Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos every
week on all aspects of the past. Today on History Calling, I have a good, juicy scandal video for
you about some very messy royal marriages. We’re going to look at a King of England who had one,
if not two wives living at the time he held the throne, but no Queen. This tale involves serial
adultery, salacious love letters, a royal murder mystery and an imprisoned princess
who was the mother of George II and the woman who should have been Queen of England,
but who you’ve probably never heard of. This my friends, is the scandalous love life of George I.
If you enjoy learning about history, especially royal history,
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also find links to my Instagram account and Patreon page in the description box below,
as well as for some additional resources all about George and his women.
The future George I was born Georg Ludwig (or George Louis)
and he came into the world in Hanover on 28 May 1660. His father was Ernst August
of Brunswick-Lüneburg. His mother was Sophia, a granddaughter of James I of England.
This connection is why George would eventually inherit the British throne, after the Protestant
branch of the Stuart family died out and the Catholic branch were barred from inheriting.
For more on the failure of the Protestant Stuarts to successfully procreate,
see my video on what happened to Queen Anne’s children, linked on-screen and below for you.
In November 1682 George married his 16 year old cousin, Sophia Dorothea of Celle (which is in
modern Germany and which I think I’ve pronounced correctly because I looked up an actual German
person saying it, but I’m sure someone will let me know in the comments if I haven’t).
Her father, Georg Wilhelm, was the brother of George Ludwig’s father. This arranged marriage
was made for dynastic reasons, but George I’s biographer, Ragnhild Hatton (whose book is
linked below for you), has noted that the groom was perfectly happy with the choice made for him
and there was no indication at the time of the wedding of the mess that was to come.
The pair produced two children; the future George II, born in November 1683 and another
Sophia Dorothea, born in March 1687, who later became the Queen of Prussia.
Dynastically, the couple had done their duty, but their union was otherwise an increasing disaster.
Husband and wife were frequently apart thanks to George Ludwig’s military commitments
and by 1686 Sophia Dorothea’s lady-in-waiting reported that her mistress had become apathetic
towards her spouse. Still, it was apparently he who strayed first, beginning an affair with one
of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting, the fabulously named Ehrengard Melusina Von Der Schulenburg,
who was generally known as Melusina or Melusine and as I’ve studied her life a little bit before
in my pre-YouTube days and always called her Melusina, that’s the name I’m going to use
for her from here on out. She gave birth to the first of their three daughters in January 1692,
though none of these girls were ever acknowledged as being their parents’ children
and were instead passed off as the daughters of Melusina’s sisters. By the early 1690s, Sophia
Dorothea (who now held the title of Electoral Princess) had also turned her attention elsewhere
and it had landed on the Swedish Count Philip Christophe Von Königsmarck. Having met in 1689,
the two began corresponding in 1690 and a large number of their letters to each other survive.
These show that matters progressed from letters, to secret meetings, to a physical affair by 1692,
though Sophia Dorothea later denied this. In March of that year however, Von Konigsmarck wrote to her
after they had met that ‘I slept like a king, and I hope you did the same. What joy! what rapture!
what enchantment did I not taste in your sweet arms. Ye gods! what a night I spent. The memory
of it blots out all my troubles, and for the moment I count myself the happiest man on earth.’
The correspondence is too long to go through it all here,
but other letters describe the many kisses they shared and strongly suggest that more occurred.
Of course this was the 17th century and the double standard around infidelity was
in full force. George Ludwig’s affair might be tolerated at court,
but his wife’s was not, especially given the implications it could have had for the succession
if she produced an illegitimate child (I have to wonder if it was only her frequent
separations from her lover, necessitated by his military career, which prevented a pregnancy).
Hatton has argued that if Sophia Dorothea had shown more prudence and discretion,
events might not have turned against her and Von Königsmarck so disastrously, but she did not.
Instead, the number of servants and friends involved in facilitating these meetings and the
sending of messages between the two when they were apart, meant that the relationship had no hope of
remaining quiet and they knew it, as a letter from Von Königsmarck in December 1692 shows. He wrote:
‘Tell me if you think it possible for us to meet to-morrow. They certainly spy upon us,
but if we fear no surprises, pour l’amour de Dieu [meaning for the love of God] let me see you!
I cannot live so many days without a glimpse of you. I would rather die than lose my love.’
In other letters, both parties mention that some of their correspondence has gone astray,
with no idea where the incriminating letters may have ended up.
Sophia Dorothea was warned of the dangers she was placing herself in and told by her family,
including her mother and mother-in-law/aunt that the affair must cease, but she paid no heed.
Likewise Von Königsmarck was told by his fellow military officers to stay away from the Princess
and the future King of England himself seems to have known about the relationship and warned his
wife to put an end to it. On the one hand this was hypocritical given his own affair with Melusina,
but on the other, the fact that he seems to have tolerated it for some time
and given Sophia Dorothea the chance to end it is surprisingly lenient, particularly when compared
to how many other husbands would have acted. Just think of how Henry VIII responded to Katherine
Howard’s alleged indiscretions for instance. The lovers were not just reckless and immune
to the good advice given to them, they were also completely deluded about their future together.
Despite Sophia Dorothea having no independent income and Von Königsmarck
having run up enormous debts due to his desire to live well beyond his means, they began to
make plans for her to end her marriage and for the two of them to run away together.
The idea that the Princess’s family (not just her husband, but her parents and in-laws too)
would ever allow such a scandalous event to happen shows how woefully out of touch these two were.
When it began to look like the pair might make a break for it after the Count had been given a
Saxon regiment with a solid income by Friedrich August I of Saxony, the royal family stepped in.
The result was still a scandal (some of the details of which remain obscure to this day),
but it was a scandal which could be at least somewhat controlled by the House of Hanover.
Matters came to a head when the lovers both arrived back in Hanover
after separate trips away in 1694. George Ludwig was awau in Berlin at the time and on 1 July
Von Königsmarck was seen entering the Leine palace where Sophia Dorothea was living. Whether he made
it to her rooms is unknown (though her lady in waiting swore he hadn’t), but either way, he
was never seen alive again and Hatton says that he was certainly murdered that night. Four courtiers
were rumoured to have killed him by sword and one of them, a man named Nicolo Montalban,
was soon afterwards gifted the extraordinary sum of 150,000 Taler (which was the currency
of the time) from Sophia Dorothea’s father-in-law, Ernst August. Bear in mind, as Hatton points out,
that this man’s usual salary was just 200 Taler per year. The Count’s body was supposedly disposed
of in the nearby River Leine in a weighted down sack, though no one really knows for certain.
Nor can we know if the future George I had anything to do with this,
but there is no evidence that he did and he wasn’t in town at the time. The involvement
of his father however, is beyond dispute. Ernst August’s mistress, the Countess von Platen,
is also often cited as one of the conspirators who had Philip killed, having supposedly been
offended after he spurned her advances, but as Hatton points out, there is no real evidence
to support this, although she may have colluded with Ernst August about the details of the plan.
The Count’s disappearance caused a Europe-wide scandal as his powerful family, friends and
employers (people who included Friedrich August I of Saxony and Louis XIV of France)
sought news of him, but no trace was ever found and the Hanoverian royal family consistently
denied any knowledge of his fate. There was a flurry of excitement in 2016 when some old
bones were discovered in Leine Castle and there was speculation that they were the remains of
the missing Philip. However analysis showed that some were animal bones and the others came from
at least 5 individuals. Only one of these people was the correct age to be the 29 year old Count,
but that person was a woman. The mystery of what happened to Von Konigsmarck therefore continues.
But now, let’s turn our attention back to Sophia Dorothea and her ruined marriage to George.
With her lover dead, the Princess was locked in her apartments, her letters to the Count
were discovered and her husband, father and father-in-law/uncle, decided to arrange a divorce
on the grounds that she refused to live with George Ludwig. [letters] The incriminating
correspondence was suppressed and some of it apparently destroyed, while what remains only
came to light and was published centuries later. Sophia Dorothea (who doesn’t seem to
have realised yet what had happened to her lover and naively thought she was going to be able to
live with him) agreed to the divorce and showed no interest in reconciling with her husband.
This divorce (and it was a divorce, rather than an annulment of the type that Henry
VIII so frequently got) was formalised in December 1694 in the following manner:
In the matrimonial suit of the illustrious Prince George Louis, Electoral Prince of Hanover, against
his consort, the illustrious Princess Sophie Dorothea, etc., we, constituted president and
judges of the Matrimonial Court of the Electorate and Duchy of Brunswick-Luneburg, declare and
pronounce judgment. After attempts have been tried and have failed to settle the matter amicably,
and in accordance with the documents and verbal declarations of the Princess and other detailed
circumstances, we agree that her continued denial of matrimonial duty and cohabitation
is well founded, and consequently that it is to be considered as an intentional desertion. In
consequence whereof we have considered sentence, and now declare the ties of matrimony to be
entirely dissolved and annulled. Since in similar cases of desertion it has been permitted to the
innocent party to re-marry, while the other is forbidden, the same judicial power will
be exercised in the present instance in favour of His Serene Highness the Electoral Prince.
It was only when the arrangements were complete that the Princess discovered that she was going
to be imprisoned by her father and never allowed to see her children again. She was locked up
under heavy guard here in Ahlden Castle and known as the princess or duchess of Ahlden.
Though well provided for financially, only her mother was allowed to visit her
and despite numerous requests over the years to be freed (including to her by-then adult daughter),
barring one brief trip to Celle from April to September 1700,
when it looked like the French might invade the territories where her normal prison was,
she never left Ahlden Castle and its grounds again. She died there in November 1726
and when the earth around the Castle proved to be too waterlogged to be used for burial,
her ex-husband allowed her to be interred in the ducal vaults in a church in Celle in May 1727.
But what of George Ludwig? He continued the relationship with Melusina and when he became the
Elector of Hanover upon the death of his father in 1698, she was given precedence over all other
ladies at court, save his mother and any Queens or Princesses who might happen to be visiting.
In 1714, he became King of Great Britain and Ireland and moved with her and their three
daughters (who were still presented as her nieces), to London. Although technically free
to marry again under Hanoverian law, in England the modern concept of divorce was in its infancy
and it was not permissible for him to remarry while his former wife lived. Nevertheless,
there have been rumours for centuries that he had a morganatic marriage with Melusina.
If you’ve never come across this phrase before, it means a union between two people of disparate
rank, in which the person of lower rank does not get the social privileges of the marriage (like
titles) and the children, though legitimate, are barred from inheriting their wealthier,
higher ranked parent’s money, lands and titles. It is still a legal marriage though,
in the sense that neither party can marry another without committing bigamy.
The evidence that George and Melusina had such a marriage is insufficient to be sure
of the matter one way or the other. One of George’s granddaughters said that they were
morganatic spouses and Melusina was given German titles in 1715 (when she was created
a countess of the Holy Roman empire) and in 1722 when the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI,
made her a Princess of Eberstein. Some have seen these honours as an indication of her status
as George’s wife, but there is no evidence that any marriage ceremony ever took place
and as far as we know neither George, nor Melusina ever referred to one another as husband and wife.
This is understandable given that any such announcement would have dredged up
the scandal of the marriage to and the imprisonment of Sophia Dorethea,
who was after all the mother of the heir to the throne. However, Melusina acted as George’s
primary hostess and was a well-known conduit to royal favour. In 1720 the English politician,
Robert Walpole, said of her that ‘she was, in effect, as much Queen of England as ever any was’.
Her unofficial position and importance to the King were marked in other ways too.
George gave her the Irish title of the Duchess of Munster, then the English title of Duchess of
Kendal, plus a hefty income to go with them. Perhaps had he had more time after Sophia
Dorethea’s death and before his own he might have publicly made an honest woman of Melusina,
but we’ll never know. George I died 7 months after his ex-wife,
on 11 June 1727, whilst on a trip back to Hanover. Melusina went back to Britain, where she lived out
her days with her surviving daughters (one of them had predeceased George) and died in 1743.
She is buried in South Audley Street Chapel in London with her eldest two children.
With her passing, the messy love life of George I had at last come to an end and ironically
(given the scandal caused at the time) it has even become something of a footnote in history.
After all, how many people have heard of Sophia Dorothea of Celle, Ehrengard Melusina Von Der
Schulenberg or Count Philip Christophe Von Konigsmarck? Probably not that many.
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but do let me know in the comments below what you think of Sophia Dorothea’s treatment by her family
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