Even in her estrangement from her husband, Sophia Dorothea never uttered a word of complaint against him. She never failed to exhibit either mildness or dignity in her captivity: on the contrary, she manifested both; and Coxe says of her, in his ‘Memoirs of Walpole,’ that, ‘on receiving the sacrament once every week, she never omitted making the most solemn asseverations that she was not guilty of the crime laid to her charge.’ Her son (George II.) had a double fault in his father’s eyes, namely, his popularity, and, at one time, his love for his mother--whom he loved, we are told, as much as he hated his father. A pleasant household, a sorry hearth; mistresses resting their rouged cheeks on the monarch’s bosom, a wife in prison, and a son hating her oppressor, and loving, but not redressing, the oppressed. Had Sophia Dorothea survived her consort, her son, it is said, had determined to bring her over to England and proclaim her Queen-dowager. Lady Suffolk, the snubbed mistress of that son, expressed to Horace Walpole her surprise on going (in the morning after the intelligence of the death of George I. had reached England) to the new Queen, ‘at seeing, hung up in the Queen’s dressing-room, a whole-length of a lady in royal robes; and, in the bed-chamber, a half-length of the same person, neither of which Lady Suffolk had ever seen before. The prince had kept them concealed, not daring to produce them during the life of his father. The whole-length he probably sent to Hanover. The half-length I have frequently seen in the library of the Princess Amelia, who told me it was the property of her grandmother. She bequeathed it, with other pictures of her family, to her nephew, the Landgrave of Hesse.’ If George II. never in his later days named his mother, it was because the enemies of the dynasty pretended to trace in the features of the second George a likeness to Count Königsmark, his mother’s gallant cavalier! The Whigs had denied the legitimacy of the son of James II., and the Tories embraced with eagerness an opportunity to deny that of the heir of Brunswick. The son of Sophia Dorothea was the pupil of his grandmother, Sophia of Hanover; and his boyhood did little credit to the system, or the acknowledged good sense of his instructress.