In England, princess Augusta was ‘a good deal affected’ by the news of the death in Germany of her younger sister Elizabeth in January 1840. Augusta wrote to a friend, Mrs Dering, that she had known that a pain in her side had been troubling Elizabeth all the previous year. Indeed, the Landgravine had written to Augusta that she was ‘like the late Earl of Huntingdon, whose knees were so bent outward that he appeared as if he was making a minuet curtsy.’ But no one, Augusta wrote sorrowfully, had thought it ‘a disease likely to terminate her precious life.’
Mary and Sophia could not feel as their elder sister did. From childhood and right up until Elizabeth’s marriage, Augusta and this third Princess had been intimate. Royal, although an indispensable part of the elder trio of princesses, had always set herself apart a little, with her lofty temperament and her position as eldest daughter of the King. Moreover, when not together in Homburg or in England, Augusta and Elizabeth had written to each other twice a week, ever since Elizabeth first married Bluff and left for Germany in 1818.
For all her grief, Augusta was her usual rational self and, when Queen Victoria spoke of attending the State Opening of Parliament in February 1840 despite the Landgravine’s death, approved her plan. ‘Of course you must go, my dear,’ she said, ‘it is right you should do so and your duty to do so.’ She added that, if Queen Victoria liked, she might say that she, Augusta, had told her she should go. Augusta was further benign in her dictum that the Queen might wear mourning for only two months, and then black gloves for six weeks. The Landgravine’s brothers and sisters would, however, wear full mourning for three months. The approaching wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert would of course be an exception.
Mary, with her sister Augusta, had once been eager to see their niece Charlotte ‘settled’. Now they were eager to see Victoria in what they regarded as that happy state. ‘In her situation it is a great object that she should be married,’ Aunt Mary had written on 17 September 1839 to Queen Louise. Fortunately Queen Louise’s husband (and Charlotte’s former husband) Uncle Leopold had the business well in hand. And his choice had never strayed from his nephew and Victoria’s cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Victoria had pleaded three years earlier, on meeting this paragon, that she and Albert were too young to marry. Not for Victoria’s eyes, but for those of her own brother Ernest, Augusta had written on 21 February 1839, regretting the influence of Prince Leopold. Victoria, she expostulated, was ‘totally inexperienced and without a friend’. The match that Leopold promoted – for his nephew and niece Albert and Victoria – was born of political ambition and, she prophesied, would never succeed. But when Uncle Leopold convinced Victoria otherwise in the late summer of 1839, and when Albert came over to England that October, Augusta welcomed the Coburg Prince. It was common knowledge, even before Albert and his brother arrived, that a match had been made. And Princess Mary had written in September that she was pleased that her niece had already had ‘the great advantage of having had an opportunity of seeing more of him than, in general, falls to the lot of Princesses, and still less of Queens.’
Queen Victoria summoned Albert to the Blue Closet at Windsor on 15 October and proposed to him. It was an infinitely ‘nervous thing’ to do, she told the Duchess of Gloucester. But, as the bride was Queen of England, the formal proposal had to come from her. Moreover, the Queen told Aunt Gloucester, Albert would never have presumed to take the liberty.
The Duchess of Gloucester apparently made a favourable impression on Albert, and she was much consulted by Victoria – while Albert travelled to Coburg and Gotha in turn – in the approach to the royal wedding that was to take place in February 1840. No favours had been given at her parents’ wedding, she reliably informed her niece – eighty years after an event at which she had not been present. Lord Melbourne was inclined to think she was right, for the daughters of George III brought an august, if sometimes spurious, authority to their pronouncements.
Queen Victoria was not slow to invent her own rules of etiquette. Accepting an invitation for herself and Albert – who returned to England in January – and a retinue of six to dine at Aunt Gloucester’s days before their wedding, Queen Victoria declared that she was ‘happy to meet anybody you choose at your table’. But the Duchess had mentioned to Albert that she intended inviting all the royal family. ‘Allow me to say that, if that is to be the case,’ Victoria wrote, ‘I must beg that, if Albert does not lead me into dinner (which he always does here but which I conclude you would do as you did last year) he should take in the next person in rank immediately after me.’ Victoria added that she felt anxious upon this point, ‘and I feel certain that my uncles and aunts will make no difficulty. …’ If they did, she warned, it would be almost impossible for her to meet her uncles except in her house and at her Court.
That old warhorse Ernest, King of Hanover was immediately up in arms at the idea of being cut out by Albert from his place as senior male member of the royal family. ‘All letters speak of the marked incivility … as to the conduct of Her Majesty and her Court to the members of the old Royal Family,’ he wrote from Hanover. ‘Mark my prophecy of three years ago,’ he continued, the Coburgs would insult them.
The Duchess of Gloucester had her own troubles in the months following Albert’s arrival – and following her sister the Landgravine’s death in Homburg. She was unwell and unable to attend Victoria’s wedding on 10 February, and Princess Augusta alone of the daughters of George III was present. When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited Aunt Mary in April at Gloucester House, Sir Henry Halford received them at the top of the stairs and whisked them into another room to give them a report on her health. The Duchess was ‘very low and excessively nervous’, he said, ‘having all sorts of fancies preying upon her mind, like at the beginning of her illness at Brighton.’
As a result, Albert stayed in the carriage outside while Victoria went in to see her aunt. She ‘kept holding my hand and looking up into my face very sadly,’ wrote Victoria. ‘In her other hand she held a paper,’ which she began telling Victoria about. It was all about some conversation, wrote a puzzled Victoria, between George IV and his daughter, Princess Charlotte, ‘which she maintains she had been forced to write’. The Duchess of Gloucester was thinking back to those short December days in 1814 when she had extracted her niece Charlotte’s troubled confidences about her mother and Captain Hesse. Victoria, knowing nothing of Princess Mary’s qualms of conscience in that affair, lost interest when Halford, who knew better, reassured her that ‘it was all imagination.’
Princess Mary recovered, and was fit to receive her brother the Duke of Cambridge when he visited her as usual on her birthday later that month. But Augusta stated of her sister dispassionately this year, when she herself was not well, ‘She is unfortunately nervous about her health, in which she is totally unlike the rest of her family.’
Augusta was by now finally reconciled to the changes that the new reign had brought, and she was fond of Victoria in a straightforward way. When she had told her niece the previous year that her health prevented her from appearing at the Birthday Court, she said she would gladly come to the dressing room where the Queen retired after the drawing room – ‘that I may make you my loyal courtesy as your subject, and maybe you will let me kiss your dear face en passant.’ And she gave her niece words of encouragement, complimenting Victoria on going to Adelaide, the Queen Dowager, directly the widow returned from a voyage abroad. She was indignant when her niece was attacked in the newspapers, and wrote with delight from Frogmore on 15 July 1839 that John Bull, the journal, had reformed its ways: ‘My poor child [Queen Victoria] has been cruelly calumniated, but yesterday she was spoken of as she ought to be.’
As she grew older, Augusta, like her brother Ernest, found change more and more repugnant. ‘The railroads are doing incalculable mischief to the great roads,’ she wrote, ‘the innkeepers are in great distress and are obliged to sell their horses and part with their boys which is melancholy – so many turned out of employment.’ Instances she had in plenty, and she named a blacksmith in Egham, ‘so very expert a man that he was in constant employ; and by calculation he will now lose the shoeing of 160 horses, which will be the ruin of the poor man’. Furthermore the two ‘capital’ inns at Bagshot were to be given up.
‘It is all detestable, I think,’ Augusta had written to Ernest on 3 October 1838. Now confined to her chair, she had once been a fervent rider who knew those roads and those inns from her long courses with her father and his equerries. Turning away from what could never please her, she sent a ‘very pretty book called “Chit Chat” with agreeable stories’ and a magic album to little Mary Adelaide at Cambridge Cottage for her birthday. Augusta had found the bright and boisterous children of her brother Adolphus a great entertainment since the family had returned from Hanover in 1837 and, with Prince George of Cambridge, settled at Cambridge Cottage in Kew. Augusta especially liked seven-year-old Princess Mary Adelaide, whom she entranced with story-telling skills developed long ago as a child at Kew. (Princess Mary Adelaide called Augusta a ‘capital Aunt’ when she resumed a story that she had stopped when her niece was naughty.) The print at the top of her letter, Aunt Augusta mentioned, showed the Amphitheatre at Brighton decorated for Queen Victoria’s visit to the Pavilion there. ‘You may cut it off and paste it into a book,’ she directed her niece.
Augusta gave her older niece Queen Victoria for her birthday in this year of her marriage ‘a turquoise heart with a bit of my old grey locks,’ and a blessing incorporating some words of advice for her future:
My hand shakes so I can hardly write – but as long as I can hold it, it will trace the truth from my heart of my affection for you, my beloved Victoria – May you as you increase in years, increase in domestic happiness, and comfort. Your solid and real happiness must be your home. Thank God you have a happy home. The life of a sovereign cannot be one of peace, it must be more or less chequered. But my dear father always said, ‘I could not have met with such locals and disagreeables, if I had not felt that when my public duty was done – and that, I always thank God, I thought first of, what was my duty to my country and for its good, before I thought of my own feelings – I say, I then thanked God that I had a peaceable happy quiet… home to return to.’ As years roll on, dearest dear Victoria, you must expect to meet with trials – for kings cannot do what they will, but what they can. And when, my dearest child, these troubles come upon you, you will have the blessing of the affection, confidence and devotion of dear Albert, which will be like balm to your soul. May God bless you, my dearest children, both together for many and many years, love your affectionate friend and aunt, Augusta.
Augusta became unwell herself at Clarence House in the summer of 1840, following Victoria’s wedding. A year earlier Brighton had been thought of as a cure for her deteriorating health, and she had written from there to her niece Victoria in February 1839 that she went out – never later than a quarter to three, and always in the best chaise – ‘with cloaks and an ermine tippet and a vile muff besides Welsh whittles [or blankets] round my feet and legs which is reckoned warmer than anything in the world’. But even so Augusta was eleven days in bed with influenza, and she detailed her bizarre appearance, with ‘leeches all round my throat – a brown necklace with a tailed fringe – very disgusting’. She had concluded then, ‘My beautiful writing will betray me, so I may as well tell you that I am still in bed.’
Wright, Princess Augusta’s dresser of long service, was with her mistress now at Clarence House. Sir Henry Halford told Lord Melbourne in June that the Princess’s condition was not hopeless, but the Duchess of Gloucester was so distressed after seeing her invalid sister that she could not attend a concert. And the members of Princess Augusta’s household at Frogmore received a lithograph of their mistress that she sent to them from London, but waited for her in vain, as her condition worsened in town. On 2 July 1840 the Windsor paper carried a report of ‘the serious and alarming illness of the Princess Augusta’. It concluded, ‘the inhabitants of this town (amongst whom Her Royal Highness has so long resided, and where her charity has been as unostentatious as her benevolence has been unbounded) … fear the worst.’
At Windsor and in its neighbourhood, Princess Augusta had been a familiar figure for years, exercising her ‘unostentatious’ charity and her ‘unbounded’ benevolence even while living at the Castle with her parents. But when she had taken possession of the Frogmore estate, following the deaths of both parents, this Princess whose personality was always less ‘marked’ than that of her sisters had flourished. She relished changes that she made to the garden and the walks there. Her mother’s estate, although extremely pretty with the ample white house facing the lake, with groves of trees bisected by Uvedale Price’s walks, had had, as her daughter saw it, its flaws. Augusta had greatly disliked looking in winter from her favourite room in the house, past a lime tree, at ‘a plain piece of grass, too large to be left unplanted and too small to be called a lawn’, in her flower garden, ‘just the other side of the lime tree opposite my own window’. In place of the turf, she wrote early on in her occupation of the estate, she had now made ‘a beautiful new basket’ so that ‘when the leaves drop from the tree, I shall have a small handsome clump to look at.’
Augusta continued delighted with the ‘basket’ outside her window, and indeed was to sniff at one the King installed at Windsor as not nearly so nice as her own. She had planted carefully, she told a correspondent, so that there was a ‘profusion of flowers’ throughout the year. And the contented mistress of Frogmore laid down her pen in favour of communing with the spirits of the place. ‘I am now going to take my walk.’
Several visitors to Frogmore commented that the water in front of the house was an eyesore, and a touring German prince, Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, wrote that it was ‘now only a swamp for frogs, though surrounded by hedges of rose and yew.’ John Claudius Loudon, the influential editor of a new publication, the Gardener’s Magazine, gave his opinion of Augusta’s beloved Frogmore as ‘a remarkably dull place’. He did admit that the walled kitchen gardens, where strawberries and melons were successfully grown, were fruitful, and he approved her gardener Mr Thomas Ingram’s wiring of walls and grafting of geraniums and passion flowers. But, recalling the landscaping of the garden when originally planted in the 1790s and ‘rendered interesting by a very long, winding piece of water’ and by ‘extensive planting’, Loudon was disapproving of Augusta’s stewardship of the garden. ‘The trees and shrubs seem now to occupy the greater part of the surface, and the water being very extensive, stagnant, and not very free from aquatic plants, the situation appears to us as unhealthy a one as could well be chosen for a residence,’ he wrote. ‘The shrubbery is too old to have the freshness of youth, the shrubs in general too common to have the beauty of variety.’ In other words, Frogmore – for all Augusta’s ‘baskets’, it had not changed substantially since first laid out by Queen Charlotte and Major William Price in the 1790s – was old fashioned and even overgrown, just what Loudon did not like, and just what Augusta did. ‘It is not tidy from the falling of leaves and that discomposes me sadly,’ she acknowledged one autumn to Miss Garth. But, as she said, her gardener would shortly dig in the leaves and it would look better.
With their own hands she and her sisters had planted some of the original seedlings which were now large and vigorous bushes. ‘Memory is a blessed delight,’ she wrote, although she admitted that ‘at times it tortures the feelings sadly.’ Frogmore in every season, whatever Prince Pückler-Muskau’s or Mr Loudon’s strictures, was enchanting to Augusta. She loved it, whether the ‘early trees’ were losing leaves, and the garden bore ‘a wintry appearance’ or when, ‘from the beauty of the verdure’, it was uncommonly summer-looking.
Mary at Bagshot got off more lightly when that stern horticultural critic Mr Loudon visited the Bagshot Park grounds on behalf of the readers of the Gardener’s Magazine. Through a rustic gate, he told them, close to the Duke and Duchess’s house, an arbour trellis gave on to a rosary or rose garden, a showy herbaceous garden and an ‘American garden on turf’ that the Duchess had laid out and planted. Loudon approved what he saw at Bagshot, and he returned there several times, although he regretted that the Duchess’s gardener Mr Toward was not better housed. He kindly included on his first visit a diagram for his readers showing all the features of Mary’s flower garden, and on his second particularly admired the American garden, ‘in which the tufted masses of peat-earth shrubs, magnolias, rhododendrons, andromedas, azaleas, kalmias, ericas, etc., looked admirably.’
With Edmund Currey and Mr Toward, Mary had undoubtedly created something quite special at Bagshot. Visitors began to come, asking to see the pleasure ground, and on one occasion a dropsical Mary deputed her sister Augusta to escort them where the little garden chair in which she tooled around the paths could not reach. Augusta appears to have borne her sister no malice for her better ‘review’ from Mr Loudon, but she seems also to have been undaunted by criticism in her love of her ‘swamp’ at Frogmore.
As a hostess at Frogmore as well as in London, Augusta was always generous with her invitations. One year she implored her friends, the Arrans, to visit her come spring. ‘I can promise you that the house is as warm as toast. Your rooms shall be to the south and you shall do everything you please from morning till night,’ sang the siren. But she was content to be alone, whatever the weather. In the wake of a downpour, she toured Windsor in an open carriage, watched the Eton boys play cricket on the playing fields, and observed the Thames crowded with pleasure boats, before she walked in the garden at Frogmore. ‘Everything looks clean and refreshed by the rain,’ she remarked, ‘and the Thames has recovered its beauty, for it was quite dull and low … The Castle is looking magnificent just now from my own little sanctum.’
Mary stayed with Augusta a good deal, especially when invalid. Miss Garth often stayed with her before Christmas on her way to her brother and his family in Surrey. Her uncle General Thomas Garth kept up ties of friendship with Augusta till his death, sending her once a ‘magnificent present of game’ for which she begged Miss Garth to thank her uncle. If he would ‘now and then be so good as to use his gun for me’, Augusta wrote, she would be very much obliged to him.
Miss Peggy Planta, Augusta’s old English teacher, stayed at Frogmore with her former pupil, and passed her mornings at Windsor, seeing her old acquaintances there – of which there were many, following her long years in harness to the royal family. Old acquaintances, old stories and old jokes going back thirty years and more provided a comfortable diet for Augusta at Frogmore. Mary ‘laughed ready to choke herself’ on one occasion, Augusta reported, when the Duchess and Miss Garth were both staying with her. Augusta had remarked on the death of an old Windsor acquaintance, Mrs Coleman, whom General Gouldsworthy had used to call ‘cross-patch’ and ‘grumpibus’ when they were young, and Miss Garth in answer had declared herself surprised that the death had been announced ‘in one paper’ only. Did they think, Mary asked, that it should have been announced to the public ‘by the common crier, or … proclaimed like a general peace by the heralds with Sir Bland Burges at their head?’
Such innocent diversions at Frogmore were at an end now. Three days after the Windsor paper had reported its alarm at Princess Augusta’s illness in London in the summer of 1840, Queen Victoria ordered the park keepers to keep the gates of Green Park closed day and night, so that the traffic would not disturb Princess Augusta. Her death was now expected, but, as Halford wrote on 21 July to Lord Melbourne, the elderly Princess’s strong constitution made it impossible to forecast its date. When Leopold, King of the Belgians, and his wife Louise visited England in August, the Princess was still in this world. Halford spoke at the end of the month to Lord Melbourne again of the Princess’s ‘natural powers of constitution’. And Queen Victoria, down at Windsor, on the same day despatched a messenger ‘by the railroad’ to London to establish the latest information.
Prince Albert had declined to remain at the Mansion House for the great dinner being given to celebrate his receiving the Freedom of the City that day. Queen Victoria held that he could not appear ‘when our poor aunt is dying’. The Duke of Cambridge, however, did attend the dinner and said robustly that if he, as the Princess’s brother, felt able to celebrate Prince Albert’s Freedom, there was no reason why the Prince himself should hang back. Unfortunately, it became clear that the banqueters, deprived of the spectacle of the Coburg bridegroom, were in a sullen mood, and one or two even turned over their plates in reproach to their hosts. Whereupon the Duke of Cambridge rose, and made a woolly-headed attempt to placate the angry tables with references to Prince Albert’s recent marriage and to the charms of Queen Victoria at Windsor. This speech did nothing to endear him to his niece, who was outraged – at six months pregnant – to be the subject of such immodest talk. And still Augusta bore up and manifested ‘a consciousness of what is passing when she is awake’, wrote Halford in September.
Leopold and Louise departed England early that month, and still Augusta struggled on. ‘Fixed mischief in the tract of the intestine’ threatened daily to end her life, but manfully she took ‘liquid nourishment’, digested it and lived, as Halford told Melbourne on 16 September. Her niece Victoria wrote, with a hint of irritation: ‘Under the circumstances I can’t well walk in public this afternoon.’
But now Augusta was in dreadful pain. Moore, the royal apothecary, was at Clarence House all day – and he stayed the night, too, so as to administer the opiates and other drugs he had brought. Prince Albert went up by train to see the Princess, and she was unconscious. The Duke of Sussex, looking ahead now, said that when his sister died word must be sent immediately to the King of Hanover. Ernest would take it ill if he did not hear ‘directly’, and Queen Victoria passed the comment to Melbourne on 21 September.
The Queen told her uncle Leopold, ‘Almost the last thing she said, when she was still conscious, the day before she died, was to Mr Moore (the apothecary), who wrote me every morning a report: “Have you written to my darling?” Is this not touching?’ Victoria was overcome, when she received that report, and told Lord Melbourne on 22 September, ‘It is wonderful that she even struggles so long.’ But she had heard from Sir Henry that afternoon that her aunt could not live more than a few hours, ‘and that probably before the evening closed in, all would be over’. Victoria wrote in her diary that she talked over that evening after dinner with ‘Lord M’ her aunt’s ‘dying condition, her having no will, and uncle Sussex likely to mix himself up in everything’.
At Clarence House in London, meanwhile, and oblivious of such worldly considerations, Princess Augusta Sophia of England had died at twenty past nine that evening. Her sister-in-law and friend Queen Adelaide held her hands while her sisters Mary and Sophia and her brother Adolphus looked on. And then the Queen Dowager closed the dead Princess’s eyes.
Augusta, as a child and later, had greatly valued her family and had delighted in her hours with them at the Queen’s House, at Kew and at Windsor. But at Frogmore and in her London homes after her parents’ deaths she had also been able to enjoy the hours alone without which, as she had said as a young girl, she was not fit for company. Her faith, her duties and works in the parish, and her attentions to the brothers and sisters she ‘doted on’ kept her busy. For recreation she had gardening, walking in the grounds she laid out, and in the evening playing duets with Lady Mary Taylor while the shadows thickened over the lake. In many ways Princess Augusta’s life recalls that of the medieval English gentlewoman, her private passions – for General Spencer and perhaps others – occluded from view. But her lively wit and sense of the ridiculous moor her firmly in the Georgian age, where for some, this reserved Princess was, as King Leopold wrote from Wiesbaden on 1 October 1840, ‘certainly the best of the whole family’. Joining those members of her family whom she had most loved, her father, her mother, her brothers George IV and William IV, and her sister Princess Amelia, she was buried in the vault under St George’s Chapel at Windsor.