THE MAYPOLE DUCHESS
For many a century, ever since her history emerged from the mists of
antiquity, Germany never lacked a Schulenburg to grace her Courts, to
lead her armies, or to wear the mitre in her churches. They held their
haughty heads high among the greatest subjects of her emperors; their
family-tree bristled with marshals and generals, bishops and
ambassadors; and they waxed so strong and so numerous that they came to
be distinguished as "Black Schulenburgs" and "White Schulenburgs," as
our own Douglases were "black" and "red."
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.
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.
When George, on hearing of the death of his unhappy wife, Sophia
Dorothea, set out on his last journey to Hanover, his only companion was
the Duchess of Kendal, the woman to whose grim fascinations he had been
loyal for more than forty years; and it was she who closed his eyes in
the Palace of Osnabrück, in which he had drawn his first breath
sixty-seven years earlier.
A French fortune-teller had warned him that "he would not survive his
wife a year"; and, as he neared Osnabrück, the home of his brother, the
Prince Bishop, his fatal illness overtook him.
"When he arrived at Ippenburen, he was quite lethargic;
his hand fell down as if lifeless, and his tongue hung
out of his mouth. He gave, however, signs enough of life
by continually crying out, as well as he could
articulate, 'Osnabrück!' 'Osnabrück!'"
As night fell the sweating horses galloped into Osnabrück; an hour
later George died in his brother's arms, less than twelve months after
his wife had drawn her last breath in her fortress-prison of Ahlden.
The Duchess of Kendal was disconsolate.
"She beat her breasts and tore her hair, and, separating
herself from the English ladies in her train, took the
road to Brunswick, where she remained in close seclusion
about three months."
Returning to England, to the only solace left to her--her
money-bags--she spent the last seventeen years of her life alternating
between her villas at Twickenham and Isleworth. George had promised her
that if she survived him, and if it were possible, he would revisit her
from the spirit world.
"When," to quote Walpole again, "one day a large raven
flew into one of the windows of her villa at Isleworth,
she was persuaded that it was the soul of the departed
monarch, and received and treated it with all the respect
and tenderness of duty, till the Royal bird or she took
their last flight."
Thus, shorn of all her powers and splendour, in obscurity, and hoarding
her ill-gotten gold, died the most remarkable woman who has ever figured
in the British Peerage. Her vast fortune was divided between her two
"nieces," one of whom, created by her father, George, Countess of
Walsingham, became the wife of that polished courtier and heartless man
of the world, Philip, fourth Earl of Chesterfield.