Following Sophia’s death in May 1848, Victoria and Albert were tender in their care of the Duchess of Gloucester. Seaside air, they decided, would help to ease her suffering. That July she was invited to Osborne, their new house on the Isle of Wight, to ‘walk around by the sea’ and to play with her great-nephews and nieces. Uncle Cambridge, as a great concession, was invited too, and the brother and sister planted trees at their niece’s request, then sat under their shade. ‘Aunt Gloucester is a most kind, amiable old lady and very sensible,’ was Victoria’s judgement.
With Princess Sophia’s death the Duchess of Gloucester and her brother the Duke of Cambridge were released from their dutiful daily attendance at York House in Kensington, just as their sister was released from her circumscribed life. But the loss for the Duchess was frightful, and her sister’s death no blessing. Sophia had been to her a cherished companion, the sister nearest in age, the last of the sisterhood whose memories were long and active. A year later, back at Osborne, Mary ‘talked with grief of Aunt Sophia and many things which had distressed her.’ The Queen took her aunt for a drive after lunch to distract her, and a beach expedition the next day with the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal, Princess Alice and Affie was still more successful. They floated about on two barges until eight in the evening.
That same year, 1849, the Duchess went with her brother Cambridge and his family to the Isle of Anglesey, when he was ordered there for his health, and they mourned together the death of their pious sister-in-law Adelaide, the Queen Dowager. But neither the Duchess nor the Cambridge household at Kew suspected that they were soon to be dealt a far worse blow. In July 1850 ‘dear Dolly’ was taken fatally ill at his London home, Cambridge House in South Audley Street, and an express was sent to Mecklenburg-Strelitz to urge his daughter Gussy to leave for England at once if she wished to see him alive.
The Hereditary Princess, accompanied by her young son, named Adolphus after her father, arrived in London hours too late. Earlier that evening at Cambridge House her aunt Mary had been sitting with the Duchess of Cambridge when a servant entered to summon the latter ‘instantly’ to the dying Duke’s side, and that Duchess entered the room where her husband lay, ‘only to hear the last gasp.’ The Duchess of Gloucester, Mary Adelaide and Prince George, now Duke of Cambridge, and all the Cambridges’ servants besides, then joined the newly widowed Duchess and knelt to pray with her round the bed.
‘His dear face looks just as if he was in a happy sleep,’ wrote the Duchess of Gloucester to her ‘sister’, the Duchess of Kent, after viewing her brother Adolphus’s corpse the following day. He deserved his rest, she added, ‘after a life spent in charities and good deeds.’ The Duke, Queen Victoria echoed her aunt, had been ‘charitable and popular, and even his peculiarities’ – like his bright yellow wig – were well liked. Aunt Gloucester was calm, Victoria recorded, though, while the Duke of Cambridge had been alive, ‘not a day [had] passed without his writing to her, or, if he was in London or at Kew, going to see her.’ Now, of all the brothers and sisters on whom, throughout a long life, Princess Mary had lavished affection, only Ernest, the widowed old King of Hanover, still resisting change and even revolution in northern Germany, remained. But he never visited England now, for, when not absorbed in Hanoverian matters of state, he was reluctant to leave his young grandson Ernst – blind Crown Prince George’s son – on whom he doted.
Mary of Gloucester spent the morning of Dolly’s funeral at home in London with her niece Queen Victoria, who had volunteered to keep her company, while the Cambridge ladies attended the Duke’s funeral at the church on Kew Green. The Duke of Wellington disapproved of their being at the funeral – it was against all royal etiquette – and thought they would have been better off at Gloucester House.
There, the Duchess of Gloucester, her niece the Queen and all the servants huddled into the dining room where Mr Nepean, the chaplain, ‘read prayers and parts of the burial service’, and gave an address. Afterwards Mary and Queen Victoria sat upstairs, and the Duchess gave her niece a beautiful diamond bracelet that Queen Adelaide had only the year before left her in her will. In sombre mood the Duchess said she would prefer to give, ‘rather than bequeath’, it to Victoria.
Now that her brothers and sisters – all but Ernest – were dead, the Duchess of Gloucester confided to Victoria stories of the Courts of George III and of George IV which she said she had never till now revealed to anyone. ‘She talked much of former times,’ Queen Victoria recorded later that year, ‘and the very painful quarrel between the Duke of Gloucester and George IV about the late Queen Caroline, whom the Duke defended. My aunt could in consequence not go to Court for a long time, as she naturally did not wish to go alone, and could not do so with her husband, exposed to see him insulted.’
The Duchess of Gloucester was encouraged to reminisce further over the next years. And she happily criticized with her niece Victoria the ‘strange, rather over-lively and undistinguished manners’ of Augusta d’Este, the daughter of her brother Sussex by Lady Augusta Murray who was now Lady Truro, wife of the Lord Chancellor, and very handsome. With Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, now in her twenties, the Duchess shared a memory from sixty years before of her first bathe in the sea at Weymouth. Her bathing dress was a ‘regular one’ made for the occasion, she recalled, which ‘no floating about deranged’. The Duchess wrote, ‘If the world had been looking on, they would have seen me as well dressed as at a drawing room.’
Energetic – and lonely – in her old age, the Duchess of Gloucester thanked Mary Adelaide for her share, on a visit she made to the Cambridge ladies at Plas Newydd, on the Isle of Anglesey, the summer after the Duke died, ‘in making me laugh of an evening. I am sure for years I had not laughed as I did the evening you brought up the Address from Bangor …’ She said she was ‘almost ashamed’ – at her age – ‘to have been so amused with … such wonderful nonsense.’ Back at home she drove about the grounds of Frogmore – now the Duchess of Kent’s retreat – in a garden chair belonging to her hostess, only to regret it next day. She wrote to Princess Mary Adelaide that it had shaken her ‘nearly into a jelly, and I am aching all over’.
Mary looked forward greatly to the opening, set for May Day 1851, of the Great Exhibition in Paxton’s ‘Glass Palace’ in Hyde Park. And she was firmly of the opinion that Prince George, the new Duke of Cambridge, should return from military duties in Dublin for the event. She told his mother, the Duchess, in April: ‘My own feeling is that as there are so few of us left of the royal family to attend her [Victoria] … he ought to come.’ Aunt Mary did not count among the royal family the actress Louisa Fairbrother, who had been going under the name of Mrs Fitzgeorge since she and George – ignoring the Royal Marriages Act – had married, and with whom, when in London, together with three small sons, the Duke lived contentedly in a house in Queen Street. George’s marriage was a matter that was rarely discussed within the royal family, his aunt Mary limiting herself to counselling him, after his father’s death, to honour Adolphus’s wishes and ‘disembarrass himself of what would trouble him more every year’. George did not take her advice.
Ten days after the opening of the Exhibition, Mary wrote of her ‘admiration’ for it to her niece Victoria – ‘it far surpassed anything I ever saw before and requires days and days to see everything. Then I was nearly blinded with looking and seeing such magnificent and such a fine collection of things from all parts of the world – and my chair went about very comfortably.’ She went a further three times that month. ‘Every day I find more to admire,’ she exclaimed, singling out the Russian exhibits for special commendation in a letter to her niece Mary Adelaide, who was on a visit to her mother’s Hesse relations at Rumpenheim in Germany. ‘I wish I had wings to fly to make you a visit,’ the Duchess of Gloucester told her, ‘and wake you up of a morning by pecking at the window to be let in and oblige you to get out of bed.’
It is ‘well worth your making the exertion to go there’, the Duchess told her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, a year or two later when she visited the Crystal Palace, which had housed the Great Exhibition, in its new home in Sydenham in south London. ‘There are plenty of chairs to be drawn about in, and plenty of room for everybody to walk about and sit down … and more than you can possibly eat and drink for 2 shillings a head and all well conducted, no noise and the building – as clean and sweet as possible … come and meet me there some day … no soul will disturb you as the conductors are all attention and do all they can to oblige everybody.’
The Duchess was as much fascinated by the visitors to the Exhibition in Hyde Park as by the construction itself. She went there in September 1851, she wrote to Mary Adelaide, on ‘one of the shilling days… to see the lower classes milling about in the greatest order looking so happy and pleased amused me … the seeing them sitting down in groups to eat their dinner and displaying the contents of their baskets [was] almost as curious a sight as the Exhibition.’ Enthralled by the Exhibition and its exotic wares, she wrote after a State Ball at Buckingham Palace that one of the guests, the Duchess of Norfolk, had been so hung about with jewels that she looked ‘as if she had put on all the Indian things … in the Exhibition.’
News arrived of the death at Herrenhausen of Ernest, King of Hanover in November 1851. And the Duke of Wellington, who had been Ernest’s political opponent, was not unmoved when he commented, ‘He had the disorder in his lungs which they all have!’ Queen Victoria wrote in November 1851, ‘Poor Aunt G feels it very much, though there never could have been great love for him on her part, but she has always been kind to all her brothers and sisters, and it is a sad feeling to be the last left of so large a family.’ As for the Queen herself, Ernest had been ‘an uncle whom I could not love … I never saw anyone like him, who liked to hurt in everything he said. He was of an extraordinary unflinching courage, for which one must admire him, but there were many dark stories connected with his name which I will not touch upon, but which make me shudder.’
‘My nephews and nieces … are now my chief object of care and interest,’ the Duchess of Gloucester wrote solemnly to Victoria after learning of her brother’s death. And, with every intention of keeping up ties of affection with her blind nephew George, the new King of Hanover, she prayed that Victoria might be guided in friendship with him. ‘I consider Hanover an old family estate that it is impossible not to wish to keep in the family,’ she explained. ‘Compared with the great country’ – the United Kingdom – she conceded that Hanover was ‘a drop in the sea’, but she counselled her niece that, ‘well managed and a good understanding kept up’, the former Electorate was a useful channel for obtaining information of affairs on the Continent. Regrettably, King George began almost immediately, as Queen Victoria informed her aunt, on ‘a track of reaction, so unfortunately the course pursued by almost all the German princes’. The ‘good understanding’ for which Mary had hoped perished before it was born. Indeed, the new King of Hanover and his wife soon incurred the old Duchess’s wrath by not acknowledging her ‘four letters… Christmas presents and New Year letter’. Her only solace, she told the Duchess of Cambridge, was King George’s resolve to ‘keep up all his father’s charities at Kew in regard to the school and church … He says he never can forget his happy childish days there.’
Marking the anniversary of the Cambridges’ wedding in May 1852, Mary surrendered to gloom. ‘Without you,’ she told the widowed Duchess of Cambridge, ‘I should be all alone in the world … sometimes I think I must be a dead weight upon you. I feel I grow so stupid, so dull and so old … all and everything’, she concluded drearily, ‘is changed as to our family and the world in general.’ But she kept up her rituals, and as usual marked the Fourth of June, her father’s Birthday, with a party. Gout did not cramp her style. ‘I managed by going to one chair and then another (like a child beginning to walk),’ she reported. But it was the first time that there were no brothers or sisters with whom to mark the day.
‘Here I am all alone by myself today to drink the health’, she wrote to Mary Adelaide, ‘of the only one of my once large family left of us brothers and sisters – It made me low when I first awoke this morning.’ She comforted herself with the reflection that ‘such dear ones as yourself, George and Gussy are left to us to love and care about’. And she seized the moment to keep up other old ties: ‘Now I am going to drive down to Brompton Square to see the King of Hanover’s foster sister, old Miss Cheveley.’ (Miss Cheveley’s mother Louisa had been Ernest’s wet-nurse.)
Occasionally lachrymose, the Duchess of Gloucester generally enjoyed a sociable old age. She offered on one occasion ‘a quiet evening with a stupid dull old lady’ at Gloucester House to an old friend, Sarah, Lady Abinger. But the tall house on the corner of Park Lane and Piccadilly often hosted greater numbers. And candidates for the crowded children’s balls she gave in the upper room there – she brought in ‘little wonders’, musical prodigies six years old, and ventriloquists to amuse her junior guests – were not hard to find. An elderly Duke of Argyll much later recalled attending children’s balls there with his cousins annually. ‘The Duchess of Gloucester, with grey curls on each side of her head and a small cap above her good natured face, was most kind and attentive to us all.’
All beauty fled, all bosom and benevolence, with a comfortable shawl pulled around her and with a large lace cap drawn over her smooth and braided hair and tied under her fleshy chin, the Duchess was now the picture of a complacent Victorian lady – which, indeed, is what she was. She travelled between White Lodge and Windsor, Gloucester House and Brighton – and even Osborne. And she bore with resignation the deaths of public and private characters which the years brought, while rejoicing in the burgeoning royal family at Windsor. The Queen gave birth to an eighth child – Prince Leopold – on 7 April 1853 and used ‘that blessed chloroform’ for the first time.
But hanging over all else was the threat of war with Turkey and Russia. And when hostilities broke out in 1854, in the thick of it was the Duchess of Gloucester’s nephew George, Duke of Cambridge, who had been promoted lieutenant-general and sent out to the Crimea that February in command of a division of Guards and Highlanders. At the battle of Alma in September his men came forward, when the Light Division had fallen back before the Russian counter-attack, and won the engagement. ‘When all was over,’ he recorded, ‘I could not help crying like a child.’ Disaster then followed success, when he had his horse shot from under him at the battle of Inkerman, and lost half his brigade of Guards.
Shocks and losses, and the suffering of others, to say nothing of the primitive conditions out in Turkey – fever, salt pork, and no vegetables, tobacco or soap – preyed on George’s nerves, and he described himself as ‘dreadfully knocked up and quite worn out’. Encamped on the heights within view but just out of sight of Sebastopol, he wrote gloomily to his mother and aunt Mary in early October 1854 that cholera had broken out again very badly among the troops. And he felt there was no likelihood that Sebastopol would fall.
News was sparse in England. Word of battles and of the killed or wounded came slowly, and Aunt Gloucester’s sleep was disturbed by the anxiety she felt on her nephew’s behalf. A month later, following news from George of Russian counter-attacks, she told the Duchess of Cambridge, ‘I am still in a shake with thinking what danger he was in.’ But, responding to the news that her nephew meditated coming home, Mary added: ‘I feel sure, without it is necessary, George never could think of doing so at such a moment.’ But George, exhausted, left the scene of war following the battle of Inkerman on 5 November and rested in a hospital ship, the Retribution, off Balaclava. Even there he was not left undisturbed, and had to retreat, after a thunderbolt hit the ship, to Constantinople to convalesce.
‘I should be miserable if his health obliged him to come home,’ Queen Victoria told her aunt Mary, as the latter informed George’s mother the Duchess of Cambridge in December. The Queen expressed the hope that her cousin had gone back to his post, and, as if to deny the possibility of his return to England, reported to Aunt Gloucester that she was at work making the Duke a comforter, to send out to him. But the Duke was homeward bound, regardless of his female relations’views. ‘You can not be more annoyed or more miserable [than I] at George having asked to come home on sick leave,’ lamented Aunt Mary to Queen Victoria as the new year of 1855 dawned. Thinking of ‘all the disagreeable things that … will be said’, she wrote, ‘it is a sad pity his nerves have been so shaken’.
Before George returned to England in late January, his examination by a medical board at Constantinople had confirmed – to the invalid’s relief – his opinion that he should not rejoin the army for the moment. Still, his martial aunt did not give up hope, and she wrote to the Duke’s mother on 23 March, ‘I consider George’s return [to the Crimea] … only put off for the time and, as a proof of this, all his horses are left there.’ Meanwhile Mary took up her paintbrush to produce sixteen paintings for the Patriotic Fund exhibition in aid of Crimean War victims.
When not fretting over her nephew’s nerves, the Duchess of Gloucester had passed the festive season arranging her glass cabinets and bringing out the treasures she had accumulated and inherited over many years. Among them was a satin pochette containing a prayer she had written when she was twelve and frightened during her father’s strange illness at Kew. And she had, should she wish to sigh over it, wrapped up in tissue paper the hair of many of her sisters – a great auburn coil from Amelia’s head – and even some iron-grey wisps identified as her mother’s during her last years. There were as well items of her sisters’ ‘work’ to turn over – including the maroon and lemon chequered workbags in which her sister Sophia had hung her correspondence on her chair arms.
But there were more cheerful mementoes of the past – her family’s ‘pictures’, ranging from miniatures of her parents and Reynolds’s painting of her sister-in-law Sophia Matilda as a child to recent photographs of the Cambridges and of Victoria’s family. There was even one prized photograph taken by the fashionable photographer Claudet. It showed not only Queen Victoria, her son Bertie, Prince of Wales and his younger sister Alice, but also their great-aunt Mary, tiny and hunched but smiling, in a highly decorated dress. Her equerry the Hon. Augustus Liddell took another photograph of the Duchess of Gloucester – alone this time, but again in a very striking outfit adorned with a shawl. Other treasures at Gloucester House included books, Bibles and almanacs that had once belonged to her brothers and sisters. And the Duchess owned besides a magpie collection of jewellery and less substantial trinkets now all hers as sole survivor of a large family who had religiously exchanged gifts all their lives on high days and holidays.
While staying in Brighton in the autumn of 1855, the Duchess of Gloucester was gratified to hear – in confidence – from Queen Victoria of another royal marriage to come. Vicky, Princess Royal, was engaged to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, future King of Prussia, and the couple met the Duchess’s criteria for happiness – ‘the young people have been allowed (fortunately) opportunities of becoming well acquainted with each other’. Mary welcomed ‘an alliance that is so desirable in every way and one I always considered as the most natural to be thought of. But she then turned tearful. ‘It is not likely I should live to see this event take place.’
‘It appears like a dream to me’, she told Victoria, ‘that you should have a daughter old enough to begin to think of settling down for life – when I remember your birth as if it happened only yesterday.’ In fact, Vicky would not marry her Prince of Prussia for another two years, and, in visiting this long engagement on their daughter, Victoria and Albert were breaking the Duchess’s tenet that long love affairs were ‘very disagreeable’. But they were at least providing for their daughter the dynastic match that Mary’s own father, King George III, had so singularly failed to produce for her.
The guns that sounded the end of war in the Crimea in March 1856 led the Duchess to speak of ‘the blessings of peace’. She had lived through three terrible carnages – the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars and now this. ‘Pray God it may be a lasting one,’ she wrote to Queen Victoria on 30 March. Honour was restored in July when, as one of the blessings of peace, George, Duke of Cambridge became commander-in-chief. But Bertie, the Prince of Wales, rather than his cousin George, was now the old Duchess’s pride and joy. As the future sovereign, he naturally attracted her attention, and she was delighted when, with his tutor Mr Gibbs, he paid her a visit at White Lodge in Richmond Park when she was recovering from a serious illness. ‘She had become so thin,’ her dresser Mrs Gold later recalled, that ‘her bones had nearly come through the skin.’ But Mary received visitors, sitting up in bed supported by cushions, and looked ‘very cheerful and … so nice and venerable’ – according to Queen Victoria – ‘in her white night-cap and everything so neatly and prettily arranged.’
When the fourteen-year-old Prince of Wales visited his great-aunt during her convalescence, he brought her five game birds he had shot himself. ‘I hear’, wrote the Duchess to the boy’s mother, ‘the keeper says he will be an admirable shot as he sets about it so steadily.’ A few years before she had encouraged Bertie’s earliest sporting attempts: ‘I can well believe how delighted you must have been at being allowed to go out shooting for the first time, and the being so fortunate as to have killed two rabbits gives every hope that you will be a good sportsman by and by.’
After receiving her great-nephew in bed, the Duchess roused herself to entertain him downstairs. ‘He made himself very agreeable, full of wishing to have the particulars of every picture that hangs up in the room and the history of every picture in the house, making very sensible remarks… in short, I was delighted with him,’ she told Queen Victoria, ‘and I hear he gained all hearts below stairs.’ Already a ladies’ man, the future King Edward VII said, before he left to catch his train, that ‘he was so glad he had seen Aunt Gloucester up and dressed, as she looked so much prettier up than in bed’.
The only one of the family who now worried Aunt Gloucester was Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge. At twenty-three she had spurned one suitor, the Prince of Sardinia – which she now regretted – and she was growing disquietingly large. But the Duchess of Gloucester endorsed the tour of Germany on which the Duchess of Cambridge led her younger daughter, and, while wishing marriage for Princess Mary Adelaide, did not for a moment neglect her other junior relations. The ninth birthday of Princess Louise in March 1857 produced a packet of books and a letter from her great-aunt Gloucester, and in addition, twenty pounds despatched separately to her mother ‘for any trinket you may fancy for her’. Mary, who had had little money herself when young, liked to give generous sums to children, once sending a ‘little bit of paper’ for three sisters to divide, with the message, ‘As there are balls, it may assist in making you all a little smart.’
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were not neglectful of Aunt Gloucester in their turn. When he heard that Mary had been taken ill in April 1857, Prince Albert sent over to Gloucester House ‘a very handsome useful piece of furniture’ – a sofa that could be raised ‘an inch at a time’ and was a ‘perfect convenience.’ The Duchess had had it brought upstairs and would probably try it in the course of the day, her equerry Liddell wrote in thanks. The Duchess was ‘very weak and much oppressed’ that day, as her niece Mary Adelaide noted, but she nevertheless wrote to Albert herself: ‘It is impossible to express, my dear Albert, how deeply I feel your kindness in sending me so beautiful and useful a chair, and one that I feel sure will be such a comfort for me when once I get used to use it, and how much I am impressed with your kindness. Thank God that dear Victoria is going on well, my affte love to her, Yours, Mary, April the 15th, GH.’ This was to be the last letter she ever wrote.
Next morning an account came to Cambridge Cottage of the Duchess of Gloucester having had ‘an attack of spasms at the heart in the night’. That afternoon George – who was out of London – and Gussy – in Mecklenburg-Strelitz – were telegraphed for, and the rest of the family, forbidden for the moment to see the Duchess, waited downstairs in the small front drawing room at Gloucester House. It was ‘wretched work’, wrote Princess Mary Adelaide after some hours of sitting there, talking and reading with her mother. And the next two days were much the same. But on the 18th, after the Duchess of Cambridge and Mary Adelaide returned from seeing the Queen’s new baby, Princess Beatrice, at Buckingham Palace, back at Gloucester House the ailing Duchess awoke from a doze and kissed her hand to her niece Mary Adelaide, when she visited her. But this small sign of life meant little, and Hawkins the Duchess’s surgeon6 said ominously on 18 April that ‘he felt much alarmed as a torpor was stealing over the brain.’
Visitors continued to come to Gloucester House – Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales and Vicky, the Princess Royal, the Duchess of Inverness, Aunt Kent, even Princess Feodora and her husband, Prince Ernest of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Queen Victoria visited with her daughter Alice. George, Duke of Cambridge arrived, and then on the 21st Gussy, from Mecklenburg-Strelitz with her son Dolphy. Mary Adelaide peeped at her aunt from behind a screen as the Duchess was given beef tea, and wondered at her marvellous tenacity. But the days hung heavy for those assembled at the house.
The Prince of Wales sneaked up the back way to look in on his aunt. On the 25th, her eighty-first birthday, Mary gave signs of life, and pressed Mary Adelaide’s hand twice when her niece kissed hers. Two days later she was confused, and did not know her visitors. She asked if the Duchess of Cambridge was coming. They replied that she was in the house. Would Aunt Mary like her to come? ‘By all means, let her come,’ was their great-aunt’s reply. But when the Duchess of Cambridge came, the patient did not speak.
The Duchess stopped eating the next day, on 28 April, and there was a ‘marked change’ in the night that followed. After seeing her aunt on the 29th, Mary Adelaide of Cambridge cried in the room of Mary’s dresser Mrs Gold, and after dinner Hawkins directed the family that they should remain for the night. At three-thirty the following morning the family knelt around the Duchess’s bed. Mr Nepean, the chaplain, read the prayers for the dying. ‘The pulse was beating feebler and feebler and death had set its stamp upon her much loved features,’ recorded Mary Adelaide. The old Princess’s heavy breathing was loud in the room, and she hovered ‘between life and eternity’. At five-fifteen in the morning of 30 April 1857, ‘with another stretch and a momentary convulsive contraction of the face’, Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester died.
‘With her is gone the last link, which connected us with a bygone generation,’ Victoria wrote, on receiving the news of her aunt’s death in a note from George, written at half-past five that morning. ‘She was an authority on everything, a bright example of loyalty, devotion and duty, the kindest and best of mistresses, and friends. She had become like a grandmother to us all, from her age, and from her being the last of the family.’ Meanwhile the mourners at Gloucester House wandered sadly from room to room, watching the servants unbar the shutters and draw the blinds as day dawned. Then they drove away, leaving Mrs Gold to wash and dress and lay out the corpse of the mistress whom she had served so long. The story of the six daughters of George III, which had begun with the Princess Royal’s birth in the Queen’s House ninety-one years before on Michaelmas Day 1766, was concluded.