This had been a crushing blow. The old Electress had schemed, and schemed as she imagined successfully, to establish her grandson George Augustus, the Electoral Prince, with his wife in England. This would have been a masterly stroke worthy of the universal reputation for policy of so grand an old lady, and would have been as it were the planting of one foot on the land she looked upon as her rightful heritage, but fate and Queen Anne decided differently. The latter had left no room for doubt about her intentions. Writing to her confidant Leibnitz, on the 17th June, the Electoral Princess Caroline said on the subject of this letter and others: “We were in a state of uncertainty here until yesterday, when a courier arrived from the Queen with letters for the Electress, the Elector, and the Electoral Prince, of which I can only say that they are of a violence worthy of my Lord Bolingbroke.”[6] It is perfectly certain that Queen Anne had made herself exceedingly objectionable as even a Queen can at times, and had not possibly stayed to choose her words. Be that as it may, she had succeeded in entirely upsetting the equanimity of her “good cousin” the Electress. The old lady issuing from the Palace, where possibly she had dined more amply than was judicious--for she was a great eater--leant on the arm of her beloved Catherine and harped as ladies of her age will do on the string of her treatment by her kinswoman Anne. It is said that she became greatly excited and walked very fast, as she spoke of her imagined wrongs. They bent their steps towards the celebrated orangery, where the Princess and the attendants with them noticed the Electress turn very white; then the next moment she fell forward in a swoon. The cries of the attendants quickly brought to her aid her son the Elector who was not far off, and he placed some _poudre d’or_--evidently a restorative--in her mouth. But she was beyond the power of earthly restoratives; she was carried into the Palace and in the barbarous custom of the time bled, but very little blood came[7]; she was dead! as the doctors said, from apoplexy. Thus did this great Princess, to whom our own late Queen, Victoria, her descendant, has been so often likened, miss by a little over six weeks the great goal of all her long years of ambition, the throne of England, for Queen Anne died on the 1st of August following. It is extraordinary that after the lapse of six generations a descendant so like her should fill that throne after which she had striven so long and so wisely for her family. Her son George was now the “Heir of Britain” in her place; an heirship which was to very soon resolve itself into possession, for within a few weeks began that celebrated crisis in England between Oxford and Bolingbroke which from the virulence of the discussions at the Councils absolutely broke down Queen Anne’s health and killed her.