young wife. The elector was
always kind, but Sophie Dorothea found his conversation wearisome and
his gallantry distasteful.

The beautiful little princess was very homesick. Nobody cared. She was
unutterably lonely. Nobody cared. She was very dull. Nobody tried to
entertain her. Then Koenigsmark came. Koenigsmark, the dashing,
Koenigsmark, the handsome, with whom she had played in childhood when he
was a page in her father's palace. Koenigsmark cared. Koenigsmark loved
her. In some respects, Koenigsmark may have been the villain some
historians have painted him, but he was genuinely in love with his old
playmate, now the neglected, unhappy wife of Prince George Louis of
Hanover.

Into this, her first real love experience, Sophie Dorothea threw
herself, body and soul. She writes to Koenigsmark:

"I belong so truly to you that death alone can part us. No one ever
loved so strongly as I love you. Why am I so far from you? What joy to
be with you, to prove by my caresses how I love and worship you! If my
blood were needed to ransom you from danger I would give it gladly. I
cannot exist without seeing you. I lead a lingering life. I think of our
joy when we were together and then of my weariness to-day. Ah, my
darling, why am I not with you in battle? I would gladly die by your
side. Once more, good-bye. I belong to you a thousand times more than to
myself." The woman who wrote these passionate words was a mother. In
name, at least, though less well treated than her husband's mistresses,
she was a wife. But she was also a starving woman, hungering and
thirsting for expressed affection.

Koenigsmark and Sophie Dorothea planned an elopement. Discovery
followed. Koenigsmark was secretly murdered by agents of old Countess
Platen, one of the Elector Augustus's mistresses. Sophie Dorothea was
consigned to the dreary castle of Ahlden a prisoner for life, and there
she lived almost half a century. There, while her husband sat on the
English throne, she ate her heart out, slowly. Her son grew up and
became, after her death, George II. of England. Her daughter married the
Crown Prince of Prussia and became the mother of Frederick the Great and
of Wilhelmine, Princess of Baireuth.

Sophie Dorothea was constantly making plans to escape. But all such
plans proved futile, for she was surrounded by spies. Her one true
friend through life, her mother, died. Soon after, an official in whom
she had placed implicit confidence betrayed h