From her watch-tower at Hanover the Duchess Sophia followed with keen interest the course of events in England, an interest which increased every day of her life until at last it became an absorbing passion. She spared no pains to keep up a good understanding between herself and her English relatives. When Charles II. was restored to the throne of his ancestors, she sent him a warm letter of congratulation, written in the oddest French, which is still preserved among the Lambeth manuscripts. Throughout her cousin’s reign Sophia continued to watch affairs in England. She noted Charles’s childless marriage to Catherine of Braganza.[18] She noted the dislike and jealousy of the people of England to Popery, and the conversion of the heir to the throne, the Duke of York, to the Roman Catholic religion, and his consequent unpopularity. She noted the marriage of his eldest daughter, Princess Mary of York, to William of Orange, and the childless condition of the Dutchman and his spouse. Last of all, she noted that the Princess Anne of York, on whom it seemed likely the crown of England would devolve in the course of nature, had reached a marriageable age, and she saw in her son, George Louis, the husband for her, and prepared to act. ----- Footnote 18: “She [Sophia] told me,” writes Lord Dartmouth many years later, “that she was once like to have been married to King Charles II., which would not have been worse for the nation, considering how many children she had brought, to which I most sincerely agreed.” -----