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The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series

R >> Rafael Sabatini >> The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series




"When he went from the King on Monday morning my Lady Castlemaine
was in bed (though about twelve o'clock), and ran out in her
smock into her aviary looking into Whitehall Gardens; and thither
her woman brought her her nightgown; and she stood, blessing
herself at the old man's going away; and several of the gallants
of Whitehall--of which there were many staying to see the
Chancellor's return--did talk to her in her birdcage; among
others Blandford, telling her she was the bird of passage."

Clarendon lingered, melancholy and disillusioned, at his fine
house in Piccadilly until, impeached by Parliament, he remembered
Strafford's fate, and set out to tread once more and for the
remainder of his days the path of exile.

Time avenged him. Two of his granddaughters--Mary and Anne--
reigned successively as queens in England.





X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN

Count Philip Königsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea



He was accounted something of a scamp throughout Europe, and
particularly in England, where he had been associated with his
brother in the killing of Mr. Thynne. But the seventeenth century
did not look for excessively nice scruples in a soldier of
fortune; and so it condoned the lack of virtue in Count Philip
Christof Königsmark for the sake of his personal beauty, his
elegance, his ready wit, and his magnificent address. The court
of Hanover made him warmly welcome, counting itself the richer
for his presence; whilst he, on his side, was retained there by
the Colonelcy in the Electoral Guard to which he had been
appointed, and by his deep and ill-starred affection for the
Princess Sophia Dorothea, the wife of the Electoral Prince, who
later was to reign in England as King George I.

His acquaintance with her dated back to childhood, for they had
been playmates at her father's ducal court of Zell, where
Königsmark had been brought up. With adolescence he had gone out
into the world to seek the broader education which it offered to
men of quality and spirit. He had fought bulls in Madrid, and the
infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure wherever it was to be
met, until romance hung about him like an aura. Thus Sophia met
him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence shone the
more brightly against the dull background of that gross
Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of
the world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.

The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a
different kind. The sweet child he had known--she had been
married in 1682, at the age of sixteen--had come in her ten years
of wedded life to the fulfilment of the handsome promise of her
maidenhood. But her beauty was spiritualized by a certain
wistfulness that had not been there before, that should not have
been there now had all been well. The sprightliness inherent in
her had not abated, but it had assumed a certain warp of
bitterness; humour, which is of the heart, had given place in her
to wit, which is of the mind, and this wit was barbed, and a
little reckless of how or where it offended.

Königsmark observed these changes that the years had wrought, and
knew enough of her story to account for them. He knew of her
thwarted love for her cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, thwarted
for the sake of dynastic ambition, to the end that by marrying
her to the Electoral Prince George the whole of the Duchy of
Luneberg might be united. Thus, for political reasons, she had
been thrust into a union that was mutually loveless; for Prince
George had as little affection to bring to it as herself. Yet for
a prince the door to compensations is ever open. Prince George's
taste, as is notorious, was ever for ugly women, and this taste
he indulged so freely, openly, and grossly that the coldness
towards him with which Sophia had entered the alliance was
eventually converted into disgust and contempt.

Thus matters stood between that ill-matched couple; contempt on
her side, cold dislike on his, a dislike that was fully shared by
his father, the Elector, Ernest Augustus, and encouraged in the
latter by the Countess von Platen.

Madame von Platen, the wife of the Elector's chief minister of
state, was--with the connivance of her despicable husband, who
saw therein the means to his own advancement--the acknowledged
mistress of Ernest Augustus. She was a fleshly, gauche, vain, and
ill-favoured woman. Malevolence sat in the creases of her painted
face, and peered from her mean eyes. Yet, such as she was, the
Elector Ernest loved her. His son's taste for ugly women would
appear to have been hereditary.

Between the Countess and Sophia there was a deadly feud. The
princess had mortally offended her father-in-law's favourite. Not
only had she never troubled to dissemble the loathing which that
detestable woman inspired in her, but she had actually given it
such free and stinging expression as had provoked against Madame
von Platen the derision of the court, a derision so ill-concealed
that echoes of it had reached its object, and made her aware of
the source from whence it sprang.

It was into this atmosphere of hostility that the advent of the
elegant, romantic Königsmark took place. He found the stage set
for comedy of a grim and bitter kind, which he was himself, by
his recklessness, to convert into tragedy.

It began by the Countess von Platen's falling in love with him.
It was some time before he suspected it, though heaven knows he
did not lack for self-esteem. Perhaps it was this very self-
esteem that blinded him here to the appalling truth. Yet in the
end understanding came to him. When the precise significance of
the fond leer of that painted harridan's repellent coquetry was
borne in upon him he felt the skin of his body creep and roughen
But he dissembled craftily. He was a venal scamp, after all, and
in the court of Hanover he saw opportunities to employ his gifts
and his knowledge of the great world in such a way as to win to
eminence. He saw that the Elector's favourite could be of use to
him; and it is not your adventurer's way to look too closely into
the nature of the ladder by which he has the chance to climb.

Skilfully, craftily, then, he played the enamoured countess so
long as her fondness for him might be useful, her hostility
detrimental. But once the Colonelcy of the Electoral Guards was
firmly in his grasp, and an intimate friendship had ripened
between himself and Prince Charles--the Elector's younger son--
sufficiently to ensure his future, he plucked off the mask and
allied himself with Sophia in her hostility towards Madame von
Platen. He did worse. Some little time thereafter, whilst on a
visit to the court of Poland, he made one night in his cups a
droll story of the amorous persecution which he had suffered at
Madame von Platen's hands.

It was a tale that set the profligate company in a roar. But
there was one present who afterwards sent a report of it to the
Countess, and you conceive the nature of the emotions it aroused
in her. Her rage was the greater for being stifled. It was
obviously impossible for her to appeal to her lover, the Elector,
to avenge her. From the Elector, above all others, must the
matter be kept concealed. But not on that account would she forgo
the vengeance due. She would present a reckoning in full ere all
was done, and bitterly should the presumptuous young adventurer
who had flouted her be made to pay.

The opportunity was very soon to be afforded her. It arose more
or less directly out of an act in which she indulged her spite
against Sophia. This lay in throwing Melusina Schulemberg into
the arms of the Electoral Prince. Melusina, who was years
afterwards to be created Duchess of Kendal, had not yet attained
to that completeness of lank, bony hideousness that was later to
distinguish her in England. But even in youth she could boast of
little attraction. Prince George, however, was easily attracted.
A dull, undignified libertine, addicted to over-eating, heavy
drinking, and low conversation, he found in Melusina von
Schulemberg an ideal mate. Her installation as maîtresse en-titre
took place publicly at a ball given by Prince George at
Herrenhausen, a ball at which the Princess Sophia was present.

Accustomed, inured, as she was to the coarse profligacy of her
dullard husband, and indifferent to his philandering as her
contempt of him now left her, yet in the affront thus publicly
offered her, she felt that the limit of endurance had been
reached. Next day it was found that she had disappeared from
Herrenhausen. She had fled to her father's court at Zell.

But her father received her coldly; lectured her upon the freedom
and levity of her manners, which he condemned as unbecoming the
dignity of her rank; recommended her to use in future greater
prudence, and a proper, wifely submission; and, the homily
delivered, packed her back to her husband at Herrenhausen.

George's reception of her on her return was bitterly hostile. She
had been guilty of a more than usual, of an unpardonable want of
respect for him. She must learn what was due to her station, and
to her husband. He would thank her to instruct herself in these
matters against his return from Berlin, whither he was about to
journey, and he warned her that he would suffer no more tantrums
of that kind.

Thus he delivered himself, with cold hate in his white, flabby,
frog-face and in the very poise of his squat, ungainly figure.

Thereafter he departed for Berlin, bearing hate of her with him,
and leaving hate and despair behind.

It was then, in this despair, that Sophia looked about her for a
true friend to lend her the aid she so urgently required; to
rescue her from her intolerable, soul-destroying fate. And at her
elbow, against this dreadful need, Destiny had placed her
sometime playmate, her most devoted friend--as she accounted
him, and as, indeed, he was--the elegant, reckless Königsmark,
with his beautiful face, his golden mane, and his unfathomable
blue eyes.

Walking with him one summer day between clipped hedges in the
formal gardens of Herrenhausen--that palace as squat and
ungraceful as those who had built and who inhabited it--she
opened her heart to him very fully, allowed him, in her
overwhelming need of sympathy, to see things which for very shame
she had hitherto veiled from all other eyes. She kept nothing
back; she dwelt upon her unhappiness with her boorish husband,
told him of slights and indignities innumerable, whose pain she
had hitherto so bravely dissembled, confessed, even, that he had
beaten her upon occasion.

Königsmark went red and white by turns, with the violent surge of
his emotions, and the deep sapphire eyes blazed with wrath when
she came at last to the culminating horror of blows endured.

"It is enough, madame," he cried. "I swear to you, as Heaven
hears me, that he shall be punished."

"Punished?" she echoed, checking in her stride, and looked at him
with a smile of sad incredulity. "It is not his punishment I
seek, my friend, but my own salvation."

"The one can be accomplished with the other," he answered hotly,
and struck the cut-steel hilt of his sword. "You shall be rid of
this lout as soon as ever I can come to him. I go after him to
Berlin to-night."

The colour all faded from her cheeks, her sensitive lips fell
apart, as she looked at him aghast.

"Why, what would you do? What do you mean?" she asked him.

"I will send him the length of my sword, and so make a widow of
you, madame."

She shook her head. "Princes do not fight," she said, on a note
of contempt.

"I shall so shame him that he will have no alternative--unless,
indeed, he is shameless. I will choose my occasion shrewdly, put
an affront on him one evening in his cups, when drink shall have
made him valiant enough to commit himself to a meeting. If even
that will not answer, and he still shields himself behind his
rank--why, there are other ways to serve him." He was thinking,
perhaps, of Mr. Thynne.

The heat of so much reckless, romantic fury on her behalf warmed
the poor lady, who had so long been chilled for want of sympathy,
and starved of love. Impulsively she caught his hand in hers.

"My friend, my friend!" she cried, on a note that quivered and
broke. "You are mad--wonderfully beautifully mad, but mad. What
would become of you if you did this?"

He swept the consideration aside by a contemptuous, almost angry
gesture. "Does that matter? I am concerned with what is to become
of you. I was born for your service, my princess, and the service
being rendered . . ." He shrugged and smiled, threw out his hands
and let them fall again to his sides in an eloquent gesture. He
was the complete courtier, the knight-errant, the romantic preux-
chevalier all in one.

She drew closer to him, took the blue lapels of his military coat
in her white hands, and looked pathetically up into his beautiful
face. If ever she wanted to kiss a man, she surely wanted to kiss
Königsmark in that moment, but as she might have kissed a loving
brother, in token of her deep gratitude for his devotion to her
who had known so little true devotion.

"If you knew," she said, "what balsam this proof of your
friendship has poured upon the wounds of my soul, you would
understand my utter lack of words in which to thank you. You
dumbfound me, my friend; I can find no expression for my
gratitude."

"I ask no gratitude," quoth he. "I am all gratitude myself that
you should have come to me in the hour of your need. I but ask
your leave to serve you in my own way."

She shook her head. She saw his blue eyes grow troubled.

He was about to speak, to protest, but she hurried on. "Serve me
if you will--God knows I need the service of a loyal friend--but
serve me as I shall myself decide--no other way."

"But what alternative service can exist?" he asked, almost
impatiently.

"I have it in mind to escape from this horrible place--to quit
Hanover, never to return."

"But to go whither?"

"Does it matter? Anywhere away from this hateful court, and this
hateful life; anywhere, since my father will not let me find
shelter at Zell, as I had hoped. Had it not been for the thought
of my children, I should have fled long ago. For the sake of
those two little ones I have suffered patiently through all these
years. But the limit of endurance has been reached and passed.
Take me away. Königsmark!" She was clutching his lapels again.
"If you would really serve me, help me to escape."

His hands descended upon hers, and held them prisoned against his
breast. A flush crept into his fair cheeks, there was a sudden
kindling of the eyes that looked down into her own piteous ones.
These sensitive, romantic natures are quickly stirred to passion,
ever ready to yield to the adventure of it.

"My princess," he said, "you may count upon your Königsmark while
he has life." Disengaging her hands from his lapels, but still
holding them, he bowed low over them, so low that his heavy
golden mane tumbled forward on either side of his handsome head
to form a screen under cover of which he pressed his lips upon
her fingers.

She let him have his will with her hands. It was little enough
reward for so much devotion.

"I thank you again," she breathed. "And now I must think--I must
consider where I can count upon finding refuge."

That cooled his ardour a little. His own high romantic notion
was, no doubt, to fling her there and then upon the withers of
his horse, and so ride out into the wide world to carve a kingdom
for her with his sword. Her sober words dispelled the dream,
revealed to him that it was not quite intended he should
hereafter be her custodian. And there for the moment the matter
was suspended.

Both had behaved quite recklessly. Each should have remembered
that an Electoral Princess is not wise to grant a protracted
interview, accompanied by lapel-holding, hand-holding, and hand-
kissings, within sight of the windows of a palace. And, as it
happened, behind one of those windows lurked the Countess von
Platen, watching them jealously, and without any disposition to
construe the meeting innocently. Was she not the deadly enemy of
both? Had not the Princess whetted satire upon her, and had not
Königsmark scorned the love she proffered him, and then
unpardonably published it in a ribald story to excite the mirth
of profligates?

That evening the Countess purposefully sought her lover, the
Elector.

"Your son is away in Prussia," quoth she. "Who guards his honour
in his absence?"

"George's honour?" quoth the Elector, bulging eyes staring at the
Countess. He did not laugh, as might have been expected at the
notion of guarding something whose existence was not easily
discerned. He had no sense of humour, as his appearance
suggested. He was a short, fat man with a face shaped like a
pear--narrow in the brow and heavy in the jowl. "What the devil
do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean that this foreign adventurer, Königsmark, and Sophia grow
too intimate."

"Sophia!" Thick eyebrows were raised until they almost met the
line of his ponderous peruke. His face broke into malevolent
creases expressive of contempt.

"That white-faced ninny! Bah!" Her very virtue was matter for
his scorn.

"It is these white-faced ninnies can be most sly," replied the
Countess, out of her worldly wisdom. "Listen a moment now." And
she related, with interest rather than discount, you may be sure,
what she had witnessed that afternoon.

The malevolence deepened in his face. He had never loved Sophia,
and he felt none the kinder towards her for her recent trip to
Zell. Then, too, being a libertine, and the father of a
libertine, it logically followed that unchastity in his women-
folk was in his eyes the unpardonable sin.

He heaved himself out of his deep chair. "How far has this
gone?" he demanded.

Prudence restrained the Countess from any over-statement that
might afterwards be disproved. Besides, there was not the need,
if she could trust her senses. Patience and vigilance would
presently afford her all the evidence required to damn the pair.
She said as much, and promised the Elector that she would
exercise herself the latter quality in his son's service. Again
the Elector did not find it grotesque that his mistress should
appoint herself the guardian of his son's honour.

The Countess went about that congenial task with zeal--though
George's honour was the least thing that concerned her. What
concerned her was the dishonour of Sophia, and the ruin of
Königsmark. So she watched assiduously, and set others, too, to
watch for her and to report. And almost daily now she had for the
Elector a tale of whisperings and hand-pressings, and secret
stolen meetings between the guilty twain. The Elector enraged,
and would have taken action, but that the guileful Countess
curbed him. All this was not enough. An accusation that could not
be substantiated would ruin all chance of punishing the
offenders, might recoil, indeed, upon the accusers by bringing
the Duke of Zell to his daughter's aid. So they must wait yet
awhile until they held more absolute proof of this intrigue.

And then at last one day the Countess sped in haste to the
Elector with word that Königsmark and the Princess had shut
themselves up together in the garden pavilion. Let him come at
once, and he should so discover them for himself, and thus at
last be able to take action. The Countess was flushed with
triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent--and Madame von Platen
could not, being what she was, and having seen what she had seen,
conceive it innocent--it was in an Electoral Princess an
unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view,
which none would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in
the face, hurried off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen
following. He came too late, despite the diligence of his spy.

Sophia had been there, but her interview with the Count had been
a brief one. She had to tell him that at last she was resolved in
all particulars. She would seek a refuge at the court of her
cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, who, she was sure--for the sake
of what once had lain between them--would not now refuse to
shelter and protect her. Of Königsmark she desired that he should
act as her escort to her cousin's court.

Königsmark was ready, eager. In Hanover he would leave nothing
that he regretted. At Wolfenbuttelyy, having served Sophia
faithfully, his ever-growing, romantic passion for her might find
expression. She would make all dispositions, and advise him when
she was ready to set out. But they must use caution, for they
were being spied upon. Madame von Platen's over-eagerness had in
part betrayed her. It was, indeed, their consciousness of
espionage which had led to this dangerous meeting in the
seclusion of the pavilion, and which urged him to linger after
Sophia had left him. They were not to be seen to emerge together.

The young Dane sat alone on the window-seat, his chin in his
hands, his eyes dreamy, a faint smile on his shapely lips, when
Ernest Augustus burst furiously in, the Countess von Platen
lingering just beyond the threshold. The Elector's face was
apoplectically purple from rage and haste, his breath came in
wheezing gasps. His bulging eyes swept round the chamber, and
fastened finally, glaring, upon the startled Königsmark.

"Where is the Princess?" he blurted out.

The Count espied Madame von Platen in the back ground, and had
the scent of mischief very strong. But he preserved an air of
innocent mystification. He rose and answered with courteous ease:

"Your Highness is seeking her? Shall I ascertain for you?"

At a loss, Ernest Augustus stared a moment, then flung a glance
over his shoulder at the Countess.

"I was told that her Highness was here," he said.

"Plainly," said Königsmark, with perfect calm, "you have been
misinformed." And his quiet glance and gesture invited the
Elector to look round for himself.

"How long have you been here yourself?" Feeling at a
disadvantage, the Elector avoided the direct question that was in
his mind.

"Half an hour at least."

"And in that time you have not seen the Princess?"

"Seen the Princess?" Königsmark's brows were knit perplexedly. "I
scarcely understand your Highness."

The Elector moved a step and trod on a soft substance. He looked
down, then stooped, and rose again, holding in his hand a woman's
glove.

"What's this?" quoth he. "Whose glove is this?"

If Königsmark's heart missed a beat--as well it may have done--
he did not betray it outwardly. He smiled; indeed he almost
laughed.

"Your Highness is amusing himself at my expense by asking me
questions that only a seer could answer."

The Elector was still considering him with his ponderously
suspicious glance, when quick steps approached. A serving-maid,
one of Sophia's women, appeared in the doorway of the pavilion.

"What do you want?" the Elector snapped at her.

"A glove her Highness lately dropped here," was the timid answer,
innocently precipitating the very discovery which the woman had
been too hastily dispatched to avert.

The Elector flung the glove at her, and there was a creak of evil
laughter from him. When she had departed' he turned again to
Königsmark.

"You fence skilfully," said he, sneering, "too skilfully for an
honest man. Will you now tell me without any more of this,
precisely what the Princess Sophia was doing here with you?"

Königsmark drew himself stiffly up, looking squarely into the
furnace of the Elector's face.

"Your Highness assumes that the Princess was here with me, and a
prince is not to be contradicted, even when he insults a lady
whose spotless purity is beyond his understanding. But your
Highness can hardly expect me to become in never so slight a
degree a party to that insult by vouchsafing any answer to your
question."

"That is your last word, sir?" The Elector shook with suppressed
anger.

"Your Highness cannot think that words are necessary?"

The bulging eyes grew narrow, the heavy nether lip was thrust
forth in scorn and menace.

"You are relieved, sir, of your duties in the Electoral Guard,
and as that is the only tie binding you to Hanover, we see no
reason why your sojourn here should be protracted."

Königsmark bowed stiffly, formally. "It shall end, your Highness,
as soon as I can make the necessary arrangements for my
departure--in a week at most."

"You are accorded three days, sir." The Elector turned, and
waddled out, leaving Königsmark to breathe freely again. The
three days should suffice for the Princess also. It was very
well.

The Elector, too, thought that it was very well. He had given
this troublesome fellow his dismissal, averted a scandal, and
placed his daughter-in-law out of the reach of harm. Madame von
Platen was the only one concerned who thought that it was not
well at all, the consummation being far from that which she had
desired. She had dreamt of a flaming scandal, that should utterly
consume her two enemies, Sophia and Königsmark. Instead, she saw
them both escaping, and the fact that she was--as she may have
supposed--effectively separating two loving hearts could be no
sort of adequate satisfaction for such bitter spite as hers.
Therefore she plied her wicked wits to force an issue more
germane to her desires.

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