Whatever may have taken place between these exalted personages, one thing is certain; Ilse was dismissed from Countess Platen’s service with every mark of ignominy. Nor did her punishment end here. The following week Ernest Augustus went to Osnabrück, and the moment his back was turned the Countess Platen clapped the unfortunate abigail into the common jail, or rather that part of it which was a “spinning house”. The fact that a woman without any trial should be dragged off to prison on a trumped-up charge shows how powerful Countess Platen was in Hanover; her word seems to have been as good as the Duke’s sign manual. Ilse was kept in prison some time, and then “dry drummed” (a sort of seventeenth-century rough music) out of Hanover as a woman of loose character, dangerous to public morals. The girl found herself without the walls, friendless and penniless. In this plight she appealed to Ernest Augustus, but that volatile Prince had already forgotten her, or was afraid to arouse the ire of Countess Platen. He sent her a small present of money, and cynically counselled her to give Hanover a wide berth in future. Ilse then made her way to Celle, and laid her sad case before the Duchess Eléonore, no doubt expatiating upon Countess Platen’s enormities and her intrigues against Sophie Dorothea. The Duchess of Celle, after sifting the facts of the case, took Ilse into her employment, and found her an asylum in the castle. Countess Platen resented the Duchess’s action as a personal insult to herself, and she was the more enraged against her and Sophie Dorothea. So the quarrel grew.