king in his favour. This most sordid and rapacious of mistresses, who looked on England only as a country to be managed for her benefit, ventured at length to put into the king's hand a memorial drawn up for her by Bolingbroke, demonstrating that the country must be absolutely ruined if Walpole continued in office. The stratagem was too palpable. Whilst she talked only, her suggestions might pass for her own, but the style of the document must have at once caused the king's suspicion of its true source. He put the paper into Walpole's hand. Walpole, after interrogating the two Turks, who were always in attendance on the king, and on their denying all knowledge of the means by which the missive reached the royal person, went directly to the duchess and charged her with the fact. She did not deny it. Walpole advised the king to admit Bolingbroke to the audience which he solicited in the memorial, trusting that the king's dislike of him would prevail in the interview. The result appeared to be of that kind; nevertheless, Walpole was far from being secure in his own mind. He knew that the mistress would be continually returning to the charge in favour of her friend and paymaster, though she enjoyed a pension from government of seven thousand five hundred pounds: and he even contemplated retiring with a peerage, but was dissuaded from this by the princess of Wales and the duke of Devonshire. On the other hand, Bollingbroke was in the highest expectation of his speedy restoration not only to rank but to office.
The deaths of monarchs, however, were peculiarly fatal to this ambitious man; that of queen Anne had precipitated him from power, and rescued his country from the ruin he prepared for it; that of George now came as opportunely to prevent the national calamity of his ministry. George set out for Hanover on the 3rd of June, o.s., accompanied, as usual, by Townshend and the duchess of Kendal. Just before his departure the youthful Horace Walpole saw him for the first and last time. When the king was come down to supper, lady Walsingham took Walpole into the duchess' ante-room, where George and his favourite were alone. Walpole knelt and kissed the king's hand. The king appeared in his usual health. In his usual impatience of reaching his beloved Hanover, he had out-travelled his minister and the mistress, and reached Delden on the 9th late at night. The next morning he proceeded again so early as four o'clock, and was pressing onward, when in the forenoon he was seized with a fit of apoplexy in his coach, and on arriving at Ippenbaren he was observed to be quite comatose—his eyes fixed, his hands motionless, and his tongue hanging from his mouth. His attendants wished to remain at Ippenbaren to procure medical assistance; but this seemed to rouse him, and he managed to articulate, "Osnabruck! Osnabruck!" The only chance for his life, if there was any, depended on instant surgical aid; they went in obedience to his command, and on arriving at Osnabruck he was found quite dead. He was there conducted to the palace of his brother, the prince bishop, and let blood, but to no purpose. Messengers were dispatched to bring up the minister and the mistress from the rear. Finding the king dead on his arrival, Townshend immediately returned to England with the news, and the duchess, after tearing her hair, beating her breast, and otherwise bewailing the loss of so valuable a friend, directed her course to Brunswick. She afterwards, however, returned to England, giving the country of her fortune the preference to that of her birth, and continued to reside there, chiefly at Kendal House, near Isleworth. She died in 1743, leaving her enormous wealth to her German relatives. This wealth would have still more augmented but for the interference of George II. The king had made a will, in which he is said to have left much property to the duchess and to her reputed niece, but supposed daughter, lady Walsingham. This lady, originally Fraülen Schulemberg, but created by George I. countess of Walsingham, bore a strong resemblance to the king, and was generally considered his daughter. One copy of the king's will he had confided to Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, the other to the duke of Brunswick. At the first council at which George II. presided, the archbishop presented to him this will, expecting that he would open and read it; but to the consternation of the primate, he immediately put it in his pocket, and left the room without a word. The will was never heard of again, for neither the primate nor the other councillors dared to ask about it, or even to request that it should be registered. Horace Walpole says it was reported to contain a legacy of forty thousand pounds to the duchess, a handsome bequest to her daughter, and to the queen of Prussia. The duke of Brunswick, who had the other will (some accounts mention two other wills in the hands of German princes), was quieted by a subsidy. Lord Chesterfield, who married lady Walsingham, determined to bring her demand to open trial, but was satisfied by twenty thousand pounds. The king of Prussia repeatedly demanded with much roughness, but less success, the legacy to his queen. The duchess of Suffolk, one of the mistresses of George II., from whom Walpole drew his information, said that George II. excused himself by saying his father had burnt two wills made in his favour. They were probably the two wills of the duke and duchess of Zell, his maternal grandparents, or one of them might be that of his mother, the princess Sophia of Zell.
That unfortunate princess was unknown to the English public. She was said to be divorced before George came to the English throne, and therefore was politically dead to England. Dead as she was to England, she was alive to her own sorrows, having been confined in the solitary castle of Ahlen, on the river Aller, for nearly thirty-two years, and died only on the 11th of November, 1726, seven months before her husband, the king of England.
The story of this unfortunate princess constituted a melancholy episode in the life of George of Hanover, and presents features of cruelty and injustice in him which must falsify the praises for uprightness and benevolence which some historians have heaped upon him. The princess Sophia of Zell was married to George when she was young, accomplished, and beautiful; but she had the misfortune to excite the envy of the mistress of the old elector, her husband's father, who, whilst the prince himself was absent with the army, contrived and accomplished her destruction. Count Philip Christopher Königsmark, the brother of count Charles John Königsmark, who had some years before murdered Mr. Thynne in the Haymarket in London—was
