. And so a gloss of Western civilization was daubed thinly over the rude barbarism of medieval Russia, a Russia with raging passions little calmed by the strains of the minuet. “It is as if there were two peoples,” wrote the chevalier de Courbon, a French diplomat at the court of Catherine the Great, “two different nations on the same soil. You are in the 14th century and the 18th century at the same time.”1

  It was a land of unlimited opportunity. Unlike in France and England, with their rigid social structure, in Russia the most humble souls could soar unhindered to greatness. The fabulously wealthy Alexander Menshikov, governor-general of St. Petersburg and commander of the armed forces, started life as a pie seller. Empress Catherine I, wife of Peter the Great, had been a laundry wench and prostitute. His Serene Highness the duke of Courland and regent of Russia, Ernest Biron, launched his brilliant career by shoveling horse manure.

  Foreign visitors, offended by the barbaric brutality and horrendous table manners of Russian nobles, were most perplexed at their bizarre hygiene. Emerging from an Oriental past, Russia kept the Eastern tradition of bathing daily and, though the most backward nation in Christendom, boasted the cleanest people. Russian nobles flaunted the largest, most dazzling emeralds and diamonds in Europe; visitors from golden Versailles routinely expressed their astonishment at stones the size of hens’ eggs glittering obscenely on men and women who seemed unaware of their value. Perhaps foreign visitors would have been equally astonished to find that fully half of these courtiers who shone like the sun did not know how to write, and a third did not know how to read.

  In this land of unnerving contradictions, perhaps the greatest was this, that only a few years after blasting free of the terem, women ruled the most chauvinistic, testosterone-rich European nation for seven decades. On the other hand, France, which had for centuries recognized the political brilliance of the fair sex, had a law that prevented a woman from inheriting the throne in her own right.

  The rule of women in eighteenth-century Russia gave rise to the flowering of the male favorite. The kings of western Europe had their silken mistresses, but the empresses of Russia had their muscular young studs. Some of these lovers wanted power, others just riches, and a few desired only the love of the monarch. As only men could command armies—even a feisty Russian empress would not gallop with her soldiers into battle—imperial lovers often served as generals. Others, less attracted to the smell of
gunpowder and screams of men, served the empress in a political role. But of all their duties, those reserved for the night were by far the most pressing.

  CATHERINE I

  “There Is a Fire Burns in My Breast”

  Peter the Great liked to boast that he spent less on whores than any king in Europe. However, the paltry sums expended were the result not of sexual moderation but of negotiating skills. The czar’s drunken orgies with prostitutes were legendary across the continent. True to the double standard of the time, Peter expected his wife to remain scrupulously faithful.

  Having thrown his critical, aristocratic first wife, Eudoxia, into a remote convent, Peter fell in love with the illiterate daughter of a Livonian gravedigger. Martha Skavronskaya had been captured as war booty and worked as a laundress for the Russian army. The soldiers passed her around until the czar claimed her for himself and eventually married her. Martha— who took the name Catherine upon converting to Russian Orthodoxy—was cheerful, plump, and jolly, the perfect companion for a ruler whose eccentricities swung from visionary genius to sadistic insanity. Had the czar selected a fine-boned French princess for his bride, she might very well have packed her bags and galloped home.

  Peter never mastered the Western fashion of eating with knife and fork. The czar ate with his fingers and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The refined Polish ambassador Manteuffel, terrified of dining with this monster of bad manners, heaved a sigh of relief after his meal, praising the czar who “neither belched nor farted nor picked his teeth—at least I neither saw nor heard him do so.”2

  For all his bad manners, Peter was resolved to pull his backward nation out of the muck and mire of the Dark Ages. Though monarchs rarely traveled outside their realms in the eighteenth century, Peter often visited western Europe to learn technology and customs, as well as to make foreign alliances.