“I assure you that of all the letters this season has brought me, yours has been the most welcome. You do well to send me your good wishes for the throne of England, which are sorely needed just now, for in spite of all the favourable rumours you mention, affairs there seem to be going from bad to worse. For my part (and I am a woman and like to delude myself) I cling to the hope that, however bad things may be now, they will ultimately turn to the advantage of our House. I accept the comparison which you draw, though all too flattering, between me and Queen Elizabeth as a good omen. Like Elizabeth, the Electress’s rights are denied her by a jealous sister with a bad temper[4], and she will never be sure of the English crown until her accession to the throne. God be praised that our Princess of Wales[5] is better than ever, and by her good health confounds all the machinations of her enemies.”
Poor young Princess Caroline, “the Pure, the Great, the Illustrious,” as Mr. Wilkins calls her. She must, but for her children, have found it none too cheerful in that dreary old Leine Schloss by the river, about which clung the then unsolved mystery of the disappearance of Königsmarck, the lover of the Princess Sophie Dorothea—her husband’s mother—as he left that lady’s chamber and was seen no more. A mystery which remained a mystery until years after when, the floor of an adjoining room being taken up, his body was found beneath.
But apart from this it must have been a dreary life for a young girl, a life of looking on at much over-eating, and over-drinking perhaps, too. A life of low sordid immorality going on under her very nose in which her husband and his father played leading parts; a life in which the higher side of her nature was never called upon, except for the almost habitual display of charity and forbearance to others.
LEINE PALACE, HANOVER.
Birthplace of Frederick, Prince of Wales.
Yet the higher nature was there despite her faults which were many; she possessed the pure gold of a good heart, which saw her through many trials and temptations, and left her, but for her conduct to her eldest son—and some of her correspondence—a clean name in history.
But other more stirring thoughts soon filled the young mother’s head than the frailties of her husband’s family, for when the sum of her nursery reached four and the little Prince Frederick was in his eighth year, the fruit of her hopes ripened, Queen Anne of England died, and a lucky turn of politics in favour of the Whigs, laid open to her the road to a throne.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. XX., p. 235. This remark is attributed to both his father and mother.
[2] The Electoral Prince was the eldest son of the elector.