To begin with, the girl Sophia-Dorothea was not exactly illegitimate. She had been legitimised some six years before as a result of a bargain struck between her father and his brother Ernest Augustus, now Duke of Hanover, then Bishop of Osnabruck; after which the official marriage of a morganatic wife with her ducal husband took place before the wondering eyes of their daughter, aged ten, who almost at once was swept into the matrimonial whirlpool with a princeling of Wolfenbüttel. True, this was only a betrothal, and the young man was carried off by a cannon-ball soon after; but it showed that the Frenchwoman’s daughter need not go begging for suitors. The Court of Hanover, holding aloof from these indecent proceedings, hurt in the very core of its pride by this admission of a half-commoner to the privileges of rank, turned away its eyes, while its ears remained alert for scandalous gossip. There was little enough, and that little ill-founded. The Frenchwoman was faithful to her Duke, and though tongues made the most of a letter from a Court page found among the twelve-year-old Dorothea’s lesson books, such jejune displays of depravity were not satisfying. The Court of Hanover, besides, had problems of conduct peculiarly its own.
