The Koenigsmarks were in their way a famous family. The elder brother was the Charles John Koenigsmark celebrated in an English State trial as the man who planned and helped to carry out the murder of Thomas Thynne. Thomas Thynne, of Longleat, the accused of Titus Oates, the "Wise Issachar," the "wealthy Western friend" of Dryden, the comrade of Monmouth, the "Tom of Ten Thousand," of every one, was betrothed to Elizabeth, the child widow--she was only fifteen years old--of Lord Ogle. Koenigsmark, fresh from love-making in {8} all the courts of Europe, and from fighting anything and everything from the Turk at Tangiers to the wild bulls of Madrid, seems to have fallen in love with Thynne's betrothed wife, and to have thought that the best way of obtaining her was to murder his rival. The murder was done, and its story is recorded in clumsy bas-relief over Thynne's tomb in Westminster Abbey. Koenigsmark's accomplices were executed, but Koenigsmark got off, and died years later fighting for the Venetians at the siege of classic Argos. The soldier in Virgil falls on a foreign field, and, dying, remembers sweet Argos. The elder Koenigsmark, dying before sweet Argos, ought of right to remember that spot where St. Albans Street joins Pall Mall, and where Thynne was done to death. The Koenigsmarks had a sister, the beautiful Aurora, who was mistress of Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, and so mother of the famous Maurice de Saxe, and ancestress of George Sand. Later, like the fair sinner of some tale of chivalry, she ended her days in pious retirement, as prioress of the Protestant Abbey at Quedlinburg. [Sidenote: 1714--Wooden shoes and warming-pans] George was born in Osnabrueck, in May, 1660, and was therefore now in his fifty-fifth year. As his first qualification for the government of England, it may be mentioned that he did not understand one sentence of the English language, was ignorant of English ways, history, and traditions, and had as little sympathy with the growing sentiments of the majority of educated English people as if he had been an Amurath succeeding an Amurath.