The Queen of England’s letter was delivered to the Electress on Wednesday evening about seven o’clock when she was playing cards. She got up from the card-table, and when she had read the letter, she became greatly agitated, and went out and walked up and down the garden for about three hours. The next morning she was not very well, but though still very much annoyed she recovered during the day, and on Friday she had apparently regained her composure. Meanwhile she determined that the Queen’s letters to herself and her grandson should be published, so that the world in general, and her friends in England in particular, might know the true state of affairs. The Elector refused to join them in this, and withheld the Queen’s letter to himself. She dined in public with the Elector that day as usual, and late in the afternoon went out for her walk in the garden of Herrenhausen with the Electoral Princess and her suite. She began to talk to Caroline about the letters, and gradually became more and more excited, walking very fast. The most trustworthy account of what followed is given in the following despatch of D’Alais, the English envoy:-- “The Electress felt indisposed on Wednesday evening, but she was better on Friday morning, and even wrote to her niece, the Duchess-dowager of Orleans. The same evening, about seven o’clock, whilst she was walking in the garden of Herrenhausen, and going towards the orangery, those with her perceived that she suddenly became pale, and she fell forwards in a fainting fit. The Electoral Princess and the Countess von Pickenbourg, who were with her, supported her on either side, and the chamberlain of her Electoral Highness helped them to keep her from falling. The Elector, who was in the garden hard by, heard their cries, and ran forward. He found her Electoral Highness unconscious, and he put some _poudre d’or_ in her mouth. Servants were promptly called, and between them they carried the Electress to her room, where she was bled. But she was already dead, and only a few drops of blood came out. The Electress was in the eighty-fourth year of her age. The doctors say that she has died of apoplexy. On the Saturday night they carried her body into the chapel of the château.”[41] Thus died one of the greatest princesses and most remarkable women of her time. The Electress Sophia was a worthy ancestress of our good Queen Victoria, whom in some respects, notably her devotion to duty, and her large and liberal way of looking at things, she closely resembled. No English historian has yet done justice to the eventful life of Sophia of Hanover, who missed, by a bare two months, becoming Queen of England. It was largely in consequence of her able policy, maintained throughout a critical period, no less than her Stuart descent, that her descendants came to occupy the English throne.