Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (19 page)

But Königsmark couldn’t restrain his jealousy even when he had no reason to doubt his lover’s affection. He seethed when George Ludwig arrived at Halle and evidently spoke of Sophia Dorothea, “[T]elling me of the state you were in, your undress, uncoifed, your hair hanging down loose on your matchless bosom. Oh God, I cannot write for anger!”

It’s hard to imagine George Ludwig, who cared nothing for his wife, boasting of her beauty to her lover, let alone to the rest of the officers. Although there is no clear indication that he was aware of Sophia Dorothea’s affair (as his mother and his father’s mistress were), perhaps it was suggested to him that he might say alluring things about her in the count’s presence, in order to gauge his reaction.

Back in Hanover, Sophia Dorothea’s mother-in-law was slyly angling for her to betray her affair with the count. The princess was too naive to recognize it, writing to her lover on June 14, 1692, that she “talks about you every time I go for a walk with her…I don’t know if she does it because of affection for you or to please me. In either case, she speaks of you a lot and I cannot even hear the sound of your name without a surge of emotion which I cannot control. She praises you so highly and with such pleasure that if she were younger I could not help being jealous, for really I think she is fond of you. She could not give me more evidence of it than she does. It even makes me uncomfortable.”

While the princess’s mother-in-law was giving the young woman enough rope to hang herself, her mother was trying to protect her, but the Duchess of Celle might as well have been spitting into the wind. Worried about her daughter’s
tendre
for the Swedish mercenary (and vice versa), Eléanore d’Olbreuse repeatedly cautioned Sophia Dorothea that she was treading into treacherous territory and
that Königsmark’s ungovernable passion for her might doom them both. But the young woman ignored every warning, listening instead to her paramour, who insisted that the duchess was “the most deceitful woman in the world. She says a thousand nice things and yet she is using her authority to try to ruin me with you.”

The lovers had discussed their future, although the count had admitted that his prospects were limited. His huge gambling debts prohibited him from covering himself in military glory at the front in Flanders, because that was where his creditors awaited. On orders from the king of Sweden, Königsmark’s estates there were to be confiscated. And he refused to accept any advantageous job offers, because it would mean quitting Hanover, and he had vowed never to leave Sophia Dorothea. When he wrote to say that he had sacrificed everything for her, it was no exaggeration; he was indeed placing their romance ahead of his career and financial stability. But ironically, without either of those two elements, what future could they possibly have on their own? How would he be able to support them?

In addition to pouring his passion onto paper, Königsmark provides a rare glimpse of life at the front. His letters are full of gossip about his fellow officers, anecdotes about the practical jokes they played on one another and getting drunk with his buddies, although he was quick to assure Sophia Dorothea that his inebriation didn’t lead to infidelity.

At some point in 1692, several of the lovers’ letters were intercepted by operatives working for Baroness von Platen and delivered to her lover, the elector Ernst Augustus, Sophia Dorothea’s father-in-law. Until that time Königsmark had been in the duke’s good graces. In 1691, for example, he entrusted the count with a diplomatic mission to Hamburg. But after he saw the letters, the duke assigned Königsmark to a Hanoverian regiment that was marching off to fight the French. Although fellow officers were liberally granted leaves of absence, the count’s requests to visit Hanover were repeatedly denied.

Stuck at an army camp while Sophia Dorothea glittered at court, surrounded by admirers, the count was consumed with jealousy and doubt, his anxiety exacerbated every time the arrival of a letter he had been expecting was delayed. Every late or missing piece of correspondence
filled the lovers with anguish and dread—and with good reason.

At the end of the 1692 campaign, Königsmark reiterated his request for a pass to return to Hanover. After it was denied, he feigned illness and went AWOL, riding to the Leine Palace in disguise and rushing into the arms of his beloved. “What I wouldn’t give to hear midnight strike!” he wrote. “Be sure to have smelling salts ready lest my excess of joy cause me to faint. Tonight I shall embrace the most agreeable person in the world and I shall kiss her charming lips…. I shall hear you tell me yourself that I matter to you in some way. I shall embrace your knees; my tears will be allowed to run down your incomparable cheeks; my arms will have the satisfaction of embracing the most beautiful body in the world.”

But after the magnitude of his desertion sank in, the count presented himself to Marshal Podewils, who was also a sympathetic friend of Sophia Dorothea’s parents. However, now that the duke of Hanover had been made an elector, Ernst Augustus had begun to care more about maintaining appearances. Although he did not terminate his own extramarital affairs, nor would he compel his son George Ludwig to do so, someone would have to be scapegoated in order to demonstrate to the Holy Roman Emperor that he was a man of strong moral fiber.

To that end, the marshal had just been assigned the unpleasant task of exiling Königsmark’s sister Aurora from Hanover, most likely at the instigation of the conniving Baroness von Platen. Being a tactful woman, Aurora departed the duchy quietly. Sophia Dorothea’s letters to Königsmark had passed through Aurora’s hands, which was undoubtedly the reason for her banishment. So the princess tapped a new conduit, her lady-in-waiting Eleonore de Knesebeck—who was eventually imprisoned for her supporting role in the royal romance.

But by this point, aware that they were being closely watched, the paramours hardly dared to exchange glances for fear that the electress Sophia or the Baroness von Platen’s spies would report it. Consequently, Königsmark was always missing, or misinterpreting, the secret signals from Eleonore de Knesebeck, and when he didn’t find an expected letter hidden in his hat, he’d assume he’d been betrayed.

The count knew by now that he had lost favor with his employer, the elector, and feared an assignment that would send him away from Hanover. But in 1693 current events conspired in his favor. Denmark allied herself with Sweden and together they prepared to invade the tiny duchy of Celle, on the pretext that Sophia Dorothea’s father had built fortifications on a frontier town. The Danes camped on the banks of the Elbe, and Königsmark was named commander of the troops in charge of preventing them from crossing the river. He was camped at Altenburg, where his letters were written until September of 1693.

On May 19, writing to his “beloved brunette,” the count pined, “It is now eight weeks since I left Hanover. I am fasting and live like a Capuchin monk. I don’t miss a sermon and I no longer trim my beard…. Ah! If I could see those eyes happy to see me die before them. If I could kiss that little place which has given me so much pleasure…. At night, your portrait is before my eyes and on my lips and I am no longer a Capuchin….”

By September, Sophia Dorothea was supporting her career soldier’s decision to abandon his profession. Königsmark wrote to her on the nineteenth of the month, “You want to know whether I still want to leave the army. I answer that that depends entirely on you, because as I have resolved to be completely yours, heart, body, and soul, you must rule on how I should conduct myself.” He was really asking her for money, having confided a couple of months earlier that his estate in Sweden was “rather poor. But I have acquired a much greater treasure and I defy this barbaric king to take it away from me. I have your very dear person and the possession of your heart.”

Unfortunately, Sophia’s dowry was in the possession of her in-laws, who begrudgingly parceled out just enough for her to live on, and she dared not ask her father for funds. Not only was the duke of Celle entirely unsupportive of their romance, but he needed every thaler he owned to fight the Danes.

Baroness von Platen was also becoming an increasing source of anxiety. Sophia Dorothea urged Königsmark to attend the woman’s soirees, as he had done in the past, and to humor the baroness, because if he irritated her too much, she would avenge herself. Her words proved prophetic. At eleven p.m. on the thirtieth of July, the
princess wrote Königsmark to confide that she’d had a three-hour conversation with Baroness von Platen, in which the older woman informed her that everyone at court was gossiping because “the life I lead is so retiring” that “they do not think it natural for a woman of my age to renounce everything so completely, and they are seeking the reason for it. I replied that if I had singled out someone and had not treated everyone the same way, people would have a right to complain, but that as I talk to no one everyone should be satisfied and that they were wrong to complain since I treated everyone alike.” And yet, after all this time Sophia Dorothea still had no clue that the fox had gotten in among the pigeons, adding, “She spoke several times about you; she is only too pleased to do so. At the end we parted as close friends and never was friendship confirmed by as many pledges as she made.”

What elevates this royal affair to the heights of grand opera is that it is a wartime romance, where issues of life and death are at stake. In many cases each letter Count von Königsmark wrote to his beloved princess could have been his last. What plunges the liaison to the depths of melodrama is the scheming presence of Baroness von Platen, overdressed, overweight, and overrouged, so wildly jealous of Sophia Dorothea and so desperately covetous of the Swedish count that one can almost hear her maniacal cackle with every twist of the plot to destroy their love and their lives.

In April 1694, Baroness von Platen convinced Ernst Augustus to exile his daughter-in-law’s paramour from Hanover. The elector summoned Königsmark and politely informed him that his services were no longer required.

The Swede left the Hanoverian court and promptly secured a new post as a general in the army of the elector of Saxony. However, one night in Dresden he drank a bit too much punch at an officers’ mess party and embarked on a booze-fueled rant about the pathetic antics of the weak Hanoverian elector Ernst Augustus, his pushy lover Baroness von Platen, his podgy, pig-snouted son, the Hereditary Prince George Ludwig, and the prince’s skeletal giant of a mistress, Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenberg. As Ernst Augustus had spies everywhere, word of Königsmark’s trash-talking got back to Hanover.

George Ludwig confronted his wife with this story of her lover’s indiscretion. Sophia Dorothea immediately countered that it was
his
romance with Melusine that was the real scandal. When she proposed a divorce, it was probably the first time the couple had ever agreed on something. But then George Ludwig began to throttle his wife and yank out her hair. Sophia Dorothea’s screams brought the servants running. They saw the Hereditary Prince shove his wife to the floor and swear never to see her again. Unlike his marriage vow, this was a promise George Ludwig would keep. However, he was afraid of doing her too much injury, because of a strange prediction made by a Gypsy fortune-teller years earlier: that if he were in any way responsible for his wife’s demise, he would meet his own doom within a year of it.

The parents of the sparring pair had predictable reactions to the news of a possible divorce. Ernst Augustus and his wife, the shrewish duchess Sophia, fearful of losing the annual installments of Sophia Dorothea’s dowry, sent their son out of town to clear his head. Sophia Dorothea’s father was wholly convinced that his daughter made a better whore than a wife. The Duchess of Celle was the only one who sympathized with the princess’s situation, but she was unable to champion her daughter alone.

At the end of June 1694, Königsmark feigned illness and deserted his military post in Dresden, riding hell-for-leather to Hanover, in disguise, to see his beloved Sophia Dorothea. The lovers had conceived the idea of running away together, although the count’s spendthrift behavior presented a hitch; he was already deeply in debt. What would they live off of after they fled? Pragmatism was never Sophia Dorothea’s strong suit, so they decided to throw caution to the winds, intending to flee to the duchy of Wolfenbüttel on the second of July.

But Baroness von Platen’s spies detected Königsmark’s disguise. The countess had already hammered the maiden nail into the coffin of Sophia Dorothea’s marriage by introducing George Ludwig to his first mistress (her daughter Sophia Charlotte); she remained hell-bent on ruining the princess’s extramarital romance as well.

On July 1, Königsmark received a letter from Sophia Dorothea written in pencil, asking him to come to her apartments between
eleven p.m. and midnight. The door would be opened to him when he whistled their secret signal, Corelli’s “The Spanish Follies.”

Sophia Dorothea later asserted that the letter was a forgery, although her lady-in-waiting, Eleonore de Knesebeck, insisted that it was genuine. Surely after so many letters from his beloved, the count would recognize her handwriting. The note was ultimately revealed to be authentic, but Baroness von Platen had known of its contents.

Count von Königsmark had worn borrowed clothes for this rendezvous so that he would be less recognizable. He did not tell his servants where he was going. Königsmark sneaked across the palace gardens, whistled the signal, and Mademoiselle de Knesebeck appeared at the back gate. She conducted him to her mistress’s room through a long, dark corridor accessible from either end.

Having been reliably informed by her spies of the mercenary’s arrival, Baroness von Platen reported it to Ernst Augustus, who decided to burst in on the lovers, catching them in flagrante delicto. But the countess talked him out of this idea, convincing him that such farcical behavior was conduct unbecoming an elector. She suggested instead that he issue a warrant for Königsmark’s arrest and put a handful of halberdiers at her disposal to execute it. As events would bear out, the countess wasn’t terribly specific with her pronouns.