THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE AND HER INFLUENCE ON RACING. 193 





but he meant to keep his word, and everybody knew it. He it was who had married 

 that virgin widow of Ogle, and of Thynne, Elizabeth Percy, Dean Swift's "Carrots" ; 

 and the name of poor Tom Thynne of Longleat is curiously connected with that of 

 the new King. Konigsmarck, the murderer of Dryden's " wealthy western friend," 

 was let off the punishment of his crime, and died fighting for the Venetians at the 

 siege of Argos, which seems far enough away from that bloodstained bit of pave- 

 ment in Pall Mall. But his name, or rather the name of his extraordinary family, 

 was not to be forgotten in the precincts of St. James's for a long while; 

 for his sister Aurora, as 

 the mistress of Frederick 

 Augustus, Elector of 

 Saxony, became the 

 mother of Maurice de 

 Saxe, who was to spread 

 dismay over many an 

 English race-course by 

 the victory of Fontenoy, 

 some time after he had 

 caused considerable 

 amusement at New- 

 market by flinging an 

 insolent scavenger into Lord Onsiow's -Whynot." 



A l_ "JJ1 r i_ BY farmiuion of H.R.H. Ptince Christian. 



the middle of his own 



mudcart. Konigsmarck's younger brother Philip was stabbed for having dared 

 to love Sophia Dorothea of Zell, the neglected wife of George I. This unhappy 

 woman, protesting her innocence to the last, was forthwith imprisoned in the castle 

 of Ahlden, while her husband sought consolation in the charms of Schulenberg and 

 Kilmansegge ; and after thirty-two years of captivity she wrote a last letter to the 

 King, which killed him as he crossed the German frontier. 



But I am moving too fast, and it is with no reluctance that I leave these some- 

 what lurid side-lights on the social manners of the time, and return to the main 

 thread of our history. George I. was fonder, far, of Hanover than of F.ngland ; and 

 his court must have been a dull one. Bolingbroke was wise enough to leave it. He 

 had played and lost. Oxford and Matthew Prior were lodged in the Tower, and 

 eventually got out again alive. Jonathan Swift, then three years off fifty, had written 





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