A History of the Four Georges, Volume I | Page 4

Elector-Palatine of the Rhine, and her life was crossed
and thwarted by the opening of the Thirty Years' War, and then by the
misfortunes of her brother Charles and his dynasty. Elizabeth survived
the English troubles and saw the Restoration, and came to live in {6}
England, and to see her nephew, Charles the Second, reign as king. She
barely saw this. Two years after the Restoration she died in London.
Sophia was her twelfth child: she had thirteen in all. One of Sophia's
elder brothers was Prince Rupert--that "Rupert of the Rhine" of whom
Macaulay's ballad says that "Rupert never comes but to conquer or to
die"--the Rupert whose daring and irresistible charges generally won
his half of the battle, only that the other half might be lost, and that his
success might be swallowed up in the ruin of his companions. His
headlong bravery was a misfortune rather than an advantage to his
cause, and there seems to have been one instance--that of the surrender
of Bristol--in which that bravery deserted him for the moment. We see
him afterwards in the pages of Pepys, an uninteresting, prosaic,
pedantic figure, usefully employed in scientific experiments, and with

all the gilt washed off him by time and years and the commonplace
wear and tear of routine life.
[Sidenote: 1714--The "Princess of Ahlden"]
George inherited none of the accomplishments of his mother. His father
was a man of some talent and force of character, but he cared nothing
for books or education of any kind, and George was allowed to revel in
ignorance. He had no particular merit except a certain easy good-nature,
which rendered him unwilling to do harm or to give pain to any one,
unless some interest of his own should make it convenient. His
neglected and unrestrained youth was abandoned to license and to
profligacy. He was married in the twenty-second year of his age,
against his own inclination, to the Princess Sophia Dorothea of Zeil,
who was some six years younger. The marriage was merely a political
one, formed with the object of uniting the whole of the Duchy of
Lüneberg. George was attached to another girl; the princess is supposed
to have fixed her affections upon another man. They were married,
however, on November 21, 1682, and during all her life Sophia
Dorothea had to put up with the neglect, the contempt, and afterwards
the cruelty of {7} her husband. George's strongest taste was for ugly
women. One of his favorites, Mademoiselle Schulemberg, maid of
honor to his mother, and who was afterwards made Duchess of Kendal,
was conspicuous, even in the unlovely Hanoverian court, for the
awkwardness of her long, gaunt, fleshless figure. Another favorite of
George's, Madame Kilmansegge, afterwards made Countess of
Darlington, represented a different style of beauty. She is described by
Horace Walpole as having "large, fierce, black eyes, rolling beneath
lofty-arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an
ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguishable from the
lower part of her body, and no portion of which was restrained by
stays."
It would not be surprising if the neglected Sophia Dorothea should
have looked for love elsewhere, or at least should not have been strict
enough in repelling it when it offered itself. Philip Christof
Königsmark, a Swedish soldier of fortune, was supposed to be her

favored lover. He suffered for his amour, and it was said that his death
came by the special order--one version has it by the very hand--of
George the Elector, the owner of the ladies Schulemberg and
Kilmansegge. Sophia Dorothea was banished for the rest of her life to
the Castle of Ahlden, on the river Aller. In the old schloss of Hanover
the spot is still shown, outside the door of the Hall of Knights, which
tradition has fixed upon as the spot where the assassination of
Königsmark took place.
The Königsmarks were in their way a famous family. The elder brother
was the Charles John Königsmark celebrated in an English State trial as
the man who planned and helped to carry out the murder of Thomas
Thynne. Thomas Thynne, of Longleat, the accused of Titus Oates, the
"Wise Issachar," the "wealthy Western friend" of Dryden, the comrade
of Monmouth, the "Tom of Ten Thousand," of every one, was
betrothed to Elizabeth, the child widow--she was only fifteen years
old--of Lord Ogle. Königsmark, fresh from love-making in {8} all the
courts of Europe, and from fighting anything and everything from the
Turk at Tangiers to the wild bulls of Madrid, seems to have fallen in
love with Thynne's betrothed wife, and to have thought that the best
way of obtaining her was to murder his rival. The murder was done,
and its story is recorded in clumsy bas-relief over Thynne's tomb in