Part Two
Anti-heroine or victim?
FRIDERIKA VON MECKLENBURG STRELITZ by Schadow
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| Terracotta bust, 1794, by Schadow. Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Image source: Web Gallery of Art |
The younger sister of Queen Louise had a tarnished career compared to the Prussian Madonna, in a much longer life circumscribed by unlucky marriages of convenience and necessity.
Aged 15, she drew the short straw in the double marriage of the
princesses of Mecklenburg Strelitz to two Prussian princes, the
virtuous, strictly monogamous heir to the throne, Frederick William, and
his more brilliant but dissolute younger
brother, Louis Charles, who died three years later.
Amid the usual double standards about male and female adultery, there were salacious rumours that during her marriage, Friderika, instead of meekly suffering her
unfaithful husband's neglect, retaliated by having an affair with one
of his uncles, Louis Ferdinand, who was only a year older than him, and
six years her senior.......
Their brief relationship, if it existed beyond an unconsummated attraction, has never been proven; of all the men with whom she was associated, he was the most appealing. He was later killed, heroically, after a disastrous decision to engage the enemy at Saarfeld in 1806. He was an admired figure at court. Like his uncle Frederick the Great, he was musical, and accomplished enough as a dilettante pianist and composer for Beethoven to dedicate his Third Piano Concerto (1803) to him, and, thirty-six years after his death, for Liszt to compose his Élégie sur des motifs du Prince Louis Ferdinand de Prusse.
Widowed in 1796 aged eighteen, with three children, Friderika became pregnant two years later by another far less distinguished German prince,
Solms-Braunfels. She subsequently married him, again unhappily, as he turned out to
be a depressive alcoholic, until she was courted by her cousin Ernest
Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the fifth and reputedly most competent son
of George III of England and Queen Charlotte. He was a blunt cavalry
officer of reactionary Tory sympathies infamous for having been accused
by his political opponents in England of murdering his valet.
Friderika
was saved from the scandal of divorce and freed to marry again
by the convenient death of her second
husband in 1814, but, typical of her luck, at the price of
malicious gossip that she had
poisoned him. The rackety coupling of Cumberland and Friderika outlived
scandal and opprobrium to achieve respectability in middle age as king
and queen of Hanover. She died in 1841, aged 63.
Atalanta by Heinrich Keller, 1802. Marble, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Image source: Web
Gallery of Art
