The greatest tragedy of those years was the death of her mother, and Sophia Dorothea herself lived only three years longer.

On a misty November day in the year 1726, she took to her bed, and in her delirium she talked of the past.

She thought she was sixteen and it was her birthday and that she was sacrificed to a monster like a child in a fairy tale.

Her hair, now streaked with white, fell about her shoulders; her eyes were wild.

‘No,’ she cried. ‘Don’t let me go to him. He will kill me. He will destroy me …’

Then she began to weep pitiably.

‘George Lewis,’ she cried. ‘How dared you condemn me. You will never forget … though I am gone.’

Those about her bed shivered. The curse of a dying woman was to be feared.

Then she rambled again, called to her mother, to the Confidante, to her dearest Philip, to her babies… .

The mist from the marshes crept into the palace like a grey ghost, like death.

And she lay back on her pillows in the room which had been her prison for more than thirty years; when she had come to it she had been young and now she was an old woman of sixty.

It was a wasted life, said those about her bed. Poor cruelly treated lady.

In the village of Ahlden the bells began to toll and the people wept openly and told their children how she used to ride about the countryside with her black hair streaming over her shoulders and the diamonds gleaming in it and about her throat – the fairy prisoner Princess of Ahlden who was in truth not only the Duchess of Hanover but the Queen of England.