But not one of all the glittering array of its dignitaries raised the family name to such an eminence—­a bad eminence—­as one of its plainest daughters, Ehrengard Melusina von der Schulenburg (to give her full, imposing name), who lived not only to wear the coronet of a Duchess of England, but to be “as much a Queen as ever there was in England.”

Fraeulein Ehrengard and her brother, who, as Count Mathias von der Schulenburg, was to win fame as the finest general in Europe of his day, were cradled and reared at the ancestral castle of Emden, in Saxony.  The Schulenburg women were never famed for beauty; but Ehrengard was, by common consent, the “ugly duckling” of the family—­abnormally tall, angular, awkward, and plain-featured, one of the last girls in Germany equipped for conquest in the field of love.

When she reached her sixteenth birthday, Ehrengard’s parents were glad to pack her off to the Court of Herrenhausen, where the family influence procured for her the post of maid-of-honour to the Electress Sophia of Hanover.  At any rate she was provided for—­an important matter, for the Schulenburgs were as poor as they were proud—­and she was too unattractive to get into mischief.  But it is the unexpected that often happens; and no sooner had the Elector’s son and heir, George, set eyes on the ungainly maid-of-honour than he promptly fell head over ears in love with her, to the amazement of the entire Court, and to the disgust of his mother, and of his newly-made bride, Sophia Dorothea of Zell.  To George—­an awkward, sullen young man of loutish manners and loose morals—­the gaunt girl, with her plain, sallow face, was a vision of beauty.  She appealed in some curious way to the animal in him; and before she had been many weeks at Herrenhausen she was his avowed mistress—­one of many.

“Just look at that mawkin,” the Electress Sophia once exclaimed to Lady Suffolk, who was a guest at the Hanoverian Court, “and think of her being my son’s mistress!” But to any other than his mother, George’s taste in women had long ceased to cause surprise.  The ugly and gross appealed to a taste which such beauty and refinement as his young wife possessed left untouched.  He had markedly demonstrated this perverseness of fancy already by showering his favours on the Baroness von Kielmansegg—­who was reputed to be his natural sister, by the way—­a lady so ugly that, as a child, Horace Walpole shrieked at sight of her.

She had, he recalls,

“two fierce black eyes, large and rolling, beneath two lofty arched eyesbrows; two acres of cheeks spread with crimson; an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distingushed from the lower part of her body, and no part of it restrained by stays.  No wonder,” he adds, “that a child dreaded such an ogress!”

Such were the two chief favourites of this unnatural heir to the throne of Hanover, who, by a curious turn of Fortune’s wheel, was to wear the English