“We are ruined by trulls. Nay, what is more vexatious, by old ugly trulls, such as could not find entertainment in the most hospitable hundreds of Old Drury.”1
Over the centuries, for better or worse, countless monarchs have ruled countless kingdoms. Some of them have been forgotten, some of them have been celebrated. Some were benevolent, some tyrannical, but there was one thing they could agree on: marriage was a serious business. And business was the operative word. When a monarch or their heir took a spouse, the decision was often one of politics rather than romance. The wrong choice of a significant other might have ramifications that could shatter a kingdom, whilst the right ring on the right finger had the power to expand an empire, stuff even the most ailing coffers full of gold or cement a conquering dynasty for centuries.
That’s not to say that royal matches haven’t been made for love, nor that those made for duty couldn’t turn into devoted partnerships, but for every love match, there were plenty that began and ended as business. Some of these were famously disastrous, some made it work against the odds, and some hovered in between thanks to tolerance, patience or even the odd bit of extramarital dabbling. Yet whether famous or forgotten, all of these marriages had one duty at their heart: to secure succession.
The line of royal succession is the key to immortality. Play the game right and your line could rule for centuries. Get it wrong and it might be cut off, reducing a sovereign to a withered branch on the family tree. To secure the heir and the spare, or even better, spares, was the duty of every royal couple. A royal marriage was a job for life.
There was one thing that royal wives had to tolerate that their husbands didn’t. The mistress, or maîtresse-en-titre, as she was known in France, was as much a part of the court as the monarch’s ministers, regarded by some as a political marvel, by others as an avaricious tart. Yet if the modern understanding of a royal mistress is a woman whose role was purely decorative or sexual, that was far from the case in Georgian times. In fact, it was a hard-won position and one that some ladies had to employ all their wiles to cling onto. As you’ll see, in the case of one of the two subjects of this book, the king’s mistress was a lot more desperate to let go than to hang on.
Melusine von der Schulenberg and Henrietta Howard were two of the Georgian era’s most enduring royal mistresses. At the courts of George I and George II respectively, one became a surrogate wife, the other a necessary evil. Their journeys to the king’s bed were different but both joined households that were riven with misery and competition, where ambition ran rampant and gossip fuelled the flames. For Melusine, that journey included divorce, murder, and the near ruin of a country, whilst in the case of Henrietta, sanctuary from her brutal husband came at the cost of her only child’s love. Melusine had no queen to contend with, but Henrietta was the servant to her lover’s formidable bride, Caroline of Ansbach. It was a fundamental difference. George I made his mistress his one and only – most of the time – whilst for George II, the number one mistress would always be second best.
With palace apartments and the ear of the monarch supposedly theirs to command, both women enjoyed a rank and prestige that seemed to suggest their lives might be fairy tales. In fact, they were far from it. These are the stories of Melusine, Duchess of Kendal, and Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, the principal mistresses at the fractured, feuding courts of King George I and his son, King George II. This is also the story of a changing world, as Stuart gave way to Hanoverian and the family from Germany began their reign on the throne of Great Britain.