The circumstantial tale continued. The prosecution showed how Karl had taken alarm at the arrests of the mercenaries, and had fled to Rotherhithe in his grotesque black wig, and found refuge that night with a Swedish ship’s captain. It was worked out by means of watermen and servants how he had continued the next day to Gravesend, where the captain’s ship lay waiting. There he had been discovered by two men in Monmouth’s employ, who traced him to the boat.
There had been a short struggle when they took him. His wig had slipped off, and his ordinary clothes, hidden under a greatcoat he had borrowed, were disclosed. Then he admitted who he was and came along quietly, through a hostile crowd at the water front who had to be held back by his captors. A conversation he had with the two men, Kid and Gibbons, while waiting for transport back to London, was significant.
Said Gibbons, “I belong to the Duke of Monmouth.”
“Why,” said Count Karl, “the Duke of Monmouth has no command now; how can you take me by his order?”
Gibbons said, “My lord, I do not apprehend you by his order. You have killed a very good friend of mine, and had not Providence ordered it otherwise, you had like to have killed a more particular friend, and a master.”
Königsmark seemed “very sorry at that,” Gibbons narrated. “But,” he said, “I don’t think they would have done any harm to the Duke of Monmouth.”
A little later the count said, as if to himself, “It is a stain upon my blood; but one good action in the wars or one lodging upon a counterscarp will wash away all that.”
He tried to discover how much was known. Gibbons was canny, but, perhaps in an experimental spirit, he announced falsely that Vratz had confessed.
“I do not believe the captain would confess anything,” said Königsmark confidently.
Going upriver, back to London, there was more conversation. “I told him that I was at Newgate on Friday, and there saw those who had done that barbarous fact,” said Gibbons. “With that, my lord asked me what lodgings there were at Newgate, and whether the captain had a good lodging. I told him a very good one. He asked me whether he confessed anything; I told him he had confessed some particulars; and, said I, it is the most barbarous thing that ever was done. ‘Certainly,’ says my lord, ‘this Mr. Thynne must have some correspondence and commerce with some lady that this captain knew, that belonged to the court, or he would never have done it.’ As for the Polander, I told him he had confessed, and that he wept mightily. With that, my lord seemed very much concerned, and took up his clothes and bit them, and sat awhile up, but was very much discomposed, and then desired to lie down.”
In court, having thought it over, Königsmark had some sort of answer to all this. The “Polander,” he said, he had met in Tangiers, and learned that Borosky was once groom to his uncle. He had thereupon formed a plan to bring him to England, to dress his horses after the German way. In proof of this statement, young Count Philipp eagerly testified that his brother had actually sent him money from France with orders that Borosky should buy him some horses, against his arrival. As for having supplied the man with a sword, Karl freely admitted it. It was the custom in Poland for men in Borosky’s position to go about with such weapons. Karl had run away after the murder, he said, because he was afraid “the common people,” always ready to suspect foreigners like himself, might hold him responsible for Thynne’s death, and knock him on the head.
The testimony was declared complete. Karl was told to make a speech in his own defense, if he wished (though the others were not given this chance), and he readily did so, addressing the court both in French and German. He was, he said, a Protestant; his forefathers were Protestants; they had always fought in defense of the Protestant religion and no other. Presumably no Knights of Malta were present to give the count the lie, and no one else disputed his word. He loved England and the King, he declared. As a good Protestant, he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with such a horrid crime. “And he says, that if any of his former actions can give any the least suspicion of his being guilty of this or any foul act, he is very willing to lay down his life, and very willing to have it cut off immediately.”
“Immediately,” added Königsmark firmly, echoing the interpreter in English.
Vratz, Stern, and Borosky were adjudged guilty. The interpreter duly reported their permitted remarks when they heard the judgment. Borosky said he prayed God to have mercy on him. Vratz said he was never rightly examined nor fairly tried. Stern said he did it for the captain’s sake.
Königsmark was found not guilty. He said in English, “God bless the King and the honorable Bench!” After which he hastily departed from England.
Vratz held out to the end, rejecting all temptation to tell more about the crime than he had already done. When Dr. Gilbert Burnet visited him, as he often did, and exhorted him to repent and so forth, “He said it was his own affair, and he desired to be left to himself; but he spake with great assurance of God’s mercy to him.” At long distance Königsmark claimed the body, and had it put in a magnificent coffin, and caused it to be carried to Holland.
Whatever God’s mercy may have proved to be, I am sure that in the afterworld it never occurred to Vratz, when Count Königsmark arrived five years later, to offer reproaches. He was a mercenary and he had his code. To Dr. Burnet it may have seemed an outlandish code, but it satisfied Vratz, and will accompany that stouthearted man, I am convinced, to the outer limits of Eternity.
2. PHILIPP CHRISTOPH
Karl Johann had escaped by the skin of his teeth and Charles II’s prejudice. Now he tactfully withdrew from England so that public indignation might have a chance to die down, though as a matter of fact the general public cared less about injustice of the sort than did the aristocracy. Only a few of those who could afford the finer feelings maintained the principle of noblesse oblige on the subject of the count.
“This day was executed Colonel Vratz and some of his accomplices,” wrote Evelyn, one of the conscientious gentlemen, on the tenth of March 1682, “for the execrable murder of Mr. Thynne, set on by the principal Königsmark. He went to execution like an undaunted hero, as one that had done a friendly deed for that base coward, Count Königsmark.…”
Karl too may have been assailed by his conscience; nobody knows. Whatever he felt, he continued to prove his incredible insolence by going straight to Holland, where he renewed his courtship of Lady Ogle. Tact was never the count’s most notable characteristic. Probably he felt it unnecessary; the rich little widow had not encountered much tact as yet in her adventurous life, and she might be said to have owed him a debt of gratitude, in a way, for having killed her unpleasant husband. But he didn’t get far with her. Either she had too much native common sense, or her temporary guardian, Lady Temple, advised her well. She might possibly have disliked Count Königsmark from the beginning. Whatever her motives, she sent him about his business, and Königsmark went back to the wars.
Lady Ogle’s future had nothing to do with the Königsmark family, but it is interesting to know that she married for the third time, and became Duchess of Somerset, and lived a long, contented life.
In London during the weeks after the trial, Karl’s young brother Philipp Christoph found his position awkward. The family name had become notorious and was execrated throughout the city, so that it was uncomfortable to go out of doors. Yet indoors he found no comfort either, since his guardian and tutor, Frederick Hanson, had borne witness against Count Karl and was under sentence of dismissal from Karl’s indignant family in Sweden. The little household in the Haymarket must be dispersed forthwith.
All Karl’s original plans for his brother, including Oxford after the course at Faubert’s Academy had been completed, were jettisoned. Instead, Philipp was sent to the Continent to complete his military training, going from court to court in the accepted manner of young noblemen doing the Grand Tour. There was never any lack of welcome wherever he went: he was exceedingly popular. He was even better-looking than Karl, just as tale
nted, and he showed a similar spirit in battle. As Karl had done before him, Philipp went first to visit his uncle Otto Wilhelm at the Swedish Embassy at Versailles. After that he traveled in Spain and Italy and Germany. Germany he already knew well and found congenial—his mother was half German; the Königsmarks had many connections there—and for this reason he spent much of his training period at Dresden.
In 1682, the first year of his wanderings, Philipp heard a good deal of talk about a marriage which was being arranged and was going to take place in the little German duchy of Celle, near Hanover. Philipp had lived at Celle for a while when he was a child, and he had pleasant memories of the ducal Schloss there, where he had played in the garden with the duke’s daughter, little Sophie Dorothea. She was just his age and they had been sweethearts, fondly smiled upon by their elders. It had been a truly Teutonic idyll, all infantile sentiment. But now the little Sophie Dorothea was evidently grown up, like Philipp himself. At least she was old enough to marry. Philipp probably reacted only mildly when he heard this news; he could hardly lay claim to any serious pangs of jealousy this late in the day. But he may well have played with the idea of regretting his lost love, and sighed a few times for sensation’s sake, before he continued on his travels.
To avoid confusion, we must now forget Philipp for a little while and turn our attention to the history of this bride he had known and was to meet again.
The wedding between the children of the Dukes of Hanover and Celle reunited two duchies which had previously been part of one duke’s land. Father of the bride and father of the bridegroom were brothers. It was very much a family affair, and was looked upon as such by quite a few petty German princes. Not many of them realized that behind the match someone was playing a game for considerable stakes—England’s throne. Though Sophie Dorothea, Princess of Celle, and George Louis, Prince of Hanover, were members of royalty, there were so many royal beings in the Empire (the Holy Roman Empire as it was called, though actually it was not much more than Germany and Austria combined) one could scarcely keep track of them.
The status of all these German and Austrian dukes and princes and electors, who were nominally subject to the Emperor Leopold, was a peculiarly loose and undefined one. For one thing, there was the fact, which seems strange in the light of our modern ideas, that such a duke or prince was quite free to ally himself with an enemy of the Emperor’s if he wished, and to make war on Leopold himself, without being condemned as a traitor. He was a subject only by courtesy, as it were. Another oddity of the Empire’s system of government was the assignment of hereditary rights. There was no hard-and-fast rule of succession. A prince, elector, or duke selected for himself, without reference to the Emperor, his heir and successor to his title. Many a ruler who had more than one child would divide his domain into small pieces and distribute them in his will among his sons, in a praiseworthy but shortsighted ambition to provide for the whole family. Usually, as soon as he was dead, the children set to work trying to join up the lands again, by force or trickery or marriage, for their children. And so wars were stimulated.
One of these reigning noblemen, a duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, had no sons, but left his land to two nephews, George William and Ernest Augustus. Celle, the sovereign principality, came into the possession of George William. His brother Ernest Augustus inherited Hanover, ten leagues from Celle, and Osnabrück as well. Duke George William was the richer, but Duke Ernest Augustus had more land and a much more important wife. George William’s wife was Eléonore d’Olbreuse, daughter of a French Huguenot marquis who had been exiled. Ernest Augustus’s wife was Princess Sophia, one of the children of Elizabeth of Bohemia and thus niece to Charles I. Like her mother the Winter Queen and her brothers Rupert and Maurice, Sophia considered herself thoroughly English. She tried to instill in her eldest son, George Louis, a similar Anglophilia; she wanted to kindle in him an ambition to inherit England’s crown, which during George Louis’s childhood was being worn by Charles II, Sophia’s cousin. In this endeavor she failed. George Louis persisted in thinking of himself as a Hanoverian.
Sophia was an admirable woman in many ways, with a keen intellect and a quick wit, but she was not a kind person and she had many fierce antipathies. Among them was her sister-in-law, George William’s wife Eléonore. Really, Sophia was quite unfair about Eléonore. There was nothing wrong with the Duchess of Celle; indeed, most people liked her very much. But Sophia said she was low and common, unworthy to be married to a duke. The real reason for this enmity was that Eléonore had ruined the Hanover family’s prospects of inheriting Celle, and though Sophia’s ambitions outstripped this mere little duchy, she would not have minded getting hold of it on her way to higher things.
Her resentment was not so unreasonable as it may seem at first sight, for the Hanover faction’s hopes had been raised by Duke George William himself, before he thought better of it. As a younger man he had announced that he was a confirmed bachelor, and that his brother or his brother’s issue should inherit his goods. Then he fell in love with Eléonore d’Olbreuse, and when she resisted all his attempts to seduce her he made her his morganatic wife. Years of near-respectability and the birth of his daughter Sophie Dorothea softened him still farther, and he lent a willing ear to the urgings of his cousin the Duke of Wolfenbüttel, that he make everything quite aboveboard by marrying Eléonore properly. This he did, ultimately, despite Sophia’s opposition. By special dispensation of the Emperor, whose powers extended this far at least, the Duke of Celle went through the necessary ceremony with his morganatic wife and she was morganatic no longer, but a full-fledged duchess. Sophie Dorothea became a princess at the same moment. Sophia could not forgive Eléonore. Her attacks were spiteful and savage, and Eléonore heartily reciprocated the sentiments of the Duchess of Hanover.
Like most wealthy little girls of the seventeenth century, Sophie Dorothea was betrothed before reaching the age of puberty. She must have been affianced even at the time she played with Philipp Christoph von Königsmark, when they were small children. But her parents, less brutal than the guardians of Elizabeth Percy, who married her off in childhood to Lord Ogle, did not carry their arrangements so far. Sophie Dorothea was still unmarried when her young man, a Wolfenbüttel prince, was killed in some war or other. She was only ten or eleven at the time, and it was generally supposed that she would ultimately marry his younger brother.
While the duke and duchess desultorily discussed the new engagement, over in Hanover the Duchess Sophia, whom the little princess had never seen, was also busying herself with matchmaking. George Louis, six years older than his cousin Sophie Dorothea, was a valuable political pawn. He had no aesthetic appeal, no personal charm, having taken after his fat father’s side of the family rather than the impulsive, quick-witted, long-legged clan of the Winter King, but he had his points; he had his prospects. Sophia entertained grandiose ideas of marrying him to Princess Anne, daughter of Charles II’s brother James, who was next in line for the throne of England.
This project alarmed and angered William of Orange. He had already married Mary, Anne’s sister, and intended to inherit England himself when the time came. George Louis must be got out of the way: why should he not make a less ambitious match? Let him take to wife his cousin Sophie Dorothea of Celle and remove himself from the race for England. William knew that George Louis’s mother and Sophie Dorothea’s mother were not on speaking terms—such chitchat was an important part of statecraft—but it was not an insuperable difficulty, he was sure. Women’s preferences were usually ignored in these matters.
Naturally reluctant to put the proposition himself to the dukes involved, William went to work intriguing on conventional lines, and arranged to hire spies at each of the two German courts. Bernstorff, first minister to George William, was his spy at Celle, and at Hanover he made connections with Madame Platen.
This Madame Platen held the office of court mistress, an institution which few well-run contemporary European courts were without. We are
puzzled nowadays to figure out just where society drew the line on this matter. The world allegedly considered royal mistresses bad things. According to later historians, people of the seventeenth century shook their heads and strongly disapproved of such goings on. Charles II is constantly described as having called down the curses of the people on his head for having flaunted his mistresses as he did. But the more I read, the more I wonder if these later historians have not projected their own indignations into the past. It wasn’t only Charles of England who flaunted mistresses; practically every duke and prince in Europe did the same. There couldn’t have been very much serious headshaking, considering. Of course the duchesses and princesses didn’t care much for the system; that is to be expected. But as for public odium—no, I do not believe it. It was much too common and popular a fashion.
Take Madame Platen, now. She was Ernest Augustus’s mistress, and really he might just as well have been married to her and kept his wife Sophia as a mistress instead, for all the promiscuity he indulged in apart from these relationships. Ernest Augustus was no libertine; he was merely a bigamist, a very different thing. What is more, he was a henpecked bigamist, rather meek with both his women.