particularly in England, where he had been associated with his
brother in the killing of Mr. Thynne. But the seventeenth century
did not look for excessively nice scruples in a soldier of
fortune; and so it condoned the lack of virtue in Count Philip
Christof Koenigsmark for the sake of his personal beauty, his
elegance, his ready wit, and his magnificent address. The court
of Hanover made him warmly welcome, counting itself the richer
for his presence; whilst he, on his side, was retained there by
the Colonelcy in the Electoral Guard to which he had been
appointed, and by his deep and ill-starred affection for the
Princess Sophia Dorothea, the wife of the Electoral Prince, who
later was to reign in England as King George I.

His acquaintance with her dated back to childhood, for they had
been playmates at her father's ducal court of Zell, where
Koenigsmark had been brought up. With adolescence he had gone out
into the world to seek the broader education which it offered to
men of quality and spirit. He had fought bulls in Madrid, and the
infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure wherever it was to be
met, until romance hung about him like an aura. Thus Sophia met
him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence shone the
more brightly against the dull background of that gross
Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of
the world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.

The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a
different kind. The sweet child he had known--she had been
married in 1682, at the age of sixteen--had come in her ten years
of wedded life to the fulfilment of the handsome promise of her
maidenhood. But her beauty was spiritualized by a certain