A pretty picture of moral and political corruption, it must be confessed. One wonders what the haughty Duchess Sophia thought of it all, and by what inexplicable means this inscrutable woman was brought to become a passive witness of the double capture by audacious adventuresses of her husband and her son. Her policy was always to ignore anything she could not help; and in this case she seems to have offered no protest. The key to this riddle is probably to be found in her character. The moral objection would not appeal to her, for though the Duchess Sophia in her own personal conduct was absolutely above reproach, and there is abundant evidence to prove she held that the virtue of princesses should be above suspicion, yet she had been trained in a school and an age which did not demand the same standard of morality from men as from women, least of all from princes. In her day women of the Platen type were as much a part of the _entourage_ of a court as the lackeys in the kitchen or the grooms in the stables, and since this was so, why not Madame Platen as well as another? Sophia had done her duty to Ernest Augustus in every sense of the word. She had been a good and faithful wife; she had upheld the dignity of the courts of Osnabrück and Hanover; she had borne her husband six children, five sons and a daughter; and though they had never any love in the highest sense for one another, yet in time affection seems to have sprung up between this curious couple, and they got on very well together, mainly on the principle of leaving each other alone. According to his lights, and possibly her lights also, Ernest Augustus was a good husband; he always treated his consort with profound respect, and outwardly he fulfilled the letter of his contract with her, it was only in the spirit he failed, but Sophia probably did not care about that. She was his duchess, the mother of his sons, the great lady of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and that sufficed her. She was fond of her children, too, especially of the younger boys and her daughter, but for George Louis, her eldest son, she had very little love. She therefore probably regarded his affair with Madame Bussche with indifference. Nor did religious scruples enter to any extent. She was a free-thinking woman, who, from a philosophic eminence, looked down upon all dogma with contempt. “The Princess Sophia,” says Dean Lockier, “was a woman of good sense and excellent conversation. I was very well acquainted with her. She sat very loose in her religious principles, and used to take a particular pleasure in setting a heretic (infidel), whenever she could meet such, and one of her chaplains disputing together.” This is a quaint characteristic; and we may picture Sophia’s face as she baited her chaplain with some truculent infidel, and chuckled while they fought together, finally dismissing them with “A plague on both your houses”.[16] ----- Footnote 16: