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

has his mistresses and maintains an army.’ 14
    The French King Louis XIV’s unsurpassable court and palace of Versailles, a former hunting lodge some 25 kilometres from Paris, became the model for aspirational princes throughout Europe.Louis moved the court there in 1682 in an attempt to curb the intrigues of his courtiers in the vast and labyrinthine Louvre – he wanted the key men in France to remain under his watchful eye. When Sophia visited in 1664 on a grand tour of France and northern Italy, she was struck by the unique formal beauty of the palace and grounds. She admired the pomp and the sophisticated revels. The rigidity of the court structure appealed to her sense of royal entitlement. After she and Ernst August inherited the principality in 1679, Sophia succeeded in creating a court at Hanover that became an eastern reflection of that of the Sun King in France. Whilst Hanover’s pleasures reflected the frenzied delights of the Venetian carnival, the style, the fashion, and the language of the court was French – the lingua franca of international diplomacy.
    Sophia and Ernst August had inherited the services of the dazzling Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Johann Friedrich, and he became so indispensable to the dynasty that he stayed for forty years. Leibniz became the family’s historian, diplomat, adviser and great friend. In him, Sophia found an intellectual sparring partner, just as her contemporary Queen Christina of Sweden, the ‘Minerva of the North’, had done in the philosopher René Descartes and in her secretary Monsieur Urban de Chevreau, who briefly filled the post in Hanover until Leibniz’s arrival. With Leibniz, the new duke and duchess devised a plan to promote the glory of their house, to make them all ‘immortal’.
    Leibniz was charged with producing a genealogy of the House, the Historia Domus , in order to support its claim to the Electorate by claiming descent from heroes of German and Classical history. His excavations in the archives of Germany and Italy produced the hoped-for link with the twelfth-century German hero Henry the Lion. But Leibniz was not the first to delve into the family’s past. In 1685 a Venetian scholar, Abbot Theodoro Damaideno, had discovered not only a link to the d’Este family of northern Italy, butalso to Rome’s second Caesar, Augustus, to the fifth-century BC Accius Navius, a contemporary of the legendary Tarquin, supposed fifth king of Rome, and to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor.
    Such revered and newly resurrected ancestors prompted a flurry of portraiture and architecture as the dead were brought into play to enhance the glory of the House. In 1664, when Sophia and Ernst August had embarked on their grand tour of northern Italy and France, they had noted how at Versailles and in the Veneto Louis XIV and the Italian princes had exploited architecture and decoration for their own propaganda. Now, twenty years later, the duke and duchess made use of the lesson. Fresh ancestral portraits were commissioned. At the Leineschloss, most prominently in the newly decorated presence chamber, the ducal family were observed by the multitude of German, Roman and Byzantine heroes they claimed as their own. Hanover’s link to ancient Rome and the glory of medieval Germany was celebrated not only in portraiture, but in the classical simplicity of Palladian architecture.
    The Hanoverian ruling house allowed Leibniz incredible freedom to follow his own intellectual pursuits, and he seems to have formed a warm and genuine friendship with Sophia. Yet he had travelled in London and Paris and felt himself far too urbane for the ‘provincial’ Hanoverians, despite Sophia’s and Ernst August’s efforts to make their court a magnet for European intellectuals. He complained: ‘Everything that so confines me both mentally and physically derives from my not living in a large city like Paris or London’ and he lamented the absence of men from whom he could