But not one of all the glittering array of its dignitaries raised the family name to such an eminence—a bad eminence—as one of its plainest daughters, Ehrengard Melusina von der Schulenburg (to give her full, imposing name), who lived not only to wear the coronet of a Duchess of England, but to be "as much a Queen as ever there was in England."
Fräulein Ehrengard and her brother, who, as Count Mathias von der Schulenburg, was to win fame as the finest general in Europe of his day, were cradled and reared at the ancestral castle of Emden, in Saxony. The Schulenburg women were never famed for beauty; but Ehrengard was, by common consent, the "ugly duckling" of the family—abnormally tall, angular, awkward, and plain-featured, one of the last girls in Germany equipped for conquest in the field of love.
When she reached her sixteenth birthday, Ehrengard's parents were glad to pack her off to the Court of Herrenhausen, where the family influence procured for her the post of maid-of-honour to the Electress Sophia of Hanover. At any rate she was provided for—an important matter, for the Schulenburgs were as poor as they were proud—and she was too unattractive to get into mischief. But it is the unexpected that often happens; and no sooner had the Elector's son and heir, George, set eyes on the ungainly maid-of-honour than he promptly fell head over ears in love with her, to the amazement of the entire Court, and to the disgust of his mother, and of his newly-made bride, Sophia Dorothea of Zell. To George—an awkward, sullen young man of loutish manners and loose morals—the gaunt girl, with her plain, sallow face, was a vision of beauty. She appealed in some curious way to the animal in him; and before she had been many weeks at Herrenhausen she was his avowed mistress—one of many.
"Just look at that mawkin," the Electress Sophia once exclaimed to Lady Suffolk, who was a guest at the Hanoverian Court, "and think of her being my son's mistress!" But to any other than his mother, George's taste in women had long ceased to cause surprise. The ugly and gross appealed to a taste which such beauty and refinement as his young wife possessed left untouched. He had markedly demonstrated this perverseness of fancy already by showering his favours on the Baroness von Kielmansegg—who was reputed to be his natural sister, by the way—a lady so ugly that, as a child, Horace Walpole shrieked at sight of her.
She had, he recalls,
"two fierce black eyes, large and rolling, beneath two lofty arched eyesbrows; two acres of cheeks spread with crimson; an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distingushed from the lower part of her body, and no part of it restrained by stays. No wonder," he adds, "that a child dreaded such an ogress!"
Such were the two chief favourites of this unnatural heir to the throne of Hanover, who, by a curious turn of Fortune's wheel, was to wear the English crown as the first of the Georges. In the company of these ogresses and of a brace of Turkish attendants, George loved to pass his time in beer-guzzling and debauchery, while his beautiful and insulted wife sought solace in that ill-starred intrigue with Königsmarck, which was to lead to his tragic death and her own thirty years' imprisonment in the Schloss Ahlden, where she, who ought to have been England's Queen, ate her heart out in loneliness and sorrow.
To George his wife's intrigue was a welcome excuse for getting rid of her—a licence for unfettered indulgence in his low tastes; and the tragedy of her eclipse but added zest and emphasis to his unfettered enjoyment of life. In the hands of Von der Schulenburg the weak-minded, self-indulgent Prince was as clay in the hands of the potter. She moulded him as she willed, for she was as crafty and diplomatic as she was ill-favoured. Madame Kielmansegg was relegated to the shade, while she stood in the full limelight. She bore two daughters to her Royal lover—daughters who were called her "nieces," although the fiction deceived nobody—and as the years passed, each adding, if possible, to her unattractiveness, her hold on the Prince became still stronger.
Thirty years passed thus at the Herrenhausen Court, when the death of Queen Anne made "the high and mighty Prince George, Elector of Hanover, rightful King of Great Britain, France and Ireland." The sluggish sensual life of the Hanoverian Court was at an end. George was summoned to a great throne, and no King ever accepted a crown with such reluctance and ill-grace. He would, and he would not. For three weeks the English envoys tried every artifice to induce him to accept his new and exalted rôle—and finally they succeeded.
But even then he had not counted on the "fair" Ehrengard. She refused point-blank to go with him to that "odious England," where chopping off heads seemed to be a favourite pastime. She was quite happy in Hanover, and there she meant to stay. She fumed and raged, ran about the Palace gardens, embracing her dearly-loved trees and clinging hysterically to the marble statues, declaring that she could not and would not desert them. And thus George left her, to start on his unwelcome pilgrimage to England.