George was now happy and reconciled to his fate, for his retinue was complete.  And what a retinue!  When the King landed at Greenwich with his grotesque assortment of Ministers, his hideous Turks, his two mistresses—­one a gaunt giant, the other rolling in billows of fat—­and his “nieces,” the crowds thronging the landing-place and streets greeted the “menagerie” with jeers and shouts of laughter.  They nicknamed Schulenburg the “Maypole,” and Kielmansegg the “Elephant,” and pursued the cavalcade with strident mockeries and insults.

“Goot peoples, vy you abuse us?” asked the Maypole, protruding her gaunt head and shoulders through the carriage window.  “Ve only gom for all your goots.”  “And for all our chattels, too, ——­ you!” came the stinging retort from a wag in the crowd.

But Schulenburg soon realised that she could afford to smile and shrug her scraggy shoulders at the insolence of those “horrid Engleesh.”  She found herself in a land of Goshen, where there were many rich plums to be gathered by far-reaching and unscrupulous hands such as hers.  If she could not love the enemy, she could at least plunder them; and this she set to work to do with a good will, while the plastic George looked on and smiled encouragement.  There were pensions, appointments, patents—­boons of all kinds to be trafficked in; and who had a greater right to act as intermediary than herself, the King’s chere amie and right hand?

She sold everything that was saleable.  As Walpole says, “She would have sold the King’s honour at a shilling advance to the best bidder.”  From Bolingbroke’s family she took L20,000 in three sums—­one for a Peerage, another for a pardon, and the third for a fat post in the Customs.  Gold poured in a ceaseless and glittering stream into her coffers.  She refused no bribe—­if it was big enough—­and was ready to sell anything, from a Dukedom to a Bishopric, if her price was forthcoming.  She made George procure her a pension of L7,500 a year (ten times as much as had long contented her well in Hanover); and when valuable posts fell vacant she induced him to leave them vacant and to give her the revenues.

Not content with filling her capacious pockets, she sighed for coronets—­and got them in showers.  Four Irish Peerages, from Baroness of Dundalk to Duchess of Munster, were flung into her lap.  And yet she was not happy.  She must have English coronets, and the best of them.  So George made her Baroness of Glastonbury, Countess of Feversham, and Duchess of Kendal.  And, to crown her ambition for such baubles, he induced the pliant German Emperor to make her a Princess—­of Eberstein.  Thus, with coffers overflowing with ill-gotten gold, her towering head graced with a dazzling variety of coronets, this grim idol of a King, who at sixty was as much her slave as in the twenties, was the proudest woman in England, patronising our own Duchesses, and snubbing Peeresses of less degree.  She might be a “maypole”—­hated and unattractive—­but at least she towered high above all the fairest and most blue-blooded beauties of her “Consort’s” Court.