Not long after the accession of her niece Victoria, Princess Sophia lost the sight in her good eye, and became blind, as we have seen. Augusta wrote sadly, shortly before her death in September 1840, that her sister’s mind was now made up ‘never to be any better’. She found it painful to ‘witness the poor dear, who used to be so often and so well employed, reduced now only to open [that is, cut the pages of] books and tear up paper for couch-pillows.’ (Sophia had apparently heard that hospital patients found pillows stuffed with paper comforting.) When Princess Sophia attended her sister’s deathbed, she could see neither her sister nor the other mourners.
A metal mesh firescreen that Sophia had once embroidered stood before the fireplace in her house in Vicarage Place, Kensington and bore a large S within a wreath of pink roses and purple and yellow pansies. The days at Windsor when Sophia had taken pleasure in this ‘work’, the days at Kensington Palace when she had embroidered dresses for her neighbour and niece Victoria, were over. Now she tore her paper or wound silk, while a series of readers came to read to her at Kensington for an hour each in English, French, German or Italian, The Princess would not allow them to read longer – ‘the fatigue would … be too great for them’. And, easily irritated, she refused to have a lady-in-waiting live with her, but relied on her dresser, Mrs Cochrane, for help. ‘Not being able to see,’ she confided to Amelia Murray, ‘she should always fancy the lady sitting opposite her, looking wearied.’
Sophia had a life that would have made anyone ‘sink’, as she did occasionally. ‘In addition to her blindness she was in some degree deaf,’ wrote Amelia Murray, ‘and could not move from her seat without being carried; yet still she was as patient and uncomplaining as ever.’ The artist Sir William Ross drew Princess Sophia at the task of carding wool, and she looks the picture of composure, with braided loops of hair, under a ribboned cap, and with sleeves massy with lace. The older woman yet has, about her smile and cast-down blind eyes, something of the elusive ‘gypsy’ quality that Lord Melbourne had detected in Princess Sophia when he and she were young.
However, Sophia did not withdraw from family life, despite her infirmities. On either side of her chair at York House hung two chequered bead-work bags, bordered and tasselled, of maroon and lemon, that she had once ornamented. The one held family letters recently received, the other those ready for despatch. (Those that arrived were read to her, but enough virtually indecipherable letters from these years survive to show that Sophia continued to write at least some of her correspondence herself.) Though she could not see, she could feel the trinkets and bibelots that all her family exchanged and amassed through legacy on tables all around her and within her reach.
Sophia’s intimacy with her niece Victoria had ended for good and all when the Queen moved out of Kensington Palace and into Buckingham Palace. Moreover, Queen Victoria gave birth months after her aunt Augusta’s death to her first child – another Victoria and a princess royal to succeed her aunt Württemberg. ‘I am very proud of her eyes, they are so large, and so dark blue; her hair is light brown; and her complexion too with pink cheeks is very pretty,’ wrote the Queen to Uncle Leopold on 22 December 1840. From now on, the Queen would be absorbed in her own family, and less curious about and considerate of the earlier generation – except for dear Aunt Mary, who took such a keen interest in Victoria and Albert and in their domestic circumstances. But the Queen still corresponded with her aunt Sophia and, as her family grew, brought them on visits to York House, Sophia’s home in Vicarage Place that had previously been the residence of the clerk of the works at Kensington Palace.
The Duchess of Gloucester, with her enormous social appetite, was Sophia’s saviour in some ways. Brooking no argument, she carried off the crumpled heap that was her sister on carriage drives around Hyde Park. Augusta’s death had left Mary bereft of a sister with whom she had for twenty years exchanged visits down at Bagshot and Frogmore, a companion at the yearly round of Court events, a friend with whom she could exchange frank remarks on the subject of their vast and vexing array of relations. The Duchess of Gloucester now visited Sophia in her seclusion all the more devotedly for the want of their elder sister.
The Duke of Cambridge was an affectionate brother too in whose company Sophia rejoiced, and his children had been trained to love Aunt Sophia, although Prince George of Cambridge later recalled her as a ‘shrivelled old lady.’ In addition, the Duke of Cambridge, like his sister Mary Adelaide, was extremely charitable, and no church, hospital or Bible society asked in vain for his presence on a committee. Philanthropy was life’s blood to his wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, and to the other ladies of the ‘old Royal Family’, too. It was said that, as Queen Dowager, William IV’s widow Adelaide spent £20,000 a year on charities benefiting children. And for the Duchess of Kent, religion and education were her watchwords, as patron of the Servants’ Society and of the Kent Dispensary, named after her deceased husband. Indeed, when she moved into Frogmore, following Princess Augusta’s death, this Duchess took over many of her sister-in-law’s pet charities at Windsor.
In town Sophia, Mary and their sisters-in-law were all successfully courted by Charles Blomfield, the energetic Bishop of London, with sermons of his own printed for the royal ladies’ delectation and with offers of visits and acceptances of dinners with his wife at their homes. They happily subscribed to his programme of building churches in outlying parts of the metropolis, and supported his work in colonial bishoprics. Indeed, with his encouragement Queen Adelaide gave large sums for the establishment of an Anglican church in Malta.
Just as her interest in Queen Victoria as a child had helped Sophia to shrug off despond in the 1820s, so the Cambridge children now – George, Augusta and Mary Adelaide – were important diversions for her. In many ways the healthy appetites and boisterous spirits of the three children recreated those of their father and his siblings in youth at Kew and Windsor, and Dolly and Mary themselves – though not Sophia – continued in their seventies to display those characteristics. ‘There is such heartiness and seemingly endless good temper about all the Royal family, to judge from manner and look,’ wrote Lady Lyttelton when a fellow guest with the Duke of Cambridge at Bagshot. Prince George of Cambridge and his sisters inherited from their father, besides, principles of benevolence which were to lead the youngest, Princess Mary Adelaide, into a positive addiction to charitable work. No bazaar was to be free of her. Others might question Adolphus’s intellect, as when he joined in unexpectedly and disastrously with professional singers at a musical evening and then applauded himself. Victoria found fault with her uncle’s extreme deafness, and others with his yellow wig. But Princess Sophia felt only warmth for the family who came so regularly and uncomplainingly to see her at York House.
The rest of her family visited her, too – the Duke of Sussex and Lady Cecilia Buggin, the widow whom he had married on Lady Augusta Murray’s death in 1830 and whom Queen Victoria, on coming to the throne, had created Duchess of Inverness. Uncle Sussex took Victoria’s part against his brother Ernest in a matter of royal precedence, and this elevation of his wife – the second whom he had married without reference to the Royal Marriages Act – was by way of a reward. Characteristically, there was an exact value placed on the Duchess of Inverness’s honours. She was never to be seated at the royal table for dinner, and was to approach it only after the most junior of other duchesses had advanced. But at the words, ‘His Grace the Duke of Sussex and Her Grace the Duchess of Inverness’, the couple could enter shambling and smiling into a reception or ball. And together the elderly Graces visited Sophia.
In April 1843, only three years after his Cecilia was made a duchess, the Duke of Sussex died, from that old-established family complaint, erysipelas. Most unusually he was buried in a granite sarcophagus in the new public cemetery of Kensal Green, north of Paddington. Incompetent arrangements for his brother William’s interment in St George’s Chapel at Windsor in 1837 had upset the Duke, it was said. But that had not stopped their sister Princess Augusta being buried in that chapel very decorously, three years later. The more romantic truth was that he wished Lady Cecilia to be laid at his side when she died, and so he arranged for the huge grey tomb in the public plot at Kensal Green to be his resting place.
News of other family matters was brought to Sophia in her Kensington home. There was the birth of another great-niece – Victoria and Albert’s second daughter Alice – in April 1843, four days after her brother Sussex’s death. And in July of that year her niece Gussy – Princess Augusta of Cambridge – departed to make a home in Germany following her marriage to Friedrich, Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. At Gussy’s wedding at Buckingham Palace, Ernest, King of Hanover, as the male head of the English royal family, rather than her father, gave the bride away. Although seventy now, bent and ‘grown very old and excessively thin’, Ernest was still combative, and tried to stop Prince Albert taking precedence over him when it came to signing the marriage register. But the Queen defeated her uncle, who was poised to take the pen from her fingers after she had signed. She ‘nipped round the table like lightning, had the register passed across to her, signed and gave the pen to the Prince before the King of Hanover knew what was happening.’
A year later, the expected death of Prince Albert’s father, Duke Ernest of Coburg, led Princess Mary to ruminate: ‘This Court mourning coming just as one season begins and when all our shops are full of their new fashions does not please the trades people.’ The death of her sister-in-law Princess Sophia Matilda struck deeper, reviving memories of Mary’s childhood as much as of her marriage to the deceased Princess’s brother. From the age of twelve, she wrote, Sophia Matilda had been ‘a warm and kind friend’, and ever ‘the same towards me’. It was a blank that would not easily be filled up, she wrote, and the loss would be greatly felt at Blackheath, where, like a medieval saint, Princess Sophia Matilda had done ‘much good to the poor and passed her retired life in acts of charity’. Mary had forgotten those days when Sophia Matilda, as her sister-in-law, had been that ‘meddling fussy sister’. Unfortunately, Sophia Matilda’s ‘anxiety to save pain’, the Duchess wrote, had made her order those about her to give no alarm when she fell ill. As a result, there was no family with her when she died, and the news came upon all of them ‘like a thunderbolt.’
The Duchess of Gloucester was always content when with Victoria and Albert and their children. She watched ‘Puss’ – Princess Vicky – play as a toddler in the Grand Corridor at Windsor when she stayed there one November, and was delighted when her great-niece and her great-nephew Bertie were brought down to luncheon. Bertie, Prince of Wales, received a letter from his great-aunt four years later, thanking him for the pretty drawing he had made for her birthday. She told the five-year-old she had just seen his grandmama, the Duchess of Kent. ‘I fear in this cold weather you will not have found your garden much advanced as to flowers,’ she said, ‘and that the east wind will make it very cold by the seaside.’ The Queen had taken her growing family to holiday on the Isle of Wight, which had remained a favourite spot from her childhood – even though her first acquaintance with it had come through her bête noire, Sir John Conroy.
Meanwhile the Duchess summered at her new country retreat, White Lodge in Richmond Park. Having previously demurred at moving from Bagshot, she took up residence in this new home after Lord Sidmouth, the old premier and its previous inhabitant, died in 1843. Her sister Sophia’s increasingly weak condition made Mary reluctant to be out of easy reach of her at Bagshot. White Lodge was a charming solution. The Duchess established all her furniture and pictures there, and soon the Lodge was redolent of comfortable chairs and feminine charm.
Queen Victoria took her five-year-old daughter Vicky with her on a visit to her aunt Sophia one January day after luncheon in 1846. They found ‘a sad sufferer and a complete cripple, unable to move, and quite blind’, as the Queen recorded afterwards in her diary. ‘In spite of it all,’ she marvelled, ‘she is quite cheerful. She was much pleased at my bringing Vicky who was very civil and good.’ Six months later, however, after another visit the Queen was less sanguine. Sophia was ‘in a very sad state’, she wrote in her diary, and she felt ‘the greatest pity for her … her existence is dreadful and she bears it so admirably, without ever complaining.’ Eighteen months later in January 1848 there came a change. At seventy years old Sophia was suddenly, as the Duke of Cambridge reported to Queen Victoria, ‘in a very precarious state and, I fear, sinking … she seems herself not to wish to live on.’ Queen Victoria drove to see her aunt on Valentine’s Day, and found her ‘much altered. She is nearly bent double, and very much wasted, and her voice is very feeble.’
In the midst of anxiety about Aunt Sophia, Victoria and Albert had cause for concern about the Queen’s other aunt, the Duchess of Gloucester. Aunt Mary was ‘again in one of her nervous states’, wrote her niece Victoria to Uncle Leopold in May 1848, ‘and gave us a dreadful fright at the christening [of Victoria and Prince Albert’s latest daughter, Princess Louise] by quite forgetting where she was and … kneeling at my feet in the middle of the service. Imagine our horror.’ Leopold’s reply was swift: ‘You must have been terrified by the poor Duchess of Gloucester.’ And he added quite untruly, ‘There is a little madness in her case.’ But Victoria believed everything that Leopold said about the ‘old Royal Family’, of which he had so briefly been part – and with whom he had fought over Charlotte’s memory.
In fact, the elderly Duchess had been much affected by having to give her opinion, as her sister Augusta had years earlier, in a case that rumbled on. Should Victoria or Ernest in Hanover inherit Queen Charlotte’s jewels? Plumping, like Augusta before her, for Ernest, Mary still felt all the weight of her niece Victoria’s disapproval of her answer, and it had preyed on her mind. Soon she was to be further disturbed in her old age, for, one afternoon in May 1848, the Duchess’s remaining sister Princess Sophia died quite dramatically for one so weak.
‘It was terribly sudden and melancholy in the midst of such rejoicing,’ Queen Victoria wrote in her journal. She and Albert had held a very successful drawing room that day at St James’s – Mary was not there, ‘Aunt Sophia not being so well’. When it was over, Prince Albert decided to ride down to Kensington and enquire at York House after the invalid’s health. Meanwhile, Queen Victoria took a drive around the Park to get some air with her younger children, Princess Alice and Prince ‘Affie’ or Alfred. She had just returned and was in the garden of Buckingham Palace when Albert’s equerry, Captain Gardiner, came running in. Victoria was terrified that some harm had come to Albert. But the Captain explained – to her ‘utter astonishment’, as the Queen wrote in her journal – that Albert had sent him from Kensington with word that ‘poor Aunt Sophia had just expired.’ The Prince himself had gone at once to Aunt Gloucester.
At Gloucester House the Duchess, who was calm and composed, revealed that, after seeing her sister at Kensington that afternoon, she had told the rest of the family who were gathered there of Sophia’s mortal danger, but she had begged them not to send word to Victoria, as the drawing room should not be put off. The Duchess had then gone home, and, by the time she returned to York House at about six, Princess Sophia had ‘passed away almost imperceptibly’ – with her hand in that of her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge. Mary reported that Sophia looked in death at last ‘most placid.’
Sophia’s had not been a life to remember with pleasure, or one that anyone could have wished prolonged. ‘She was blind, helpless and suffered martyrdom; a very clever, well-informed woman but [one] who never lived in the world,’ was the diarist Charles Greville’s cold assessment. But Sophia had been much loved by the few to whom she had allowed a degree of friendship. The Duchess of Kent, who went to her daughter Queen Victoria after dinner that evening, was ‘much shocked’ by the news, ‘having been very intimate’, Victoria wrote, ‘with poor Aunt Sophia, for, when we lived at Kensington, we saw her almost daily and she was always very kind and amiable.’ There was immense curiosity in the family about Sophia’s financial affairs and about her directions for burial. The Duchesses of Gloucester and Cambridge searched at Sophia’s house in Kensington, as Queen Victoria noted in her journal, for ‘any will or papers, directing what was to be done’. Finding nothing, and knowing that Sir John Conroy ‘had done everything’ for the Princess, reluctantly they thought it best to send for him. He reported, as Queen Victoria put it, that everything was in ‘the greatest order’, but confirmed that there was no will, ‘though he had several times expressed the wish [for her] to make one’. (Princess Augusta too had died intestate, but her sister Sophia should have had more to leave. With every death of the royal sisters who lived in England, the Parliamentary sum that the remaining princesses received – and that had been allotted them for division as far back as 1812 – grew larger.) Princess Sophia had always answered that ‘she knew her brother and sister Dolly and Minny would do all that was right.’ To the surprise – and disappointment – of the royal family, it emerged that Sophia had left practically nothing. She had expended all that she had had, at different times, on Sir John Conroy, on the purchase of his residences and on the maintenance of his family in a superior style, and on her charities.
Members of the royal family, following Sophia’s death, visited her corpse at Vicarage Place, where it had been laid out by her dresser Mrs Cochrane. Although the Princess had left no will, she had, as it turned out, left clear instructions about where that corpse should be buried. Two days after her death her banker Mr Drummond brought to Queen Victoria a letter dated 11 March of that year, in which Sophia expressed the wish to be buried ‘on the south side of the cemetery of Kensal Green’, close to where her brother Augustus was buried, and her funeral ‘to be as private as possible’.
Where her brother Augustus had been buried earlier and where his widow the Duchess of Inverness was to be laid in due course, Princess Sophia’s coffin was put to rest on 6 June 1848 – for the moment, within the cemetery vault. (Prince Albert’s artistic adviser, Professor Ludwig Grüner of Dresden, had been given the task of designing a casket tomb to stand on the plot opposite that of the Duke of Sussex, long Sophia’s fellow inmate at Kensington Palace.) The Duke of Cambridge was much affected, and all Sophia’s ladies attended the interment, but, as Sophia had wished and as Queen Victoria recorded in her journal, ‘There were only mourning coaches, no royal ones.’
A year later, the Princess’s tomb was ready, and Princess Sophia’s remains were duly transferred to ‘grave plot number 8028’, and to Grüner’s wreathed and swagged quattrocento sarcophagus. Carved of Carrara marble by the eminent Signor Bardi, with lions’ paws for legs and bearing the name Sophia, this elegant casket perched atop a high stone podium made by Edward Pearce. On one panel of the podium ran the fitting legend, ‘Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.’ In addition Sophia’s royal relations, while following her instructions for a private funeral, had ensured that her burial place would always attract attention. For while, across the way, her brother Augustus’s sarcophagus was, if massive, plain, Sophia’s ornate casket tomb was, in the public cemetery, highly noticeable, being surmounted by a large coronet.
As for the last remaining daughter of George III, the Duchess of Gloucester’s dresser Mrs Gold said her mistress ‘never thought of being, or wished to be, buried anywhere but at Windsor and … was much shocked at her brother, the Duke of Sussex, and her sister being buried at Kensal Green, remarking at the time, “They shall not carry me there.’ ” Accordingly the Duchess of Gloucester set down immediately after Princess Sophia’s death the directions for her own interment at Windsor, whenever it should occur.
There were those who thought that Sophia chose Kensal Green as a burial place where her son Tommy Garth might one day also lie, but she left no such instructions. It seems likely that the idea would have been repugnant in the extreme to Sophia. Tommy Garth himself, however, may have believed that this wish directed her choice of burial ground. He certainly expected to inherit a fortune on her death, as he later told George, Duke of Cambridge – and he swore it was George’s own father, Adolphus, who had told him so immediately after Sophia’s death. But of course there was nothing.
Shortly after his passage of arms with Sir Herbert Taylor in 1829, Tommy Garth, failing to fend off creditors any longer, had taken up residence in the King’s Bench debtors’ prison in south London. He remained there five years – years during which his lover Georgiana Astley stayed close by and gave birth to his daughter, Georgiana Rosamund Garth. Adding further melodrama to a story already overladen with it, Lady Astley died in childbirth. And her daughter, whom we must assume to have been Sophia’s granddaughter, although she was baptized confusingly after her mother’s death as the daughter of Sir Jacob and Lady Astley, was reared in the neighbourhood of the King’s Bench, while her father Tommy Garth lingered inside. Appeals to Sir Herbert from prison eventually brought Garth in 1834 a lump sum of £10,000 to effect his release and establishment, and when he emerged from jail he took his young daughter Georgiana to live with him.
Princess Sophia’s death in 1848 and the disappointment of his hopes that he was the heir to a fortune came at a moment when Tommy Garth’s lump sum of £10,000 from Sir Herbert had dwindled to nothing. Repeated appeals to the royal purse secured, as the scandal faded, a less generous settlement, a pension of £300 a year. When, following her father’s death in 1875, Georgiana Garth made claims of her own to the royal family for assistance, she failed entirely in her attempts. If Tommy Garth’s life had been blighted from birth by the mystery of his parentage, Georgiana Rosamund was doubly cursed. She never married, apparently feeling that the scandal of her birth and its circumstances made such an enterprise impossible. In this she echoed her grandmother Sophia’s own sentiments from years before.