Over in England the King heard the news of his wife’s death with ill-concealed concern, born not of remorse, but fear. In his superstitious soul he remembered the prophecy and trembled. His forebodings of evil were not lessened when Prince Waldeck arrived from Hanover with secret despatches, which gave a detailed account of the awful deathbed at Ahlden and the dying woman’s appeal to the retribution of Heaven. Nor did the King derive much comfort from his withered mistresses, for the Duchess of Kendal, to whom he confided all, had a firm faith in omens, visions, and soothsayers, and was even more troubled than he. By way of averting the curse she became more devout than ever, and attended church as many as four times a day, notwithstanding the fact that the Lutheran minister at the German Chapel Royal refused her the communion on the ground that she was living in unrepentant adultery. King George sought to shake off his depression by every means in his power, and the very evening that he learned the tidings his wife was no more he sought distraction by going to see a performance of the Italian comedians at the Haymarket, accompanied by the Duchess of Kendal and Lady Darlington. The next day he commanded a special performance at the King’s Theatre, which was followed by others, though up to now the play was a pastime he had very rarely indulged in. But all his efforts were ineffectual, for the shade of his victim haunted him, and her dying cry for vengeance rang in his ears. Sophie Dorothea was more powerful in death than in life.

Outwardly the court of St. James ignored the event, and, beyond a line in the London Gazette to the effect that the “Duchess of Ahlden” had died at Ahlden on a date specified, the death of the wife of the King of England and the mother of the King to be received no official notice whatever. But the court of Hanover on receipt of the news from Ahlden had very properly assumed mourning, as on the occasion of the decease of the Duchess of Celle. When King George heard this he waxed exceeding wroth, and sent peremptory orders to the Hanoverian officials to return to their ordinary wear. His anger was increased when he learned that the court of Berlin had decreed the deepest mourning, as for a Queen of England who was also mother of the Queen of Prussia. It was a natural mark of respect for the daughter to pay, and it showed to all the world that she believed her mother to be an injured woman. George I. resented the court mourning at Berlin as a personal affront, and protested; but his protest was in vain. Thus did his mean malice pursue his victim even in death.

Meanwhile the body of Sophie Dorothea lay in a plain leaden coffin in the vaults of the castle of Ahlden, awaiting the King’s orders. None dared pay the remains any honour, nor even give them a decent and Christian burial, for fear of offending the tyrant in England. With the new year (1727) Prince Waldeck came back from London with the royal command that the “Duchess of Ahlden” should be buried with as little ceremony as possible in a grave dug in the garden of the castle. But the season was rainy and the Aller overflowed its banks, and though the grave-diggers dug again and again in the swampy ground the waters always rushed into the grave and rendered their labours vain. It was impossible to communicate quickly with the King across the sea, so the coffin was ignominiously carried back again to the cellar, covered over with a heap of sand, and left until further orders. It would have been left there until now, for all the King cared, had he not been a prey to superstitious fears. He could not sleep, he could not rest, and life was becoming a burden to him. This may have been due to advancing years and an impaired digestion, for he was a coarse and heavy eater; but the Duchess of Kendal declared that she was warned in a dream that it was all the work of the unquiet spirit of Sophie Dorothea, and her ghost would never rest, nor let the King rest, until her body was laid by the side of her ancestors at Celle.

One May morning, therefore, a King’s messenger arrived at Ahlden from England with orders, under the royal sign manual, that the remains of the “Duchess of Ahlden” should be interred in the ducal burial-vaults in the old church of Celle as quietly and expeditiously as possible. That same night the body was taken from the cellar, hoisted on to a vehicle, and conveyed across the moorland to Celle, where it arrived while the little town was still sleeping. Three or four workmen from the castle were waiting in the church and everything was in readiness. Without any ceremony or religious service the coffin was hurried down to the vaults under the chancel, where it lies until this day.

The church above is full of effigies of Sophie Dorothea’s ancestors, whose deeds and renown are blazoned forth in brass and marble and painted glass; but there is neither memorial nor inscription to mark the last resting-place of the heiress of Celle, who, by virtue of her sufferings, was the most famous of them all. In the dark vault below, her remains could not be identified at all were it not for a small shield on the top right-hand corner of the coffin, containing her name and the dates of birth and death. Hard by in the “French Garden” of Celle there stands a monument to Caroline Matilda, Princess of England and Queen of Denmark, whose sad lot closely resembled that of her ancestress Sophie Dorothea, and whose body was deposited in the same vault half a century later. But of the heiress of Celle, direct ancestress of two of the mightiest sovereigns in the modern world, there exists no monument whatever. Now that the flight of years has obliterated the bitterness which clung around her name it is surely time that some memorial were raised to her memory. And where more fitting than in the place of her birth, near the grey walls of the old castle? She was the last princess of Celle, and in the hearts of the people the tradition of her beauty and her woes still lingers.

The vision which appeared to the Duchess of Kendal must have been a lying spirit, for though Sophie Dorothea slept with her forefathers, no relief came to her oppressor. King George was overwrought, nervous, and dispirited. His government was honeycombed with intrigues, his quarrel with his son was intensified in bitterness; and not all his avaricious mistresses with their ruddled cheeks could give him comfort. He was consumed with a desire to return to Hanover. Peradventure, like certain criminals, he felt impelled to revisit the scene of his crime.

On June 3, 1727, a month after the tardy burial of his victim, the King set out from England for Hanover. Travelling night and day, he reached Dalden on the far frontier of Holland at midnight on June 9th. Here he stopped to change horses and he devoured a huge supper. Instead of tarrying for the night, as his suite expected and his travelling physician advised, for he had eaten heavily and was worn out with the long journey, the King was seized with an overpowering restlessness to reach Hanover, and started off again at three o’clock in the morning.

As the royal coach rumbled out of the courtyard a man stepped forth from the shadow and threw a document through the window on to the King’s knees. Neither his Majesty nor his escort thought anything of the incident, supposing the paper to be one of those many petitions with which George was wont to be pestered on his return to the electorate. By the grey light of the dawn the King broke the seal and read, and as he read his hands shook and his face grew ashen. It was a letter from his dead wife, written when she felt the hand of death upon her. The trusty messenger, to whom she had given the packet, had waited and waited until the King should come from England that he might surely deliver it into his hands. It was an awful letter for a woman to write, doubly awful for the man to receive. It was penned evidently when Sophie Dorothea’s brain was on fire with her wrongs—when her reason was trembling in the balance; in it she reiterated her sufferings and his cruelty, cursed him with her dying breath, and summoned him to meet her within a year and a day before the judgment throne of God, there to answer for the wrong he had done her. To the trembling tyrant it came like a voice from the dead. He recalled again the prophecy that he would not long outlive his wife, and now came the confirmation of his fears. He heard his victim, like an accusing angel, calling him to his doom—a year and a day—a year and a day,—and that was last November. The letter fell from his nerveless hands, there was a rush of blood to his eyes, a beating in his brain, and he fell forward in a fit.

In great alarm the equerry called a halt, and the long procession of coaches and escort, pulled up by the wayside. But the King recovered almost immediately, and, insisting that it was nothing, angrily commanded them to proceed. Landen, the next stopping-place, was reached in a few hours, and here dinner awaited the royal traveller. But the King could not eat. His indisposition was evidently worse than he would admit. The surgeons bled him and dosed him and advised a rest; but their patient would hear no reason, his one desire was to push forward to his beloved Hanover.

Quitting Landen at sunset, the royal cortége thundered forward with all speed. An hour later the King became much worse, but he hastened on as though pursued by a legion of furies. His escort would fain have halted; but still the King urged them on, leaning forward from the window, and shouting “To Osnabrück! to Osnabrück!” as the horses galloped through the gathering dusk. Osnabrück was reached at ten o’clock; but by that time the King had again collapsed, falling forward into the arms of his gentleman-in-waiting. They bore him into the palace, now occupied by his youngest brother Ernest Augustus, bled him again, chafed his clenched hands, applied restoratives; but all in vain. George never recovered consciousness, and died at midnight in the very room where he was born sixty-seven years before. He had obeyed the dread summons, and had gone to meet his wife before the judgment throne of God.

Thus died George I., the first of our Hanoverian kings, unloved and unmourned—nay, not quite unmourned, for even this man had one who loved him. His aged mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, had not been able to pack up in time to travel with her liege, but was following him with all speed. When the news of his death was brought her on the road she gave way to the loudest demonstrations of grief, beating her breast, tearing her hair, and filling the air with lamentations. She had lived with him nigh on forty years, and though he had not been true to her—for it was not his nature to be true to any one—in his way he had been fond of her; she had become as indispensable to him as he had to her.

The new King, George II., did nothing so far as we know to clear his mother’s memory, though Horace Walpole writes: “The second George loved his mother as much as he hated his father, and purposed, it was said, if she had survived, to have brought her over and declared her Queen-Dowager. Lady Suffolk told me her surprise, on going to the new Queen the morning after George I.’s death, at seeing hung up in the Queen’s dressing-room the whole length of a lady in royal robes, and in the bed-chamber a half-length of the same person, which Lady Suffolk had never seen before.”^[249] They were pictures of his mother, which the Prince had till then kept concealed. This hardly tallies with Lord Hervey’s testimony of George II.’s reticence concerning his mother, “whom,” he writes, “on no occasion I ever heard him mention, not even inadvertently or indirectly, any more than if such a person had ever had a being”.^[250] The Jacobites used to call George II. “the little Königsmarck” (an unfounded libel if ever there was one!), and this may have accounted for his silence. Another poetaster twitted “dapper George” with being governed by his Queen, and advised him

which shows that Sophie Dorothea’s imprisonment at Ahlden was fairly familiar to the English public.

That the true story of his mother’s life became known to George II. is certain, for on his first visit to Hanover after ascending the throne of England he ordered the secret records of the divorce proceedings, and some of the incriminating letters to be brought to him, and read them through carefully. Extraordinary care was taken at Hanover to suppress any and every compromising document or paper which contained mention of Sophie Dorothea or Königsmarck. Despite these precautions, the most damning evidence of all came to light. Some workmen employed in renovating the wing formerly occupied by Sophie Dorothea in the Palace of Hanover, came across the skeleton of a man, almost unrecognisable from quicklime, but, from a ring and fragments of clothing, was identified as that of the missing Count Königsmarck. Orders were given that the place should be bricked up again, and the remains were thrust out of sight once for all—probably pulverised and cast into the river Leine.

These things go to prove that the son lacked the courage to do justice to his mother’s memory, or he believed her guilty. In death, as in life, Sophie Dorothea continued to be the family skeleton of the House of Hanover.

But we can afford to be more merciful in our judgment. Whatever were the faults of her youth, she atoned for them fourfold. Her dauntless spirit, her fortitude, her dignified resignation through long years of captivity, invest her memory with a halo of suffering. Her love and her sorrows plead for her—her sorrows most of all, for it may be doubted if either history or romance can offer a parallel to the long-drawn agony of the life of this uncrowned queen.