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

winter snow’. The new king ruled for only one year and one day before the Catholic Imperial forces defeated him at the battle of Bílá Hora near Prague on 7 November 1620. Everything was lost. Not even Frederick’s rule of the Palatinate could be salvaged, despite the (admittedly lukewarm) intervention of his father-in-law King James. His beloved Palatinate was overrun by the Bavarians, his nobility massacred or their lands confiscated, and the population forcibly converted. Henceforth Frederick and Elizabeth, monarchs in exile,were dubbed the ‘Winter King and Queen’, recalling the priests’ prophecy. Frederick’s acceptance of the Bohemian throne was arguably the start of the catastrophic ‘Thirty Years’ War’, a conflict between the German princes and the Emperor. It destroyed the fabric of German society, devastated entire communities, and by the war’s end in 1648 had reduced the population from 21 million to an estimated 13 million; some historians believe that Germany lost up to half of her pre-war population. 2 Still others have speculated that the widespread destruction of German society led to later aggressive German nationalism, ‘the soil of despair which alone can have fed the seeds of virulent German pride that sprouted from the recovery of a later age’. 3
    Sophia was her parents’ penultimate child and she spent her childhood watching Frederick and Elizabeth’s desperate efforts to recover their kingdom. When Frederick died in 1632 the onus fell on Elizabeth to restore their children to their birthright. Sophia recalls in her extensive memoirs her mother’s insistence on etiquette and decorum as she strove to recreate the Palatinate court in exile in The Hague. She was never allowed to forget that she was a princess who, through marriage, could expect to become a queen.
    The peace settlement of 1648 that marked the end of the Thirty Years War restored the Rhine Palatinate to Sophia’s eldest brother, Karl Ludwig. He set up court at Heidelberg with his wife, the tempestuous Caroline of Hesse-Cassel, and the pair invited Sophia to join them. But although she adored her brother and his children (particularly her niece Elisabeth Charlotte, or Liselotte as she was called by the family) she was drawn into a drama that led her to seek marriage and her own household at any cost.
    Karl Ludwig had fallen in love with a lady-in-waiting to Caroline, Louise von Degenfeld. Caroline felt hideously betrayed, particularly as she had befriended and protected the girl. Louise, young and pretty, had also attracted the attentions of Karl Ludwig’s brother,Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the romantic hero of the Cavaliers of the English Civil War, on one of his rare visits to Heidelberg. Caroline, to discourage the amorous prince, encouraged Louise to sleep with her in her own bedchamber for the duration of his visit. She had no idea that Louise and her husband had already fallen in love. When Caroline found out about the affair she became violent and in a fit of rage nearly severed one of Louise’s fingers with her teeth. Karl Ludwig was determined to leave Caroline and marry Louise, but Caroline refused to be put aside. Their hysterical rows culminated in a desperate Caroline accusing her husband of incest with his own sister, Sophia. It was not the last time that Sophia would be obliged to refute an allegation of incest.
    Karl Ludwig divorced Caroline and married Louise morganatically in 1658. They went on to have fourteen children, nine of whom survived infancy. On their marriage Louise was created a Raugravine – effectively a landless countess – and their children, who became raugraves and raugravines, were regular visitors to the Hanoverian court. But Caroline, slightly unhinged by the betrayal, refused to accept her new status and leave. She stayed with the household.
    Sophia’s quest for a husband and escape from the emotionally draining and volatile Heidelberg court was not straightforward. She was