Crime enough is in it, sin and folly on both sides; there is killing too, but NOT assassination (as it turns out); on the whole there is nothing of atrocity, or nothing that was not accidental, unavoidable;--and there is a certain greatness of DECORUM on the part of those Hanover Princes and official gentlemen, a depth of silence, of polite stoicism, which deserves more praise than it will get in our times. Enough now of the Konigsmark tragedy;[A considerable dreary mass of books, pamphlets, lucubrations, false all and of no worth or of less, have accumulated on this dark subject, during the last hundred and fifty years; nor has the process yet stopped,--as it now well might. For there have now two things occurred in regard to it FIRST: In the year l847, a Swedish Professor, named Palmblad, groping about for other objects in the College Library of Lund (which is in the country of the Konigsmark connections), came upon a Box of Old Letters,--Letters undated, signed only with initials, and very enigmatic till well searched into,--which have turned out to he the very Autographs of the Princess and her Konigsmark; throwing of course a henceforth indisputable light on their relation. SECOND THING: A cautious exact old gentleman, of diplomatic habits (understood to be "Count Von Schulenburg-Klosterrode of Dresden"), has, since that event, unweariedly gone into the whole matter; and has brayed it everywhere, and pounded it small; sifting, with sublime patience, not only those Swedish Autographs, but the whole mass of lying books, pamphlets, hints and notices, old and recent; and bringing out (truly in an intricate and thrice-wearisome, but for the first time in an authentic way) what real evidence there is. In which evidence the facts, or essential fact, lie at last indisputable enough. His Book, thick Pamphlet rather, is that same <italic>
Herzogin von Ahlden <end italic> (Leipzig, 1852) cited above.
The dreary wheelbarrowful of others I had rather not mention again;but leave Count von Schulenburg to mention and describe them,--which he does abundantly, so many as had accumulated up to that date of 1852, to the affliction more or less of sane mankind.]
contemporaneous with Friedrich Wilhelm's stay at Hanover, but not otherwise much related to him or his doings there.
He got no improvement in breeding, as we intimated; none at all;fought, on the contrary, with his young Cousin (afterwards our George II.), a boy twice his age, though of weaker bone; and gave him a bloody nose. To the scandal and consternation of the French Protestant gentlewomen and court-dames in their stiff silks:
"Ahee, your Electoral Highness!" This had been a rough unruly boy from the first discovery of him. At a very early stage, he, one morning while the nurses were dressing him, took to investigating one of his shoe buckles; would, in spite of remonstrances, slobber it about in his mouth; and at length swallowed it down,--beyond mistake; and the whole world cannot get it up! Whereupon, wild wail of nurses; and his "Mother came screaming," poor mother:--It is the same small shoe-buckle which is still shown, with a ticket and date to it, "31 December, 1692," in the Berlin <italic>
Kunstkammer <end italic>; for it turned out harmless, after all the screaming; and a few grains of rhubarb restored it safely to the light of day; henceforth a thrice-memorable shoe-buckle.
[Forster, i. 74. Erman, <italic> Memoires de Sophie Charlotte <end italic> (Berlin, 1801), p. 130.]
Another time, it is recorded, though with less precision of detail, his Governess the Dame Montbail having ordered him to do something which was intolerable to the princely mind, the princely mind resisted in a very strange way: the princely body, namely, flung itself suddenly out of a third-story window, nothing but the hands left within; and hanging on there by the sill, and fixedly resolute to obey gravitation rather than Montbail, soon brought the poor lady to terms. Upon which, indeed, he had been taken from her, and from the women altogether, as evidently now needing rougher government. Always an unruly fellow, and dangerous to trust among crockery. At Hanover he could do no good in the way of breeding: sage Leibnitz himself, with his big black periwig and large patient nose, could have put no metaphysics into such a boy.
Sublime <italic> Theodicee <end italic> (Leibnitzian "justification of the ways of God") was not an article this individual had the least need of, nor at any time the least value for. "Justify? What doomed dog questions it, then? Are you for Bedlam, then?"--and in maturer years his rattan might have been dangerous! For this was a singular individual of his day;human soul still in robust health, and not given to spin its bowels into cobwebs. He is known only to have quarrelled much with Cousin George, during the year or so he spent in those parts.
But there was another Cousin at Hanover, just one other, little Sophie Dorothee (called after her mother), a few months older than himself; by all accounts, a really pretty little child, whom he liked a great deal better. She, I imagine, was his main resource, while on this Hanover visit; with her were laid the foundations of an intimacy which ripened well afterwards. Some say it was already settled by the parents that there was to be a marriage in due time. Settled it could hardly be; for Wilhelmina tells us, [<italic> Memoires de la Margrave de Bareith, <end italic> i. l.]