On this day, Madame writes from Versailles to her half-sister, the Raugravine Louise, in the Palatinate:
“My aunt has announced to me the marriage of her grandson the Elector of Brunswick to the Princess of Ansbach. I am very pleased because I hear much good of her. May God wish this marriage to be happy!”
Commentary:
Madame is a little ahead of herself. The Electress Sophia’s grandson is not yet the Elector; the electoral crown still belongs to his father at this date. He should be called the Electoral Prince.
Pictured: George Louis (1660-1727), Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg, more often called Elector of Hanover, in 1706, after Hirschmann. He will later be King of Great Britain and Ireland as George I.
The Electress’s son and grandson are both called George. Through her bloodline as a Protestant grand daughter of James I, they will later be George I and George II of Great Britain and Ireland. She herself will miss becoming queen by a hairsbreadth, dying only 2 months before her cousin Queen Anne, whose heir she is by the terms of the Act of Settlement.
Pictured: George Augustus (1683-1760), Electoral Prince of Hanover at this date, Prince of Wales from 1714, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover from 1727.
The Princess of Ansbach, as alert readers will have realized by now, is Caroline of Ansbach, the ancestress of every British monarch since George III.
Pictured: Caroline (1683-1737), Princess of Brandenburg-Ansbach by birth, Electoral Princess of Hanover by marriage, later Princess of Wales, in which state she is depicted here in 1716 by Kneller, and later still Queen of Great Britain and Ireland as the consort of George II.
The translation from the French is my own, as it always is unless I credit someone else.
If you have questions that I have not addressed in the commentary, please ask in the comments.
And there is Caroline…looking extraordinarily just like every single British monarch since George III.