party
persisted in declaring Caroline of Brunswick was a martyred angel. So was
Helen of Greece innocent. She never ran away with Paris, the dangerous
young Trojan. Menelaus, her husband, ill-used her, and there never was any
siege of Troy at all. So was Bluebeard's wife innocent. She never peeped
into the closet where the other wives were with their heads off. She never
dropped the key, or stained it with blood; and her brothers were quite
right in finishing Bluebeard, the cowardly brute! Yes, Caroline of
Brunswick was innocent: and Madame Laffarge never poisoned her husband;
and Mary of Scotland never blew up hers; and poor Sophia Dorothea was
never unfaithful; and Eve never took the apple--it was a cowardly
fabrication of the serpent's.

George Louis has been held up to execration as a murderous Bluebeard,
whereas the Electoral prince had no share in the transaction in which
Philip of Koenigsmarck was scuffled out of this mortal scene. The prince
was absent when the catastrophe came. The princess had had a hundred
warnings; mild hints from her husband's parents; grim remonstrances from
himself--but took no more heed of this advice than such besotted poor
wretches do. On the night of Sunday, the 1st of July, 1694, Koenigsmarck
paid a long visit to the princess, and left her to get ready for flight.
Her husband was away at Berlin; her carriages and horses were prepared and
ready for the elopement. Meanwhile, the spies of Countess Platen had
brought the news to their mistress. She went to Ernest Augustus, and
procured from the Elector an order for the arrest of the Swede. On the way
by which he was to come, four guards were commissioned to take him. He
strove to cut his way through the four men, and wounded more than one of
them. They fell upon him; cut him down; and, as he was lying wounded on
the ground, the countess, his enemy, whom he had betrayed and insulted,
came out and beheld him prostrate. He cursed her with his dying lips, and
the furious woman stamped upon his mouth with her heel. He was dispatched
presently; his body burnt the next day; and all traces of the man
disappeared. The guards who killed him were enjoined silence under severe
penalties. The princess was reported to be ill in her apartments, from
which she was taken in October of the same year, being then
eight-and-twenty years old, and consigned to the castle of Ahlden, where
she remained a prisoner for no less than thirty-two years. A separation