glish, and, from choice, would have spoken
that alone. She knew more English history than the English ambassadors
accredited to her husband's court. To gain, through her remote claim,
the English throne either for herself or her descendants, Sophie of
Hanover all her life saved, and gathered, and schemed, and relentlessly
crushed human obstacles. At the age of eighty, her old eyes gleaming,
she said: "I could sink into the grave perfectly happy if I knew that
the words 'Queen of Great Britain and Ireland' would be inscribed upon
my tombstone." She died within sight of the promised land, only a few
weeks before Anne Stuart.

An intellectual woman, an energetic woman, a virtuous woman, using the
word "virtue" in its narrower sense of chastity, a wonderfully able
woman, was Sophie of Hanover. An amiable woman, a lovable woman, a
generous woman, except occasionally for policy's sake, she most
certainly was not. But the hardness of her life should in some measure
extenuate the hardness of her heart.

Sophie possessed a keen analytical intellect that saw, without the
slightest tinge of emotion, clear down to the bottom of things. She
passed an almost loveless childhood in a royal nursery far away from her
mother, whom she never understood or cared for, and a sunless girlhood
as governess in the household of her brother Carl Ludwig, to whom the
Rhine Palatinate had been finally restored. Prince Carl and his wife
lived a cat and dog life. Disgraceful scenes were continually occurring
between them, sometimes even at the court table. The only member of the
Palatine household in the least congenial to Sophie was her quick-witted
niece Elizabeth Charlotte, afterward Duchess of Orleans.

Even bridal joys unalloyed were not to be poor, plain Sophie's. Duke
George William of Hanover, to whom she had been affianced, refused her
after seeing her, and, as if she were no more than a horse, foisted her
upon his younger brother Ernest Augustus, at that time Bishop of
Osnabrueck, but later, through Sophie's clever scheming, Electoral
Prince of Hanover.

Delving into the records of the court of Hanover, during the reign of
Ernest Augustus and Sophie, is like working in a sewer; the worker is
sickened by filth. A part of the time the electress escaped from the
court's noxious atmosphere into the purer, higher, colder regions of
philosophy. There was no courtier's flattery in the praise Leibnitz gave
to Princess Sophie's intellectual abilit