In the summer of 1812, 43-year-old Princess Augusta Sophia wrote to her brother, the Prince Regent, pleading for permission to marry the man she had loved for more than a decade. Her family had repeatedly blocked her from marrying, and this final appeal may have been her last chance. No reply survives, and whatever became of that relationship, Augusta Sophia remained unmarried for the rest of her life, spending her days in the same royal court that had denied her the right to marry and choose her own future. Princess Augusta Sophia was born at Buckingham House in London, the building later remodeled into Buckingham Palace, on November 8, 1768.
She was the sixth daughter and second daughter of King George III of Great Britain and his wife, Queen Charlotte. Unusually, the king had wanted a girl, while royal families typically preferred sons to ensure plenty of potential heirs. When the attending physician, Dr. William Hunter, tactfully suggested the possibility of another son, George scolded the doctor and began complaining to his wife, mid-labor, about her physician.
Augusta was named after her paternal grandmother, Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales, and her mother, whose full name was Sophia Charlotte. Days after her birth, at the usual public reception for a new royal baby, visitors arrived at St. James’s Palace and were offered cakes and drink, a warm mixture of oatmeal and wine. Two young ladies ended up drunk and causing a commotion.
This was the kind of incident Augusta would later appreciate, as she was known for a dry wit and had little patience for excessive court formality, unlike her sisters. Augusta’s nursery was run by Lady Charlotte Finch and Miss Mary Dacres, who were patient with Augusta’s innate shyness as she grew up. For example, she would stammer when around people she did not know. She was educated at home and learned to speak several languages, including French and German, along with other subjects such as history, music, classics, and needlework.
She was introverted by nature and needed solitude, later remarking that if she did not get an hour of quiet each day for herself, she was good for nothing. She grew up to be the acknowledged beauty of the family, with one governess describing her as the most beautiful princess ever. In 1782, 13-year-old Augusta made her first formal appearance in society during her father’s birthday celebrations. She still felt extremely uncomfortable in crowds, so Queen Charlotte deliberately waited until just two days before to tell her daughter what would happen.
As Augusta and her older sisters aged, they spent more time accompanying their parents to the theater, opera, and royal court. Their academic education gradually gave way to more music, arts, and the social training expected of young princesses. They were growing up, and soon it would be time for them to marry. But when that time came, Augusta discovered that her family had no intention of allowing her to choose her own husband.
As a daughter of a major European monarch like George III, she was typically a diplomatic chess piece used to strengthen alliances or treaties. Negotiations for the marriage of a princess like Augusta Sophia would usually begin when she was almost a child. However, it was different with George III’s daughters. George had watched his sister Caroline Matilda marry at a very young age and become Queen of Denmark, only to be involved in a major scandal at the Copenhagen court that ended in divorce, exile, and her early death.
George was determined to avoid his daughter suffering a similar fate. So when the Danes inquired in 1785 whether Augusta might be a potential bride for Prince Frederick of Denmark, George refused outright. Given the treatment his late sister received in Copenhagen, no one in the royal establishment wanted that alliance. The most serious marriage proposal for Augusta came in early 1791.
With Europe on the brink of the French Revolutionary Wars, Duke Ferdinand of Württemberg, a lieutenant in the Austrian army, arrived in England and began courting Augusta. As Britain prepared for the coming conflict with revolutionary France, an alliance with a prominent German duke serving Austria made the match look particularly attractive. The royal family was generally satisfied with him, and for the first time, Augusta seemed to have a realistic chance of marriage. But George III refused.
The reason was complicated. Ferdinand was the brother of Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg, whose first wife, Auguste Caroline, was George’s niece. She had died in a Russian prison amid ugly rumors surrounding her behavior and treatment there. Whatever the truth of those rumors, George clearly wanted nothing to do with the proposed marriage, and once again Augusta’s hopes of marrying were dashed by her father.
After this latest disappointment, Augusta became more withdrawn, retreating into books, religion, and the ancient Greek and Roman authors she loved. But soon, the question of Augusta’s marriage was overshadowed by a far more serious matter. Her father began suffering from the illness that would change the future of the entire royal family. In the autumn of 1788, George fell seriously ill for the first time, showing signs of disturbed behavior and general mania that left him unable to govern.
On one particularly bad evening, he insisted on nursing the queen, made a bed for her from the drawing-room sofa, arranged his daughters around her, and then ranted for the rest of the night. Augusta turned 20 on November 8 of that first year of the political crisis caused by her father’s illness. For a time, it seemed Augusta’s oldest brother, the future George IV, would have to rule as regent in place of his father, but the king recovered in early 1789. However, further episodes followed in 1801 and 1804, and from 1810 his condition became permanent, entering a final illness that lasted 10 years and resulted in a decade-long regency until 1820.
While doctors struggled to understand what was happening to him, George III’s illness grew more severe. At Windsor Castle, the king was confined to his own apartments, while his daughters remained under their mother’s strict supervision. By that time, their lives had become so isolated that the princesses began calling Windsor “the Nunnery. ” For Augusta, it was a life of increasing seclusion.
Her father could no longer be relied upon to approve her marriage. Her mother was determined to keep her daughters close, and finding suitable suitors became more difficult. However, around 1800, someone would soon enter Augusta’s life, a man who might finally give her the chance to escape. In 1799, an officer arrived at the British court who would change the course of her life.
Sir Brent Spencer was an Irishman from County Antrim in northeastern Ireland, though he had spent most of his career in the West Indies. He impressed the king at court and was appointed one of his military aides-de-camp. He was then 39 years old and unmarried, and a fondness soon grew between him and Augusta. Augusta had a practical personality that suited the military man who appeared at the royal court in 1799.
She seems to have fallen in love with him, and according to her later accounts, she did not view him merely as a lover but as a substitute husband as she entered her thirties without marrying. He seems to have returned her feelings and soon broke off an engagement his family had arranged with a cousin while he was serving in India. Their relationship became publicly known at court by 1803, and she confided its details to her brothers, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. But there was one huge problem.
Augusta was a princess, while Spencer was not. No matter how attached they were to each other, a marriage between them would have been considered beneath her royal station, and it was practically impossible while her father remained king. So their relationship was forced into secrecy, leaving Augusta waiting and hoping that circumstances might one day change. Instead, Spencer was sent off to war.
He fought the French in the Mediterranean and Egypt, and later in Portugal and Spain during the Peninsular War, where he was awarded the prestigious Order of the Bath in recognition of his service. While he risked his life on battlefields across Europe, Augusta was left behind waiting for the man she could not marry. Eventually, with her father incapacitated and her brother effectively king, Augusta decided to act. With Parliament granting the princesses an independent income of 13,000 pounds a year, Augusta finally felt free enough to act.
On March 5, 1812, she wrote to her brother, reminding him that she had told him about her relationship with Spencer years before, and asked him to approve a secret marriage despite Spencer’s modest social standing. She said she had known him for 12 years, and that she was now in her mid-forties and unlikely to marry a royal prince or high-ranking aristocrat. The diplomatic consequences of her marrying Spencer were therefore almost nonexistent, especially if it were done quietly and privately. Curiously, or perhaps understandably, Augusta kept the letter for three months, only sending it on June 12, 1812.
Perhaps it was due to hesitation, or perhaps the tense political atmosphere at court, where it was clear that George III would not recover. What happened next remains one of the greatest mysteries of Augusta’s life. No reply from her brother was ever found, so we do not know whether he refused her request or simply chose not to answer. This has led historians to wonder whether Augusta went ahead and secretly married Spencer anyway.
No marriage record survives, and without her brother’s consent, finding a clergyman willing to perform the ceremony would have been extremely difficult. But then, in December 1828, Spencer died, and a stunning discovery deepened the mystery further. Around his neck was a locket containing a miniature portrait of Augusta, attached to a small card declaring that the two were married. Was it merely a romantic symbol of a relationship that could never become official, or had Augusta Sophia secretly become the wife of Sir Brent Spencer after all?
More than two centuries later, we still do not know for certain. When Queen Charlotte died in November 1818, she left Frogmore House, her beloved retreat in Windsor Home Park, to Augusta. But Augusta did not move into her inheritance immediately. Her father was still alive, and although she had inherited a house of her own, she remained at Windsor, continuing to care for the ailing king.
Only after George III’s death in January 1820 did Augusta finally move to Frogmore and begin making the house her own. At Frogmore, Augusta was interested in gardening and did much charity work in the parish, with local newspapers praising her unusual generosity. She replaced a patch of grass outside her favorite window with a basket of planted flowers, and she was still happy with it years later, noting it surpassed anything in the main castle. Others were less impressed.
A visiting German prince thought Augusta’s handiwork looked like a frog pond. In the evenings, she was a warm hostess, inviting friends from London to enjoy music and other entertainment at her home. When her brother William, later King William, dined with her in town, she also played tunes with him, and by all accounts she was never happier than when making music. By the summer of 1837, Augusta had buried both her parents and four of her adult siblings, two of whom had been kings, George IV and William IV.
She also became one of the last living links to her father’s court as her young niece, Victoria, ascended the throne and a new era began within the royal establishment. By that time, Augusta was already in declining health, having spent time on the coast in Brighton to learn to walk with a cane after an illness. She was not without criticism of the new reign. Privately, she thought Victoria inexperienced and friendless, and believed the marriage being arranged with Prince Albert, a German aristocrat, would be disastrous, although she proved wrong on that point.
After the death of her sister Elizabeth in January 1840, Augusta was the one who told Victoria’s family that Parliament must be opened regardless of the royal funeral, considering it a royal duty. She was the only one of George III’s daughters healthy enough to attend a royal wedding in February. On Victoria’s birthday that year, she sent the queen a turquoise heart containing a lock of her gray hair, with a letter quoting her father about the value of maintaining a royal household free of conflict as much as possible, although that was difficult to actually achieve in George III’s reign. Additionally, Augusta became opposed to what she saw as excessive change in Britain.
For a woman born at the start of the Industrial Revolution, she grumbled that the spread of new railways was ruining the roads. Augusta fell seriously ill at Clarence House in the summer of 1840, with her doctor diagnosing inflammation of the intestines. By early July, newspapers were reporting that she might not survive much longer. Because of this, Victoria ordered the gates of Green Park closed so that traffic around her London residence would not disturb her.
Yet she survived for weeks, defying all expectations of dying within hours or days. Instead, she only passed away on the evening of September 22, 1840, at the age of 71. She was surrounded by the rest of her family, never left Britain, and perhaps never married, although we cannot be 100 percent sure of that last point. Augusta Sophia was then buried in the royal vault beneath St.
George’s Chapel at Windsor.