The Court of Hanover at the time of Caroline’s marriage was one of the principal courts of North Germany, not equal in importance to that of Berlin, or in splendour to that of Dresden, but second to no others. During the reign of the first Elector, Ernest Augustus, and his consort, the Electress Sophia, Hanover had gained materially in power and importance. The town became the resort of wealthy nobles, who had before divided their attentions between Hamburg and Brunswick. Handsome public buildings and new houses sprang up on every side, and outside the walls, especially towards Herrenhausen, the borders of the city were extending. Few of the houses were large, for the wealthy Hanoverian nobility resided for the most part at their castles in the country, and only came to the capital now and then for the carnival or the opera, which was one of the best in Germany, or to pay their respects to the Elector. The Hanover of that day, after the model of German mediæval cities, was a town with walls and gates. The old town within the walls was composed of rough narrow streets, and timbered, gabled houses with high sloping roofs. Some of these old houses, such as Leibnizhaus, a sandstone building of the seventeenth century, still remain, and so do the old brick Markt Kirche, the Rathhaus, and other quaint buildings characteristic of mediæval Germany; they make it easy to conjure up the everyday life of the old Hanoverian burghers. Caroline found that Hanover was a more important place than Ansbach, and everything was on a larger scale. For instance, it possessed three palaces instead of one, the small Alte Palais, since Sophie Dorothea’s disgrace seldom used, the Leine Schloss, a huge barrack of a palace on the banks of the Leine, and last, but not least, Herrenhausen, about two miles without the walls, approached by a magnificent double avenue of limes. The grounds of Herrenhausen were designed in imitation of Versailles, and, though the palace itself was plain and unpretending, the beauty of the place consisted in its great park, full of magnificent limes, elms, chestnuts and maples, and in its garden, one hundred and twenty acres in extent, laid out in the old French style with terraces, statues and fountains, and fenced about with maze-like hedges of clipped hornbeam. The Electress Sophia loved Herrenhausen greatly, though since her widowhood she had been relegated to one wing of it by her son the Elector. He would not permit her any share in the government of the electorate, and she had therefore ample time to devote herself to her philosophic studies. But she also employed her active mind in looking after her English affairs, in which she was deeply interested. The fact that she was in the direct line of the English succession attracted to Herrenhausen many English people of note, and it became a rallying-point of those who favoured the Hanoverian succession.