The next incident told is more dramatic of character, perhaps, than any of the others. The countess had engaged the count in conversation in a pavilion of the gardens in the Electoral Palace, when, making the approach of two gentlemen an excuse for retiring, they withdrew together. The gentlemen alluded to were George Louis and the Count von Platen; and these entering the pavilion which had just been vacated, the former picked up a glove which had been dropped by the countess. The prince recognised it by the embroidery, and perhaps by a crest, or some mark impressed upon it, as being a glove belonging to his consort. He was musingly examining it, when a servant entered the place, professedly in search of a glove which the princess had lost. On some explanation ensuing, it was subsequently discovered that Madame von Weyhe, the sister of the Countess von Platen, had succeeded in persuading Prince Maximilian to procure for her this glove, on pretext that she wished to copy the pattern of the embroidery upon it, and that the prince had thoughtlessly done so, leaving the glove of Madame von Weyhe in its place. But this, which might have accounted for its appearance in the pavilion, was not known to George Louis, who would probably in such case have ceased to think more of the matter, but that he was obligingly informed that Count Königsmark had been before him in the pavilion where the glove was found; been there, indeed, with the excellent Countess von Platen, who acknowledged the fact, adding, that no glove was on the ground when she was there, and that the one found could not have been hers, inasmuch as she never wore Netherland gloves—as the one in question was—but gloves altogether of different make and quality. Königsmark had been there, and the glove of the Princess Sophia Dorothea had been found there, and this German specimen of Mrs. Candour knew nothing beyond.
Thenceforth, George Louis was not merely rude and faithless to his wife, but cruel in the extreme—the degrading blow, so it was alleged, following the harsh word. The Elector of Hanover was more just than his rash and worthless son: he disbelieved the insinuations made against his daughter-in-law. The Electress was less reasonable, less merciful, less just, to her son’s wife. She treated her with a coolness which interpreted a belief in the slander uttered against her; and when Sophia Dorothea expressed a wish to visit her mother, the electoral permission was given with an alacrity which testified to the pleasure with which the Electress of Hanover would witness the departure of Sophia Dorothea from her court.
Sophia Dorothea, as soon as she descended at the gates of her father’s residence, found a mother there, indeed, ready to receive her with the arms of a mother’s love, and to feel that the love was showered upon a daughter worthy of it. Not of like quality were the old duke’s feelings. Communications had been made to him from Hanover, to the effect that his daughter was obstinate, disobedient, disrespectful to the Elector and Electress, neglectful of her children, and faithless in heart, if not in fact, to their father. The Duke of Zell had been, as he thought, slow to believe the charges brought against his child’s good name, and had applied to the Elector for some further explanation. But poor Ernest Augustus was just then perplexed by another domestic quarrel. His son, the ever troublesome Prince Maximilian, having long entertained a suspicion that the Countess von Platen’s denial of the light offence laid to her charge, of wearing rouge, was also a playful denial, mischievously proved the fact one day, by not very gallantly ‘flicking’ from his finger a little water in which peas had been boiled, and which was then a popularly mischievous test to try the presence of rouge, as, if the latter were there, the pea-water left an indelible fleck or stain upon it. At this indignity, the Countess von Platen was the more enraged as her denial had been disproved. She rushed to the feet of the Elector, and told her complaint with an energy as if the whole state were in peril. The Elector listened, threatened Prince Maximilian with arrest, and wished his family were as easy to govern as his electoral dominions. He had scarcely relieved himself of this particular source of trouble, by binding Prince Maximilian to his good behaviour, when he was applied to by the Duke of Zell on the subject of his daughter. He angrily referred the duke to three of his ministers, who, he said, were acquainted with the facts. Now these ministers were the men who had expressly distorted them.
These worthy persons, if report may be trusted, performed their wicked office with as wicked an alacrity. However the result was reached, its existence cannot be denied, and its consequences were fatal to Sophia Dorothea. The Electress Sophia is said to have at last so thoroughly hated her daughter-in-law, as to have entered partly into these misrepresentations, which acquired for her the temporary wrath of her father. But of this enmity of her mother-in-law the younger Sophia does not appear to have suspected anything. Sophia Dorothea, at all events, bore her father’s temporary aversion with a wondering patience, satisfied that ‘time and the hour’ would at length do her justice.
The duke’s prejudice, however, was rather stubborn of character, and he was guilty of many absurdities to show, as he thought, that his obstinacy of ill-merited feeling against his own child was not ill-founded. He refused to listen to her own statement of her wrongs, in order to show how he guarded himself against being unduly biassed. The mother of the princess remained her firmest friend and truest champion. If misrepresentations had shaken her confidence for a moment, it was only for a moment. She knew the disposition of Sophia Dorothea too well to lend credit to false representations which depicted her as a wife, compared with whom Petruchio’s Katherine would have been the gentlest of Griseldas. As little did she believe—and to the expression of her disbelief she gave much indignant force of phrase—as little did she believe in the suggestions of the ministers of the Elector that the familiar terms which, as they alleged, existed between the Electoral Princess and Count Königsmark were such as did wrong to her husband George Louis. Those judges of morality had jumped to the conclusion that youth and good looks were incompatible with propriety of conduct.
The worst that could have been alleged against Sophia Dorothea at this period was, that some letters had passed between her and Count Königsmark, and that the latter had once or twice had private audience of the Electoral Princess. Whatever may be thought of such things here in England, and in the present age, they have never been accounted of in Germany but as common-place circumstances, involving neither blame nor injury. A correspondence between two persons of the respective ranks of the Electoral Princess and the count was not an uncommon occurrence; save that it was not often that two such persons had either the taste or capacity to maintain such intercourse. As to an occasional interview, such a favour, granted by ladies of rank to clever conversational men, was as common an event as any throughout the empire; and as harmless as the interviews of Leonora and that very selfish personage, the poet Tasso. The simple fact appears to have been that, out of a very small imprudence—if imprudence it may be called—the enemies of Sophia Dorothea contrived to rear a structure which should threaten her with ruin. Her exemplary husband, who affected to hold himself wronged by the alleged course adopted by his consort, had abandoned her, in the worst sense of that word. He had never, in absence, made her hours glad by letters, whose every word is dew to a soul athirst for assurances of even simple esteem. In his own household his conversation was seldom or never addressed to his wife; and, when it was, never to enlighten, raise, or cheer her. She may have conversed and corresponded with Königsmark, but no society then construed such conversation and correspondence as crimes; and even had they approached in this case to a limit which would have merited censure, the last man who should have stooped to pick up a stone to cast at the reputation of his consort was that George Louis, whose affected indignation was expressed from a couch with Mademoiselle von der Schulenburg at his side, and their very old-fashioned (as to look, but not less illegitimate as to fact) baby, playing, in much unconsciousness of her future distinction, between them.
It was because Sophia Dorothea had not been altogether tamely silent touching her own wrongs, that she had found enemies trumpet-tongued publishing a forged record of her transgressions. When Count von Moltke had become implicated in the little domestic rebellion of Prince Maximilian, some intimation was conveyed to him that, if he would contrive, in his defence, to mingle the name of Sophia Dorothea in the details of the trumpery conspiracy, so as to attach suspicion to such name, his own acquittal would be secured. The count was a gallant man, refused to injure an unoffending lady, and was beheaded; as though he had conspired to overthrow a state, instead of having tried to help a discontented heir in the disputed settlement of some family accounts.
The contempt of Sophia Dorothea, on discovering to what lengths the intimacy of George Louis and Ermengarda von der Schulenburg had gone, found bitter and eloquent expression. Where an angry contest was to be maintained, George Louis could be eloquent too; and in these domestic quarrels, not only is he said to have been as coarse as any of his own grooms, but, at least on one occasion, to have proceeded to blows. His hand was on her throat, and the wife and mother of a King of England would have been strangled by her exasperated lord, had it not been for the intervention of the courtiers, who rushed in, and, presumedly, prevented murder. To such a story wide currency was given; and, if not exact to the letter, neither can it be said to be without foundation.
The circumstances which led Sophia Dorothea to formally complain of the treatment she experienced at her husband’s hands were these. One evening, after being one of a group in the open air, witnessing an eclipse of the moon, and listening to Leibnitz’s explanations, Sophia Dorothea (attended by Fräulein Knesebeck and Madame Sassdorf) returned towards the castle. The ladies missed their way in the dark, but they found themselves at last at the door of a newly-erected building, which Sophia Dorothea entered, despite Frau Sassdorf’s entreaties to the contrary. She equally disregarded the same lady’s urgent entreaties not to enter a room at the end of the ante-chamber where the ladies were standing together. Sophia Dorothea opened the door of the room, and there beheld Mademoiselle von der Schulenburg on a couch; one hand in that of George Louis, who with the other was rocking a sleeping baby (the future Countess of Chesterfield) in a cradle.
After the scene of unseemly violence which followed, and after Sophia Dorothea’s recovery from a consequent illness, she made her indignant complaint to her husband’s parents. ‘Old Sophia’ censured her son, and found fault with Sophia Dorothea’s rashness. Ernest Augustus intimated that all princes had their little weaknesses, and that it was her duty to condone her husband’s.