Bernhard was subsequently sent by the princess to spy out what they would do with Königsmark.
‘When the count was in the vault, he came a little to himself, and spoke:—“You take a guiltless man’s life. On that I’ll die, but do not let me perish like a dog, in my blood and my sins. Grant me a priest, for my soul’s sake.” Then the Electoral Prince went out, and the fourier remained alone with him. Then was a strange parson fetched, and a strange executioner, and the fourier fetched a great chair. And when the count had confessed, he was so weak that three or four of them lifted him into the chair; and there in the prince’s presence was his head laid at his feet. And they had tools with them, and they dug a hole in the right corner of the vault, and there they laid him, and there he must be to be found. When all was over, this Bernhard slipped away from the castle; and indeed Counsellor Lucius, who was a friend of the princess’s, sent him some of his livery to save him; for they sought him in all corners, because they had seen him in the room during the affray.... And what Bernhard Zayer saw in the vault, he saw through a crack.’
Clear as this narrative is in its details, it is contradictory and rests on small basis of truth. The Electoral Prince was undoubtedly absent on the night Königsmark was murdered.
The Countess Aurora of Königsmark has left a statement of her brother’s intimacy with the princess, in which the innocence of the latter is maintained, but his imprudence acknowledged. The statement referred to explains the guilty nature of the intercourse kept up between Königsmark and the Countess von Platen. It is written in terms of extreme indelicacy. We may add that the faithful von Knesebeck, on whose character no one ever cast an imputation, in her examination before the judges, argued the innocence of her accused mistress upon grounds the nature of which cannot even be alluded to. The princess, it is clear, had urged Königsmark to renew his interrupted intrigue with von Platen, out of dread that the latter, taking the princess as the cause of the intercourse having been broken off, should work a revenge, which she did not hesitate to menace, upon the princess herself.
The details of all the stories are marked by great improbability, and they have not been substantiated by the alleged death-bed confessions of the Countess von Platen, and Baumain, one of the guards—the two criminals having, without so intending it, confessed to the same clergyman, a minister named Kramer! Though these confessions are spoken of, and are even cited by German authors, their authenticity cannot be warranted. At all events, there is an English version of the details of this murder given by Horace Walpole; and as that lively writer founded his lugubrious details upon authority which he deemed could not be gainsaid, they may fairly find a place, by way of supplement to the foreign version.
‘Königsmark’s vanity,’ says Walpole, ‘the beauty of the Electoral Princess, and the neglect under which he found her, encouraged his presumptions to make his addresses to her, not covertly, and she, though believed not to have transgressed her duty, did receive them too indiscreetly. The old Elector flamed at the insolence of so stigmatised a pretender, and ordered him to quit his dominions the next day. This princess, surrounded by women too closely connected with her husband and consequently enemies of the lady they injured, was persuaded by them to suffer the count to kiss her hand, before his abrupt departure; and he was actually introduced by them into her bedchamber the next morning before she rose. From that moment he disappeared, nor was it known what became of him, till on the death of George I., on his son, the new King’s first journey to Hanover, some alterations in the palace being ordered by him, the body of Königsmark was discovered under the floor of the Electoral Princess’s dressing-room—the count having probably been strangled there, the instant he left her, and his body secreted. The discovery was hushed up. George II. (the son of Sophia Dorothea) entrusted the secret to his wife, Queen Caroline, who told it to my father; but the King was too tender of the honour of his mother to utter it to his mistress; nor did Lady Suffolk ever hear of it, till I informed her of it several years afterwards. The disappearance of the count made his murder suspected, and various reports of the discovery of his body have of late years been spread, but not with the authentic circumstances.’
To turn to the German sources of information: we are told by these, that after the departure of Königsmark from the chamber of the princess, she was engaged in arranging her papers, and in securing her jewels, preparatory, as she hoped, to her anticipated removal to the Court of Wolfenbüttel. Königsmark must have been murdered and the body made away with silently and swiftly, for not a dweller in the palace was disturbed by the doing of this bloody deed. All signs of its having been done had been so effaced that no trace of it was left to attract notice in the early morning. On that next morning the count’s servants were not troubled at his absence; such an occurrence was not unusual. When it was prolonged and enquiry became necessary, nothing could be learnt of him. Every soul in the palace was silent, designedly or through ignorance. Rumour, of course, was busy and full of confidence in what it put forth. George Louis himself said that the gay count would reappear, perhaps, when least expected. The tremendous secret was faithfully kept by the few who knew the truth; and when speculation was busiest as to the count’s whereabout, there was probably no atom of his body left, if it be true that it had been cast into a drain and had been consumed in slack-lime.
The princess was, for a time, kept in ignorance of the count’s assassination; but she was perplexed by his disappearance, and alarmed when she heard that all his papers had been seized and conveyed to the Elector for his examination. Some notes had passed between them: and, innocent as they were, she felt annoyed at the thought that their existence should be known, still more that they should be perused. To their most innocent expressions the Countess von Platen, who examined them with the Elector, gave a most guilty interpretation; and she so wrought upon Ernest Augustus, that he commissioned no less a person than the Count von Platen to interrogate the princess on the subject. She did not lack spirit; and when the coarse-minded count began to put coarse questions to her, as to the degree of intercourse which had existed between herself and the count, she spiritedly remarked that he appeared to imagine that he was examining into the conduct of his own wife; a thrust which he repaid by bluntly informing her that whatever intercourse may have existed, it would never be renewed, seeing that sure intelligence had been received of Königsmark’s death.
Sophia Dorothea, shocked at this information, and at the manner in which it was conveyed, had no friend in whom she could repose confidence but her faithful lady-in-waiting, Fräulein von Knesebeck. The princess could have had no more ardent defender than this worthy attendant. But the assertions made by the latter, in favour of the mistress whom she loved, were not at all to the taste of the enemies of that mistress, and the speedy result was, that Fräulein von Knesebeck was arrested and carried away to the castle of Schartzfeld in the Hartz. She was there kept in confinement many years; but she ultimately escaped so cleverly through the roof, by the help of a tiler, or a friend in the likeness of a tiler, that the credit of the success of the attempt was given by the governor of the gaol to the demons of the adjacent mountains. She subsequently became lady-in-waiting to Sophia Dorothea’s daughter.
Sophia Dorothea had now but one immediate earnest wish, namely, to retire from Hanover. Already the subject of a divorce had been mooted, but the Elector being somewhat fearful that a divorce might affect his son’s succession to his wife’s inheritance, and even obstruct the union of Zell with Hanover, an endeavour was made to reconcile the antagonistic spouses, and to bury past dissensions in oblivion.