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
Lueneberg. 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
Koenigsmark, 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 Koenigsmark took place.

The Koenigsmarks were in their way a famous family. The elder brother
was the Charles John Koenigsmark 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
Monmou