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

players entertained them; a legion of pages, gentlemen of the bedchamber and ladies in waiting served them.
    During the 1680s the sophisticated Sir William Dutton Colt, English envoy to Hanover, wrote that in ‘all Germany there is not a finer court’. He and his secretary, Larrocque, rhapsodized that Hanover had achieved the apex of fine culture and the intellect. Even the indefatigable courtier and acid-tongued English diarist Lady Mary Wortley Montagu agreed and praised it as ‘one of the most agreeable places in the world’.
    Its chief musician was the renowned composer Agostino Steffani, its philosopher and historian the brilliant polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Hanover was a state of benignautocracy and religious tolerance, whose Protestant rulers encouraged freedom of worship. Catholics, Calvinists, Huguenots and Jews were employed, adding to the richness of the intellectual and artistic tradition that Sophia had worked hard to establish since she arrived in Hanover in 1679. Like many of his contemporary German princes, Ernst August employed his own Hofjude, or Court Jew, the financier Elieser Lefmann Berens-Cohen. His role was essential to the smooth running of the state.
    But it was also a court of secret sexual machinations and bitter familial rivalry. To understand the family and court that Melusine encountered in 1690, we have to tell the story of the woman who first employed, protected and finally despised her – the Electress Sophia.
    Sophia came of an illustrious lineage. Her parents were the tragic king and queen of Bohemia. She was the granddaughter of James I of England and the great-granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots. Eventually this genetic inheritance would bring her eldest son George to the Crown of Great Britain as George I – after England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the country would not accept a Catholic monarch. The historian Alvin Redman tells us:
In 1658, nine years after the head of Charles I had dropped into the basket at Whitehall, she [Sophia] brought as her dowry, unknowingly and unpredictably, the reversion of the Crown of Great Britain. She was a handsome woman, shrewd and accomplished, and fortunately for the Hanoverian succession she was the only daughter of the luckless Elizabeth Stuart who was a Protestant . . . 1
    Amazingly, considering that Sophia was the twelfth child, she was the closest Protestant to the throne. All her older siblings save Louise were dead by 1682, and of their descendants some were illegitimate, some dead, and the rest married into Catholic families.Louise, meanwhile, converted to Catholicism in 1657 and became the abbess of Maubuisson.
    Nevertheless Sophia was brought up in the uncertainty of exile in a foreign court, away from her father’s homeland. She was to have a profound influence on Melusine’s life, yet she could barely bring herself to address her and rarely spoke of her to others. The reasons for this are clear; due to her tumultuous upbringing, Sophia craved familial stability and marital fidelity, ideals that she believed were profoundly threatened by the existence of her son’s mistress.
    When Sophia’s mother Elizabeth was sixteen years old she was married to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine and head of the German Protestant Union. It was this marriage that would ultimately destine the heirs of their twelfth child Sophia for the throne of Great Britain. Frederick and Elizabeth were the same age and, unusually for royal dynastic marriages, their relationship was an extremely happy one. They set up court at Heidelberg, Frederick’s capital, where they lived an extravagant lifestyle of parties, plays and masquerades. Then, in 1619, politics and wars of religion began to destroy their idyll when the citizens of Protestant Bohemia, having dethroned their Catholic monarch, invited the Calvinist Frederick to take the Crown.
    The Jesuits foretold that Frederick would reign for only one season, ‘then his rule would melt away like the