The Electress Sophia was not happy in her children; “none of them ever showed the respect they ought to have done,” writes her niece, Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orleans. Of all her seven children, only three were now living: George the Elector, who disliked her; Maximilian, a Jacobite and Roman Catholic, in exile and open rebellion against his brother; and Ernest Augustus, the youngest of them all. Of her grandson, George Augustus, we have already spoken, and he, too, frequently treated her with disrespect. There remained his sister, the Princess Sophie Dorothea, a young princess of beauty and promise, whose matrimonial prospects were engaging the attention of the old Electress. Such was the electoral family of Hanover which Caroline had now joined. There was one other member of it, poor Sophie Dorothea of Celle, consort of the Elector, but she was thrust out of sight, divorced, disgraced, imprisoned, and now entering on the eleventh year of her dreary captivity in the castle of Ahlden, some twenty miles from Hanover. Caroline had doubtless heard of the black business in the old Leine Schloss that July night, 1694, when Königsmarck mysteriously disappeared coming from the Princess’s chamber, for the scandal had been discussed in every court in Europe. But there is nothing to show that she expressed any opinion on the guilt or innocence of her unhappy mother-in-law, whether she took her husband’s view, who regarded his mother as the victim of the Elector’s tyranny, or the view of the Electress Sophia, who could find no words bad enough to condemn her. Caroline was much too discreet to stir the embers of that old family feud, or to mention a name which was not so much as whispered at Herrenhausen. But one thing may be noted in her favour; she showed many courtesies to the imprisoned Princess’s mother, the aged Duchess of Celle, who, since her husband’s death, had been forced to quit the castle of Celle, and now lived in retirement at Wienhausen. The favour of George Augustus and Caroline protected the Duchess of Celle from open insult, but history is silent as to whether the Duchess attempted to act as a means of communication between them and her imprisoned daughter.