Read The Princess of Celle: (Georgian Series) Online
Authors: Jean Plaidy
But death came instead; and two months later Queen Anne herself died and George Lewis of Hanover became George I of England.
Now she, Sophia Dorothea, was the Queen of England, but she remained the prisoner of Ahlden.
The last years were made a little happier by her daughter who wrote to her and would have visited her had she been allowed to.
It was comforting to know that her children remembered; and she herself was growing old now.
The greatest tragedy of those years was the death of her mother, and Sophia Dorothea herself lived only three years longer.
On a misty November day in the year 1726, she took to her bed, and in her delirium she talked of the past.
She thought she was sixteen and it was her birthday and that she was sacrificed to a monster like a child in a fairy tale.
Her hair, now streaked with white, fell about her shoulders; her eyes were wild.
‘No,’ she cried. ‘Don’t let me go to him. He will kill me. He will destroy me …’
Then she began to weep pitiably.
‘George Lewis,’ she cried. ‘How dared you condemn me. You will never forget … though I am gone.’
Those about her bed shivered. The curse of a dying woman was to be feared.
Then she rambled again, called to her mother, to the Confidante, to her dearest Philip, to her babies… .
The mist from the marshes crept into the palace like a grey ghost, like death.
And she lay back on her pillows in the room which had been her prison for more than thirty years; when she had come to it she had been young and now she was an old woman of sixty.
It was a wasted life, said those about her bed. Poor cruelly treated lady.
In the village of Ahlden the bells began to toll and the people wept openly and told their children how she used to ride about the countryside with her black hair streaming over her shoulders and the diamonds gleaming in it and about her throat – the fairy prisoner Princess of Ahlden who was in truth not only the Duchess of Hanover but the Queen of England.
Bibliography
Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea,
from the secret archives of Hanover, Brunswick, Berlin and Vienna with letters and other documents. (2 volumes)
Love of an Uncrowned Queen, Sophia Dorothea; and her Correspondence with Philip Christopher, Count Königsmarck
W. H. Wilkins
The First George: In Hanover and England
(2 volumes) Lewis Melville
A Constitutional King: George the First
Sir H. M. Imbert-Terry
Notes on British History
William Edwards
The Four Georges
W. M. Thackeray
The Four Georges
Sir Charles Petrie
The House of Hanover
Alvin Redman
A History of Four Georges and William IV
Justin McCarthy
The Dictionary of National Biography
Edited by Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee
British History
John Wade
The National and Domestic History of England
William Hickman Smith Aubrey
Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague
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Epub ISBN: 9781448150380
Version 1.0
First published 1967 by Robert Hale and Company
© Jean Plaidy 1967
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 330 24308 X