“Alas! It is not the Electoral Prince’s fault that, as desired by all honest folk, he has not gone to London before now. He has moved heaven and earth in the matter, and I have spoken about it very strongly to the Elector. 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. The Electoral Prince is now in despair about going to take his seat in the English Parliament, as he had hoped. I do not know how the world will judge of the policy which keeps us still at Hanover. I do not so much regret the loss we personally may suffer, as that we may seem to have abandoned for the moment the cause of our religion, the liberty of Europe and so many of our brave and honest friends in England. I have only the consolation of knowing that everything possible has been done by the Prince to obtain the Queen’s permission. The Electress joined him in this, and they now both intend to send the letters they have received from the Queen to their friends in England. I can find no comfort anywhere beyond the belief that Providence orders all things for our good. In fact I may say that never has any annoyance seemed to me so keen and insupportable as this. I fear for the health of the Electoral Prince, and perhaps even for his life.”[40] There was another life, more valuable than that of the Electoral Prince, trembling in the balance. The day after Caroline wrote this letter was a fatal day to the Electress Sophia. She, the “Heiress of Britain,” had felt the Queen’s rebuff far more than her grandson or Caroline; her haughty spirit resented the manner in which she was addressed by her royal cousin of England, and her wounded pride and her thwarted ambition combined to throw her into an extraordinary state of agitation, which at her age she was unable to bear. Mollineux, an agent of the Duke of Marlborough who was at Hanover at the time, declared later that the shock of “these vile letters has broken her heart and brought her in sorrow to the grave”.