The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (19 page)

It was at Kensington that Melusine and George expended most
of their creative efforts. The gardens, reminiscent of Herrenhausen, were particularly impressive. Saussure was enchanted. In the 1720s he wrote:

Going north, about two miles from Chelsea you reach Kensington, a large and fine village situated on a slight elevation. The King has a palace at this spot . . . it was much enlarged and embellished by Queen Anne and by the present reigning King [George]. It contains some magnificent paintings by Titian, Correggio, Veronese, and other painters . . . This palace is not vast, but its apartments are convenient and in good taste. When the King does not go to Hanover, he spends his summer in this palace. The gardens are so immense that twenty or thirty gardeners work in them. One evening, being surprised at seeing so many of these men going home from work, I inquired how many there were. One of them answered there had been fifty or sixty at work for the last fortnight.

The house was bought by William III from the Earl of Nottingham as a way of escaping filthy London and relieving his asthma. William particularly liked it because the staircases were shallow, reducing exertion and the inevitable and often debilitating wheezing that accompanied it. Saussure noted in his diary that it was during George’s reign that the old Nottingham House finally morphed into ‘buildings of a more palatial character’. But with George’s accession it was still a ‘very sweet villa’ and not the grandiose structure that we know today.

Melusine and George were eager to start work, but the upheaval of their first year in England meant that they could not seriously consider renovations until the beginning of 1716. Designs were submitted by Vanbrugh, and possibly by Wren in his capacity as Master of the King’s Works. If Wren did submit plans he probably took them with him when he left his post in 1718. We have no trace of them today. Vanbrugh wanted to recreate unsurpassable
Blenheim in the suburbs of London, but neither Melusine nor George wanted anything that suggested pomp. His grand plans were rejected.

Instead, the architect of George and Melusine’s Kensington was Colen Campbell, the architect favoured by William Benson, Wren’s replacement at the Board of Works. Benson was well aware of George’s taste. He accompanied the king to Hanover in 1716, and George was extremely impressed with his ideas for the fountain at Herrenhausen. Both Benson and Campbell shared George’s love of simple Palladianism above the more exuberant English baroque of Wren and Vanbrugh, although the finished building was probably influenced by Vanbrugh. The plans were finally approved in the summer of 1718, when George required the renovations to be completed ‘with all speed’.

The works conducted were on a huge scale, and saw the destruction of much of the old Nottingham House. The state apartments were sumptuously and expensively decorated by the artist William Kent. George uncharacteristically did not stint on cost – the colour he chose for the vaulted roof of the grand chamber, for example, was the expensive ultramarine at £350, over the Prussian blue at £300.

The most beautiful part of Kensington Palace was the Queen’s Apartments, built for Mary II. The large windows frame sweeping views over the gardens and the rooms are light and airy. They are on a more intimate scale than English monarchs had traditionally enjoyed, influenced by Mary’s years in the Netherlands and the Dutch predilection for a less formal monarchy. Her collection of pretty Chinese and Japanese porcelain, furniture and paintings can still be seen today. It was here that an often lonely and melancholy Mary would despair for the children so desired but never born, and imagine her adored husband’s infidelity.

But despite their beauty, Mary’s apartments were shut by
George I. They would not be used until Georg August came to the throne as George II. George may well have wanted Melusine to have the use of them, but propriety dictated that while Sophia Dorothea still lived in her Ahlden prison, not even Melusine could inhabit them. So he built her an exquisite house within Kensington Palace. It was the most beautiful of the non-state apartments.

It is generally very difficult to ascertain exactly who lived where at Kensington, as all we have is the information provided by the Board of Works, which is often patchy and incomplete. Much therefore is guesswork. But luckily in the case of Melusine we have the work of the art historian Christopher Hussey, who in 1928 wrote an article about the genesis of her accommodation at Kensington.
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We know from the accounts that Melusine’s house was constructed between 1722 and 1726, at the northernmost end of the palace. We also know that it dates from that period, as plans of 1716–17 show a completely different structure on the site. The building work was a huge undertaking, and for much of that time Melusine probably made do in other apartments, living on a building site littered with rubble and scaffolding. From 1724 the old Kitchen Court – the western court – was demolished, and the eastern court, or Green Cloth Court, was rebuilt around the existing structure. It is in Kitchen Court that we find Melusine’s house, occupying the north side. Today part of the house is occupied by Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

Melusine’s apartments were also decorated by William Kent, emulating his hero Inigo Jones’s work at Burlington House. The stucco work is elaborate, the chimneypieces splendid and gorgeous – the grey marble example in the drawing room stands nearly 6 feet high – and the grand staircase, thought by earlier historians to have been the work of Inigo Jones himself, is magnificent. The apartment is just as stately as the newly refurbished public rooms George commissioned, also decorated by William Kent. After all, much of the king’s business was done in these rooms. Walpole, Townshend, Sunderland, Stanhope and the Prince and Princess of Wales were all regular visitors and the setting was appropriately magisterial.

With building completed, a pleased George let it be known that he was ‘more at ease and tranquillity than ever before in England’.
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To add a touch of excitement to the beautifully completed palace, a zoo was added, filled, rather incongruously, with a tiger and tortoises.

But Melusine only enjoyed her lovely rooms, where George visited her daily between five and eight o’clock, for a year, after which his death forced her into private accommodation. The next occupant was probably Frederick Prince of Wales, Georg August and Caroline’s eldest child, who came over from Hanover soon after his grandfather’s death. We know that he had apartments at Kensington, and as Kitchen Court is today known as Prince of Wales Court, it is probable that it took its name from Frederick.

Kensington took eight years to build. It was only completed in 1726 and the final touches – the hanging of the paintings and the drapes, and the positioning of the furniture – had yet to be decided. When Georg August and Caroline moved in to their grand chambers the following year, they found the rooms sparsely furnished. Many of the walls in the private apartments remained bare of paintings prior to George and Melusine’s last trip to Hanover in the summer of 1727. They had expected to complete the final touches to the English home they were fondest of after their return.

11.
Politics and Players

I will send you a general map of Courts; a region yet unexplored . . . all the paths are slippery, and every slip is dangerous.

– The Earl of Chesterfield writing to his son, 1749
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After 1716 George never had fewer than twenty-five Hanoverian ministers in London.
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He needed them with him because, although now king of Great Britain, he remained Elector of Hanover, with full responsibility for the principality. His Hanoverian ministers were vital to carrying out his business there. They had an office in St James’s and their lodgings were either in the palace or nearby.

The Act of Settlement stated that no German could hold office or a title in England, and officially the Hanoverians were there solely to carry out George’s Electoral business. But in reality they became his unofficial advisers, together with Melusine, and to a lesser extent Sophia Charlotte. Naturally this meant that the ‘German cabal’ had a huge influence over how George conducted the nation’s business and who could rise at court.

The courtiers and George’s English ministers quickly realized that if they wanted to get anything done – preferment for a friend or relative, a bill passed through parliament, a title – it was best to approach the Germans to smooth the path. They acted as intermediaries between George and his English Secretaries of State, in large part because George’s English was, at least at first, extremely poor.
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Chief amongst them was Melusine, and certainly for the last five years of George’s reign, very little was done without her involvement. For example, in September 1723 Townshend, one of George’s English ministers, wrote to his brother-in-law Robert Walpole about the relatively small matter of a post in the king’s closet. Townshend wanted Sir William Irby to have the post but Melusine had a candidate of her own:

I must beg your pardon that I do not send you the King’s commands in relation to Sir Wm. Irby this post . . . I must acquaint you that since my writing to you on this subject, the Duchess [of Kendal] pleads a prior promise made to one Willard. However I will certainly get it for Sir Wm. Irby if it can be done without disobliging her which I am sure you will not desire.
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Later in the month Townshend, obviously less assured of success after conversations with Melusine, went on to say: ‘I hope Sir Wm. Irby’s business will succeed and that I shall get the Duchess to desist . . .’
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Although Townshend eventually triumphed and Irby was appointed at the beginning of 1724, it shows how integral Melusine’s approval was to everything within the king’s orbit.

Such was the importance of the Germans that in December 1714 Frederick Bonet, the Prussian Resident in London, told his master that the country was governed by Marlborough and Townshend, and also the Germans Bothmer and Bernstorff. In his opinion, he continued, the Germans were by far the most important of the four.
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Hans Kaspar von Bothmer had begun his service to the Hanoverians as Sophia Dorothea’s chamberlain and had been George’s envoy in England during the last years of Anne’s reign. He was devoted to the house he served and was instrumental in proclaiming George King of Great Britain. On Anne’s death he led a committee of the Council in burning her private papers – there could be no whiff of the suspicion that in her last days she might have preferred her Stuart brother as her successor – and appropriating her gold plate. Before George’s actual arrival at the end of September Bothmer was the most important man in the kingdom, fielding requests from anyone ‘with hopes of a job’.
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The most senior of George’s ministers to accompany him to England was Baron Andreas von Bernstorff, often simply called
‘the old Baron’. Bernstorff was a political veteran, having served George’s Celle uncle from the 1690s. He was George’s first minister in all but name, a wily operator with an encyclopedic knowledge of European affairs. George relied on him completely for foreign policy. In 1716 Lord Carnarvon’s pointed remark that Bernstorff was ‘the first and only minister the King relies on’ was more or less the truth.
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To the fury of George’s English ministers, he interfered in foreign policy and had no qualms about trampling over the fuzzy lines of the British sphere of influence. He readily used British resources to promote Hanoverian interests, although in theory the two were meant to be entirely separate. He was also said to be madly in love with Lady Mary Cowper, a Lady of the Bedchamber to Caroline, although this was unrequited. Mary was helpful to the new regime, as she used her fluent French to act as a translator between the king and her husband, the Lord Chancellor.

It is Mary’s extensive diaries of the beginning of Hanoverian rule that bring such life to the period. She was extremely beautiful and relatively young – she was twenty-eight on George’s accession – and Bernstorff, in his late sixties, was enchanted. This great statesman ran to her apartments on any pretext, and Lady Essex Robartes chided Mary for not making more of his feelings for her: ‘Mr Bernstorff, who never was in love in his life before and ’tis so considerable a conquest that you ought to be proud of it . . .’
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But Bernstorff’s ‘love’ for Mary may have been a ruse to gain intelligence. Lord Cowper, a member of the Cabinet Council, was privy to information that Bernstorff was not. In October 1715 Mary recorded in her diary:

There was at this time some misunderstandings in the Cabinet Council. B[aron] Bernstorff desired me to get information of it from my Lord Cowper who by me gave B. Bernstorff a faithful Account of every thing that was useful for him to know. It was an employment I was not fond of, but as it was at the request of B. Bernstorff and that I thought he was right in getting all the information he could I consented to it and so did my Ld. Cowper.
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Bernstorff was assisted by the Huguenot refugee Jean Robethon, another political veteran, who had served Duke George William of Celle and William III before entering George’s service. In England he was George’s Councillor of the Embassy. Other members of the inner circle included Baron Görtz, George’s treasurer, who had been in Hanoverian employ since 1686, and Friedrich Ernst von Fabrice, one of George’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and an intimate friend of both Melusine and her brother Johann Matthias. Sophia Charlotte’s husband, Johann Adolf Kielmansegg, was Master of the Horse – extremely important for George, considering how essential hunting was to his well-being – and young Frederick William Schulenburg, Melusine’s half-brother, was another gentleman of the bedchamber and trusted adviser. There is evidence that he performed at least one sensitive diplomatic mission for George, and the confidence the king had in him further bolstered Melusine’s position.