Another important fact must also be mentioned and that is that Madame Walmoden had presented the King with a fine boy, which she, of course, declared to be his. The King was fifty-three, fatuous and ready to believe anything she told him; the birth of this child attached him more to the Walmoden than ever, a consummation she had no doubt calculated upon. Now it came about that one night, when the King was away at Herrenhausen, a muddle-headed gardener with no knowledge of the courtly world and its pretty little ways, stumbled over a ladder in the small hours placed immediately under Madame Walmoden’s window, which looked upon the gardens of the old Leine Schloss, those gardens through which it is said Sophie Dorothea, the mother of George the Second, stole disguised to meet her lover Königsmarck at his lodgings hard by. The obtuse gardener, instead of leaving the ladder where it was and going his way, officiously thrust his nose into other people’s business, and having carefully examined the ladder--some say it was a rope ladder and fixed to the Walmoden’s window-sill--proceeded to search the gardens, believing as subsequently stated that a robber was planning the removal of the mistress’s jewels. As might have been expected by one less dense he presently discovered a man hiding in some bushes near. This man he seized, and at the same time alarmed the palace guard. This man being placed in the guard room and examined proved as it is stated in one account, “to everyone’s astonishment,” to be a certain officer in the Austrian service named Schulemberg; Captain von der Schulemberg, and certainly not a robber in the ordinary sense of the word. In addition, he was a relative of the Duchess of Kendal--old Melusine von der Schulemberg--the mistress of George the First. How these Hanoverian courtesans and their belongings got mixed up! Von Schulemberg protested vigorously against his treatment, which he, perhaps, rightly considered a violation of his dignity as a diplomatic envoy from the Court of Vienna, but he did not explain how his diplomatic mission had brought him to the foot of the rope ladder in the Leine Schloss gardens, which ladder led into the bedroom of Madame Walmoden. He, however, made so great a noise in the guard room, striking terror into the heart of the captain of the guard by referring to the vengeance his master, the Austrian Emperor, would exact for this insult to his envoy, that the officer let him go, and he departed into the night, no doubt cursing the gardener.