ueen 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