having a great ascendancy over the King of Great Britain, and maintaining a strict union with his ministers, must materially influence their principal resolutions. You will neglect nothing to acquire a share of her confidence, from a conviction that nothing can be more conducive to my interests. There is, however, a manner of giving additional value to the marks of confidence you bestow on her in private, by avoiding in public all appearances which might seem too pointed; by which means you will avoid falling into the inconvenience of being suspected by those who are not friendly to the Duchess ; at the same time that a kind of mysteriousness in public on the subject of your confidence, will give rise to a firm belief of your having formed a friendship mutually sincere."

Though George the First was far from being constant to his antiquated Sultana, she, nevertheless, maintained her unaccountable influence over him to the last. It must have been the force of habit, indeed, rather than the remains of any softer feeling, which latterly attached him to the mistress of his youth, for at the period when death dissolved their union, the connection between them must have subsisted for nearly half a century. Unquestionably, she was of great service to him after he had ascended the throne of England; for not only, from a long course of experience, was she intimately acquainted with his tastes, his prejudices, and habits, and thus able to dissipate the tedium of his more solitary hours,

but she also did the honours of his evening parties, and, apparently, was complaisant enough to allow him to extend his favours to younger rivals, without wearying him with inconvenient reproaches. Occasionally, it is said, she used to complain of the great difficulty she experienced in amusing the King, and finding employment for his idle hours. A similar complaint is known to have been made by Madame de Maintenon during her intercourse with Louis the Fourteenth. George the First, when he paid his nightly visits to the apartments of the Duchess of Kendal, is said to have usually employed himself in cutting paper into different shapes.

Probably, the Duchess really retained an attachment for her royal lover. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observes, speaking of their almost ludicrous amours, "She was duller than the King, and, consequently, did not find out that he was so." She accompanied her royal lover in his last visit to Hanover, but, for some reason, remained behind at Delden, while the King was hastening towards Osnaburg. She had, however, proceeded on her journey, when a courier met her on the road, and announced to her the melancholy tidings of the King's illness. She immediately hurried forward with all speed, but had accomplished only a few miles when a second courier communicated to her the tidings of his death. The grief which she displayed on hearing the news, to all appearance, was excessive and sincere. She even beat her breast and tore her hair, and immediately separating herself from the English ladies who

accompanied her, took the road to Brunswick, where she remained in close seclusion about three months.

A somewhat fantastic anecdote is related by Horace Walpole, which, though it places in a ridiculous light the superstition both of George the First and of his mistress, yet affords pleasing evidence that they were sincerely attached to each other. "In a tender mood," says Walpole, "George the First promised the Duchess of Kendal, that if she survived him, and it were possible for the departed to return to this world, he would make her a visit. The Duchess, on his death, so much expected the accomplishment of that engagement, that a large raven, or some black fowl, flying into one of the windows of her villa at Isleworth, she was persuaded it was the soul of her departed monarch so accoutred, and received and treated it with all the respect and tenderness of duty, till the royal bird or she took their last flight."

The Duchess of Kendal, after the death of her royal lover, paid a compliment to England, by making it the country of her choice. She principally resided at Kendal House, near Twickenham, which, after her death, was converted into a teagarden. She expired in the early part of 1743, in the eighty-fifth year of her age. Her wealth, of which Walpole, in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, speaks as "immense," was divided between her reputed niece and presumed daughter, the Countess of Chesterfield, and some other German relations.

329

SOPHIA CHARLOTTE,

COUNTESS OF PLATEN AND DARLINGTON.

racter.

Sister of Count Platen, one of the most influential noblemen in Hanover. The family of Platen supply the Electoral House with mistresses.-The young Countess taken by her ambitious mother to the Electoral Court.-She thwarts her mother's schemes by falling in love with the son of a Hamburgh merchant. She marries him, in order to preserve her chaHer mother's disappointment and death. The Countess separates from her husband, and squanders the fortune left her by her mother.-Becomes George the First's mistress. His vexation at her indiscretions and extravagance. She accompanies him to England.-Character of her by Lady M. W. Montagu.-Her liaison with Mr. Methuen.Created Countess of Darlington.-Horace Walpole's portrait of her in her old age. Her daughter by George the First married to Viscount Howe of Ireland.-Death of the Countess in 1730.

SOPHIA CHARLOTTE, Countess of Platen, who figures as the next in importance in the seraglio of George the First, had attained the age of forty at the period when she followed the King to this country. She was of the house of Offlen, being sister of Count Platen, one of the most considerable men in Hanover. It seems to have been the fate of this family to supply the Electoral House with mistresses. The mother of Count Platen had long been the mistress of the Elector Ernest

Augustus, and, moreover, the Count had the misfortune to see his wife and sister successively filling the same situation to the Elector George Lewis, afterwards King of England.

The mother of the Countess of Platen is said to have carried her daughter to the Electoral court, with the express purpose of establishing her as the mistress of the future sovereign of England. The young lady was possessed of an agreeable person and considerable powers of fascination, and such was the effect which they produced on the amorous Elector, that his desertion of his consort, Sophia of Zell, and the subsequent divorce and misery of that unhappy woman, have been traced to this discreditable attachment. The young lady, however, discovered, at least at this period, but little inclination to second the ambitious views of her mother. Indeed, she completely thwarted them by falling in love with a M. Kilmansegge, the son of a merchant of Hamburgh, and by conferring on this person the favours which she had refused her sovereign, shortly afterwards proved in a fair way to become a mother. As the only means of saving her from irremediable disgrace, it was thought expedient to marry her to her seducer. Her mother died shortly after this event (as was supposed, of grief and disappointment), and bequeathed her daughter the large fortune of £40,000, which, in her youth, she had obtained from the generosity of her early lover, the Elector Ernest Augustus.

Impatient of matrimonial restraint, and addicted