100 Elector Ernest Augustus. 101 Duke of Celle. 102 Prince George Louis. 103 Marshal Podevils. 112 Prince Maximilian. 120 Königsmarck. 128 Bülow. 129 Bernstorff. 200 The Electress Sophia. 201 Princess Sophie Dorothea. 202 Countess Platen. 207 Fräulein von Schulenburg. 214 Fräulein von Knesebeck. 226 Countess Aurora Königsmarck. 227 The Duchess of Celle. 300 Hanover. 301 Luisburg. 302 Herrenhausen. 305 Celle. 306 Brockhausen. In the letters which follow, translated from the French of the original manuscripts into English, I have endeavoured to render this intricate cypher legible, and have substituted everywhere the real names of persons and places. The task of translation and unravelling the cypher has not been easy,[60] and if an error should be discovered it must not be ascribed to any inaccuracy in the original letters, but to my rendering, since in spite of every care it is impossible to guard against the possibility of a chance error. I have further endeavoured to reduce the letters to something like chronological order—also a difficult task, for only four have the year inscribed, many are without date, some have the day of the week, and a few the time of day; and in such cases it is only from the text that one can guess the dates with accuracy. To do this it has been necessary to sort the letters from the batches into which they are divided in the original manuscripts, and to allow them to answer one another in due order. In the correspondence during the campaign of 1692, for instance, it will be seen that Königsmarck’s letters and those of the Princess answer one another freely. I have also, to better elucidate the text and preserve the flow of the narrative, interspersed the letters with a record of current events gleaned from Colt’s despatches and other documents, and have annotated them where necessary. The letters hereafter given represent two-thirds of the whole; the remainder has been omitted simply because it is made up mainly of repetition and unimportant details, and to quote it in full would be to weary and not to edify. For the first time these letters are published in any language—if we except the few fragments (which would not make more than six pages of this book) given by Palmblad in a Swedish book long since out of print—and for the first time they are now translated into English from the original manuscripts, edited, and compared and tested with contemporary records. ----- Footnote 60: In this task I was aided by the fragment of a key to the cypher found with the letters at Lund. ----- [Illustration: