Princess Sophie-Dorothea will expect Count Königsmark this evening, after ten.
This note, a forgery imitating Sophie-Dorothea's handwriting, was the work of Countess von Platen. Königsmark, unsuspecting and brave as a lion, kept the appointment. He left the Princess at two in the morning.
Next morning Sophie-Dorothea saw from her balcony two men furtively wandering in the park as if they had lost something. They were Count Philip's servants searching for their master. He was never to be seen again, by them or any one else.
There you have the tragedy, my friend. There remains the dénouement, the divorce of Sophie-Dorothea. That unhappy young woman of twenty-eight lived in a world of enemies. She wished to leave her husband, who was a nightmare to her, but was prevented by the wishes of her father, who had forced a marriage on her for political reasons. A love-sick girl could not be allowed to upset the pretty scheme which had the throne of England as its possible goal. The unhappy creature refused to lend herself to it. She was dangerous for other reasons. The Swedish Count had relations. And so she was duly divorced after a trial in which she suffered every outrage and humiliation. Her children were taken out of her care, and ultimately the wife of the King of England, once more plain Duchess, died a prisoner in her Castle at Ahlden in 1726. Then only did the parental fury relent. The vaults of the castle in which she was born were opened to her corpse. There, in the obscurest corner of the crypt of the keep of Celle, is a humble coffin, bearing no inscription. It contains the mortal remains of Sophie-Dorothea, wife of the Elector George-Lonis of Hanover, King of England under the name of George I.
I have outlined, as briefly as I could, the story of Philip von Königsmark and Sophie-Dorothea. I need hardly say that many points in the tragedy have never yet been cleared up. The assassination of the Count is undoubtedly the most obscure incident in the whole affair. Witnesses agree that it was Countess von Platen who set the trap in which he perished. Ten hired assassins pierced him with their swords and the horrible Countess herself dealt him the final blow. But what was done with the corpse? This is where the mystery begins.
Opinions are divided. Was the Count, as some say, buried in a grave in the park? Or, according to another version which I have reasons to believe the true one, was his corpse covered with quick-lime and thrown under the stone floor of the room known as the "Knights' Hall"? Or was it simply cast into the latrines which communicated with the Lüne flowing at the foot of the castle, as the author of the "Secret History"[2] would have us believe? Was his the corpse, as Horace Walpole asserts, which was discovered twenty years later under the floor of a retiring-room in the Herrenhausen? I only put these problems to explain to you, though to me it still remains inexplicable, my feverish resolution to solve them. You may well imagine that the mystery was more vivid and intriguing to me than to any other man, partly because of the situation at the palace, with its many points of resemblance to that in which the tragedy took place, and partly because of the priceless material at my disposal in the ducal library.
The most valuable authority till then available was the correspondence of Königsmark and Sophie-Dorothea, to be found in the archives of the La Gardie Library at Loeberod in Sweden. This correspondence was discovered by Professor Palmblad, who published extracts from it at Upsala in 1851. When Professor Thierry in taking leave of me had referred me to Palmblad's work, he hoped that at Lautenburg I should be able to discover a portion of the correspondence, which wandered all over Germany before finding a definite home at Loeberod. I was, however, unable to find anything, though I had compensation for my disappointment in another and most fruitful discovery.
You remember I spoke of Sophie-Dorothea's daughter a short time ago. She married the Crown Prince of Prussia, the future "Drill-Sergeant King," Frederick I. "A harsh and tyrannical husband," as Blaze de Bury writes, "his first act, on mounting the throne, was to forbid his wife formally to hold any sort of communication with the prisoner of Ahlden. It was only when Sophie-Dorothea had inherited from her mother a revenue of twenty thousand crowns, a very considerable sum in those days, that the royal miser began to soften towards her, though his sudden concern was purely mercenary, being based solely on his wife's possible interest in the inheritance, an interest which the celebrated jurisconsult, Thomasius, had laboured to establish."[3]
The Queen of Prussia was the meekest of women, but, urged on secretly by her confessor, she had never ceased to reproach herself for not having boldly taken her captive mother's part, convinced as she was of her innocence. She began to take advantage of her forbidding husband's better moments to collect the material on which to base proceedings to clear her character. Unfortunately Sophie-Dorothea died in 1726. This did not deter her royal daughter from pursuing her labour of love. Thanks to her resolution and the learned assistance of the jurisconsult Thomasius already mentioned, an enormous dossier, comprising some twelve hundred documents, was prepared. It established beyond doubt Sophie-Dorothea's innocence and Countess von Platen's ignominy. This monument of filial devotion was never to serve any practical purpose. An anonymous note at the top of the file records that on the representations of George II., King of England, communicated to his brother-in-law, Frederick I. of Prussia through the British Minister, the rehabilitation suit was never begun. The English King observed to his sister, not without truth, that every piece of evidence disproving their mother's guilt only established their father's.
The submissive Prussian Queen yielded to the force of this political argument. The file, a monument of futile industry, after various wanderings recorded in the note I have mentioned, ended by falling in 1783 into the hands of the Grand Duchess Charlotte-Augusta of Lautenburg, niece of the reigning sovereign. It was this very file that I had the good fortune to discover among the uncatalogued manuscripts in the ducal library at the end of January, 1914. From the original notes of the cross-examination of Fräulein von Knesebeck, Sophie-Dorothea's confidante, to the record of Countess von Platen's confession,[4] had before me everything required to reconstruct the story of the mysterious Herrenhausen drama. In the casual manner of historians in dealing with uncatalogued manuscripts I carried off to the privacy of my room the six packets containing the whole melancholy story.