This wife, the illegitimate daughter of George I., was not even mentioned incidentally in a will which recognised the services of menials, and rewarded them with ostentation. But after Chesterfield’s death the mansion in May Fair, and its great room, and its dark, mysterious boudoirs, curtained with blue and silver tissue, and slightly echoing the rustle of silks that were not worn by the wife of the lord of the house--over all these there came a change. The stage remained, but the actors and audiences were different, and now we see that once little girl who usurped in Hanover a love to which she was not legitimately entitled, a sober woman grown, throwing open her saloons to Rowland Hill and the eager multitude who thronged to hear that hearty, honest, and uncompromising man. In March 1777, Horace Walpole wrote: ‘Lady Chesterfield has had a stroke of palsy, but may linger some time longer.’ In September of the following year, the record is: ‘Lady Chesterfield is dead, at above fourscore. She was not a girl when she came over with George I.’ ‘She was very like him,’ Walpole writes, in the following month to Cole, ‘as her brother, General Schulenburg, is, in black, to the late King.’ Such was the end of that lady whose birth in 1693 had so severely wounded the pride and self-dignity of Sophia Dorothea. ‘I was with her to the last,’ says Lady Huntingdon, ‘and never saw a soul more humbled in the dust before God, on account of her own vileness and nothingness, but having a sure and steadfast hope of the love and mercy of God in Christ, constantly affirming that his blood cleanseth from all sin. The last audible expressions which fell from her a few moments before her final struggle were, “Oh, my friend, I have hope, a strong hope--through grace.” Then, taking my hand, and clasping it earnestly between hers, she exclaimed with much energy, “God be merciful to me, a sinner!”’