the count to kiss her hand before his abrupt departure and he was actually introduced by them into her bedchamber the next morning before she rose.  From that moment he disappeared nor was it known what became of him, till on the death of George I., on his son the new King’s first journey to Hanover, some alterations in the palace being ordered by him, the body of Konigsmark was discovered under the floor of the Electoral Princess’s dressing-room-the Count having probably been strangled there the instant he left her, and his body secreted.  The discovery was hushed up; George ii. entrusted the secret to his wife, Queen Caroline, who told it to my father:  but the King was too tender of the honour of his mother to utter it to his mistress; nor did Lady Suffolk ever hear of it, till I informed her of it several years afterwards.  The disappearance of the Count made his murder suspected, and various reports of the discovery of his body have of late years been spread, but not with the authentic circumstances.  The second George loved his mother as much as he hated his father, and purposed, as was said, had the former survived, to have brought her over and declared her Queen Dowager. (73) Lady Suffolk has told me her surprise, on going to the new Queen the morning after the news arrived of the death of George I., at seeing hung up in the Queen’s dressing-room a whole length of a lady in royal robes; and in the bedchamber a half length of the same person, neither of which Lady Suffolk had ever seen before.  The Prince had kept them concealed, not daring to produce them during the life of his father.  The whole length he probably sent to Hanover:  (74) the half length I have frequently and frequently seen in the library of Princess Amelia, who told me it was the portrait of her grandmother. she bequeathed it, with other pictures of her family, to her nephew, the Landgrave of Hesse.

Of the circumstances that ensued on Konigsmark’s disappearance I am ignorant; nor am I acquainted with the laws of Germany relative to divorce or separation:  nor do I know or suppose that despotism and pride allow the law to insist on much formality when a sovereign has reason or mind to get rid of his wife.  Perhaps too much difficulty of untying the Gordian not of matrimony thrown in the way of an absolute prince would be no kindness to the ladies, but might prompt him to use a sharper weapon, like that butchering husband, our Henry viii.  Sovereigns, who narrow or let out the law of God according to their prejudices and passions, mould their own laws no doubt to the standard of their convenience.  Genealogic purity of blood is the predominant folly of Germany; and the code of Malta seems to have more force in the empire than the ten commandments.  Thence was introduced that most absurd evasion of the indissolubility of marriage, espousals with the left hand-as if the Almighty had restrained his ordinance to one half of a man’s person, and allowed a greater latitude