Last summer, when in Germany, I learned that more love-letters of Sophie Dorothea and Königsmarck still existed, over and above those at Lund and Berlin. I learned this important fact from a trustworthy source which I am not permitted at present to make public. These remaining letters were preserved at Hanover until 1866, not in the Royal Archives, but among the Guelph domestic papers at Herrenhausen. When the late King of Hanover, George V., was wrongfully despoiled of his kingdom by Prussia, and forced to live in exile, he rightly took his family papers with him into Austria. Among those papers was some of the correspondence between his ancestress Sophie Dorothea and Königsmarck. These letters are now in the possession of his son, the Duke of Cumberland, _de jure_ King of Hanover, at Gmünden. What their contents are I am unable to say, but it is probable that they contain the missing links wanted to make the chain of the correspondence complete. It is my desire some day to translate the whole correspondence at Lund, at Berlin, and at Gmünden, and arrange it in chronological order with the aid of first-hand documentary evidence drawn from other sources. (But this, of course, depends upon the necessary permission being granted.) For this reason, and because they shed no fresh light on the tragedy, I have not given herein any of the Berlin letters. On the contrary, I have omitted from this edition a few of those letters published in the first, which were merely a repetition of others; their great similarity of style and sentiment tended to weary rather than to edify.[2] ----- Footnote 2: I have also condensed the later chapters which deal with the death of the Electress Sophia and the accession of George I. to the English throne. These events are not strictly germane to the history of Sophie Dorothea, and moreover I have treated of them much more fully in _Caroline the Illustrious, Queen Consort of George II._, which may be regarded as a sequel to this book. ----- I should like to repeat that this book is largely based upon papers found in the Hanoverian archives and elsewhere, duly specified in footnotes. The despatches of Sir William Dutton Colt, of Cresset and of Poley, English envoys at Hanover during the period under consideration, and of Stepney, sometime English envoy at Dresden, now preserved in the State Paper Office, London, have also been drawn upon freely. To this list of hitherto unpublished documents there remain to be added many letters from the correspondence at Lund, translated from the French of the original documents. These have never before been published in English and (except for a few unimportant extracts in a Swedish book long since out of print) have never been published in any language. I may claim to be the first to edit and arrange this correspondence in something like chronological order, and to compare it with historical documents of undoubted authenticity with a view to proving its genuineness.