Sophia's Fate,

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 33, 14 August 1902, Page 1

Sophia's Fate,

The Electress Sophia lived and died in a state of 'gilded misery.' Lyttellon said in his ' Advice to a Lady ' :

What is your sex's earliest, latest o»re, Your heart's Buprenie ambition ? To be fair. Such a thing was past the power of the Electress. Her ' heart's supreme ambition ' was to be Queen of England. And she had a reasonable hope of wielding the sceptre of the Britains— she saw her Promised Land :it was so near, and yet so far. She asked permission to go to England as the heir apparent, or at least to send her son (afterwards George I.) as heir-presumptive. But Anne would have neither the one nor the other flitting about her court, and she wrote a letter to the aged Electress conveying an intimation to that effect in terms that are not to be found in the Polite Letter-Writer. She even warned the aspirant to the throne that ' such conduct may imperil the succession itself.' The historian Green tells the sequel : •To Sophia the letter was a sentence of death. Two days after she read it, as she was walking- in the garden at Herrenhausen she fell in a dying swoon to the ground.' There her eyes closed for ever— never to rest upon the England for which he heart had so long been aching. She died, as she had lived, a staunch Lutheran. Queen Anne followed her a few months later to the great Bejond.

Sophia's son, George 1., came to the throne of Great Britain. History does not make him out to be either interesting or attractive. He had a marked partiality for stale oysters, and, like his mother was a Lutheran, His Protestantism, if not deep, was unimpeachable. He readily abandoned the creed of his birth and conformed to the Church of England as by law established. But he was neither baptised nor confirmed in the official creed of his adopted country. Neither was his son, George 11. George lll.— the ' Whig of the Revolution '—was the first of the Hanoverian line that imbibed Conformity. ' The Kings of the House of Hanover ' says a recent writer, ' all became English Episcopalians, and all married Lutherans who conformed to the Established Church, but were never formally admitted into the same by any rite or sacrament. This custom has continued to the present day. The late Prince Consort, a high-minded religious man, was a Lutheran born, bred, baptised and confirmed. When he married our late Sovereign Lady he simply conformed to the Church of England in this country, to the Church of Scotland when north of the Tweed, and to the Lutheran Church of his baptism when he and Queen Victoria visited Germany.' With the exception of the Duchess of Coburjr who is an adherent of the Orthoeox Greek Church, all the children. irt-law of the late Queen Victoria are Anglican Epis«

copalians in England and Presbyterians in Scotland. On Holy Thursday of last year (1901) her Majesty the present Queen — as reported in the papers at the time — received communion according to the Lutheran rite with the Danish Royal Family at Christianborg.