The princess was, for a time, kept in ignorance of the count’s assassination; but she was perplexed by his disappearance, and alarmed when she heard that all his papers had been seized and conveyed to the Elector for his examination. Some notes had passed between them: and, innocent as they were, she felt annoyed at the thought that their existence should be known, still more that they should be perused. To their most innocent expressions the Countess von Platen, who examined them with the Elector, gave a most guilty interpretation; and she so wrought upon Ernest Augustus, that he commissioned no less a person than the Count von Platen to interrogate the princess on the subject. She did not lack spirit; and when the coarse-minded count began to put coarse questions to her, as to the degree of intercourse which had existed between herself and the count, she spiritedly remarked that he appeared to imagine that he was examining into the conduct of his own wife; a thrust which he repaid by bluntly informing her that whatever intercourse may have existed, it would never be renewed, seeing that sure intelligence had been received of Königsmark’s death. Sophia Dorothea, shocked at this information, and at the manner in which it was conveyed, had no friend in whom she could repose confidence but her faithful lady-in-waiting, Fräulein von Knesebeck. The princess could have had no more ardent defender than this worthy attendant. But the assertions made by the latter, in favour of the mistress whom she loved, were not at all to the taste of the enemies of that mistress, and the speedy result was, that Fräulein von Knesebeck was arrested and carried away to the castle of Schartzfeld in the Hartz. She was there kept in confinement many years; but she ultimately escaped so cleverly through the roof, by the help of a tiler, or a friend in the likeness of a tiler, that the credit of the success of the attempt was given by the governor of the gaol to the demons of the adjacent mountains. She subsequently became lady-in-waiting to Sophia Dorothea’s daughter. Sophia Dorothea had now but one immediate earnest wish, namely, to retire from Hanover. Already the subject of a divorce had been mooted, but the Elector being somewhat fearful that a divorce might affect his son’s succession to his wife’s inheritance, and even obstruct the union of Zell with Hanover, an endeavour was made to reconcile the antagonistic spouses, and to bury past dissensions in oblivion.