But she came remarkably close.
George I died in June 1727, only about seven months after Sophia Dorothea.
Their son succeeded him as George II.
That means the woman imprisoned after the Königsmarck scandal was not merely the discarded wife of one British king.
She was the mother of another.
Her daughter had meanwhile become Queen of Prussia.
Her grandson through that daughter would become Frederick the Great.
Sophia Dorothea therefore stood at the center of a remarkable network of European royalty while personally remaining excluded from it.
That is one of the great ironies of her story.
Her descendants occupied thrones.
She remained at Ahlden.
The Mystery That Never Completely Went Away
The Königsmarck affair became irresistible because it contains almost every element of a royal scandal.
An unhappy dynastic marriage.
A secret relationship.
Passionate correspondence.
Plans to escape.
A palace meeting at night.
A missing aristocrat.
Rumors of murder.
A vanished body.
A marriage dissolved almost immediately afterward.
And a princess imprisoned for the rest of her life.
Yet the most dramatic version of the story can also obscure the most important distinction.
Some elements are well documented.
Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck had an intimate relationship reflected in surviving correspondence. They were considering escape. Königsmarck disappeared in Hanover in 1694. The court moved against Sophia Dorothea immediately afterward. Her marriage ended, she was sent to Ahlden, and she remained there until her death.
Other elements remain less certain.
Exactly how the killing was authorized, who ultimately ordered it, what every participant knew beforehand, and precisely how Königsmarck’s body was disposed of are harder questions.
The secrecy surrounding the affair helped ensure those questions survived for centuries.
But perhaps the darkest part of the story does not require solving the murder mystery at all.
Königsmarck disappeared during a single night.
Sophia Dorothea disappeared from public royal life for more than three decades.
In 1714, George I arrived in Britain to begin a new royal dynasty. His estranged wife was still alive in Germany, behind the restrictions imposed after the scandal twenty years earlier.
She would never become his queen.
She would never see her children again.
She would never leave Ahlden as a free woman.
And somewhere behind that extraordinary punishment remained the unanswered question that had begun it all: what precisely happened after Philip Christoph von Königsmarck entered the Hanoverian palace in 1694—and who decided that neither he nor Sophia Dorothea would ever be allowed to threaten the dynasty again?