Madame von Kielmansegg, however, was of another mind. If her great rival would not go, she would; and after giving the Elector a day's start, she raced after him, caught him up, and, to her delight, was welcomed with open arms. The moment Von der Schulenburg heard of the trick "that Kielmansegg woman" had played on her, she, too, packed her trunks, and, taking her "nieces" with her, also set out in hot pursuit of her Royal lover and tool, and overtook him just as he was on the point of embarking for England.
George was now happy and reconciled to his fate, for his retinue was complete. And what a retinue! When the King landed at Greenwich with his grotesque assortment of Ministers, his hideous Turks, his two mistresses—one a gaunt giant, the other rolling in billows of fat—and his "nieces," the crowds thronging the landing-place and streets greeted the "menagerie" with jeers and shouts of laughter. They nicknamed Schulenburg the "Maypole," and Kielmansegg the "Elephant," and pursued the cavalcade with strident mockeries and insults.
"Goot peoples, vy you abuse us?" asked the Maypole, protruding her gaunt head and shoulders through the carriage window. "Ve only gom for all your goots." "And for all our chattels, too, —— you!" came the stinging retort from a wag in the crowd.
But Schulenburg soon realised that she could afford to smile and shrug her scraggy shoulders at the insolence of those "horrid Engleesh." She found herself in a land of Goshen, where there were many rich plums to be gathered by far-reaching and unscrupulous hands such as hers. If she could not love the enemy, she could at least plunder them; and this she set to work to do with a good will, while the plastic George looked on and smiled encouragement. There were pensions, appointments, patents—boons of all kinds to be trafficked in; and who had a greater right to act as intermediary than herself, the King's chère amie and right hand?
She sold everything that was saleable. As Walpole says, "She would have sold the King's honour at a shilling advance to the best bidder." From Bolingbroke's family she took £20,000 in three sums—one for a Peerage, another for a pardon, and the third for a fat post in the Customs. Gold poured in a ceaseless and glittering stream into her coffers. She refused no bribe—if it was big enough—and was ready to sell anything, from a Dukedom to a Bishopric, if her price was forthcoming. She made George procure her a pension of £7,500 a year (ten times as much as had long contented her well in Hanover); and when valuable posts fell vacant she induced him to leave them vacant and to give her the revenues.
Not content with filling her capacious pockets, she sighed for coronets—and got them in showers. Four Irish Peerages, from Baroness of Dundalk to Duchess of Munster, were flung into her lap. And yet she was not happy. She must have English coronets, and the best of them. So George made her Baroness of Glastonbury, Countess of Feversham, and Duchess of Kendal. And, to crown her ambition for such baubles, he induced the pliant German Emperor to make her a Princess—of Eberstein. Thus, with coffers overflowing with ill-gotten gold, her towering head graced with a dazzling variety of coronets, this grim idol of a King, who at sixty was as much her slave as in the twenties, was the proudest woman in England, patronising our own Duchesses, and snubbing Peeresses of less degree. She might be a "maypole"—hated and unattractive—but at least she towered high above all the fairest and most blue-blooded beauties of her "Consort's" Court.
When the South Sea Bubble rose to dazzle all eyes with its iridescent splendours, it was she more than any other who blew it. She was the witch behind the scenes of the South Sea and many another bubble Company, whether its object was to "carry on a thing that will turn to the advantage of the concerned," "the breeding and providing for natural children," or "for planting mulberries in Chelsea Park to breed silk-worms."
Every day of this wild, insane gamble, which wrecked thousands of homes, and filled hundreds of suicides' graves, brought its stream of gold to her exchequer; and when the bubbles burst in havoc and ruin she smiled and counted her gains, turning a deaf ear to the storm of execration that raged against her outside the palace walls. She knew that she had played her cards so skilfully that all the popular rage was impotent to harm her. Only one of her many puppets—Knight, the Treasurer of the South Sea Company—could be the means of doing her harm. If he were arrested and told all he knew, impeachment would probably follow, with a sentence of imprisonment and banishment. But the crafty German was much too old a bird to be caught in that way. She packed Knight off to Antwerp; and, through the influence of her friend, the German Empress, the States of Brabant refused to give him up to his fate.
The Duchess of Kendal was now at the zenith of her power and splendour. While Sophia Dorothea, the true Queen of England, was pining away in solitude in distant Ahlden, the German "Maypole" was Queen in all but name, ruling alike her senile paramour and the nation with a tactful, if iron hand. It is said that she was actually the morganatic wife of George, that the ceremony had been performed by no less a dignitary than the Archbishop of York; but, whether this was so or not, it is certain that this "old and forbidding skeleton of a giantess" was more England's Queen than any other Consort of the Georges.
She was present at every consultation between the King and his Ministers—indeed the conferences were invariably held in her own apartments, every day from five till eight. She understood and humoured every whim of her Royal partner with infinite tactfulness, to the extent even of encouraging his amours with young and attractive women, while she herself, to emphasise her platonic relations with him, affected an extravagant piety, attending as many as seven Lutheran services every Sunday. The only rival she had ever feared—and hated—Madame Kielmansegg, had long passed out of power, and as Countess of Darlington was too much absorbed in pandering to her mountain of flesh, and filling her pockets, to spare a regret for the Royal lover she had lost.