The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I Read Online Free PDF Page A

electoral cap has been called ‘the most expensive bonnet in history’, and to secure it, Ernst August was prepared to compromise his religious beliefs, send his people to war, use his children to further his dynastic ambitions and – most damaging to his immediate family circle – establish primogeniture inHanover. It could only be achieved if Ernst August could prove that Hanover was large enough and wealthy enough to be of use to the Emperor – and more so than any of the competing German principalities.
    In pursuit of electoral status, Ernst August and Sophia spent a fortune on building and patronage. They rebuilt and modernized the Leineschloss, and the small summer villa of Herrenhausen was entirely remodelled by Ernst August’s Italian architect, Quirini, who used as his archetype the sublime Palladian palaces of the Veneto. If the Hanoverians could have lived anywhere on Earth they probably would have chosen Venice. Ernst August and George William adored it and kept a permanent residence there. But they were not doges of Venice; they were dukes of a minor German principality with ambitions, and Sophia was determined to make the best of it. Since the assumption of rule in Hanover, with the time-consuming duties it entailed, meant fewer opportunities for Venetian holidays, she would create a little Venice right there in Hanover, at Herrenhausen, for the family and court to delight in. When the work was completed the family spent every summer there, from May until October.
    The relatively simple building began life in 1665 when Johann Friedrich dismantled his hunting lodge, Lauenstein, near Coldingen, and took it to Hanover. Its half-timbered frame was remodelled by the Venetian architect Lorenzo Bedoghi, and the foundations of the baroque gardens were laid the following year. Johann Friedrich, a humanist and an enlightened prince, clearly gave much thought to the gardens and their layout. The philosophy behind baroque gardens was man’s taming of nature, and he charged his new thirty-year-old court adviser, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – who would achieve renown as a philosopher, mathematician, polymath and the implacable rival of Isaac Newton – to bring his skills to bear on the gardens from the outset.
    At Herrenhausen Leibniz’s fingerprints are everywhere. Throughout the 50 hectares of the Great Garden, for example, there is not one perfect right angle: they are all precisely 2.8 degrees out of true. 12 Baroque thinking gave rise to the paradoxical theory that perfection appears imperfect to the eye, hence flawlessness can only be achieved by a small discrepancy. Leibniz’s mathematical genius had detected that anything up to 3 degrees awry created something even more faultless to the eye than a perfect right angle. The ideal baroque garden aspired to be far more than a pleasing space. It was meant to represent the immeasurable nature of the universe. And at Herrenhausen the long pathways of the Great Garden almost tricked the eye into supposing that they carried on into infinity.
    Johann Friedrich continued to extend the house and the gardens until his death in 1679. Although the foundation of something marvellous was already there, Sophia was disappointed with what she saw as rural, dreary Herrenhausen. But she set about her improvements with such passion and determination that the project consumed her. She spent the next thirty-five years turning it into one of the glories of Hanover, and its incomparable gardens made the duke and duchess the envy of many a European ruler. Sophia said: ‘The garden is my life.’ And by the time she died in the middle of her wonderful creation in 1714 it was the most gorgeous and perfectly baroque garden in Europe.
    She summoned the French gardener Martin Charbonnier, who had designed the gardens at their palace of Osnabrück, to help her; in turn he employed other gardeners and sent them on scouting missions throughout Europe. Charbonnier oversaw the design of the