In the summer of 1812, a 43-year-old daughter of King George III wrote to her brother, the Prince Regent, begging him to allow her to marry the man she had loved for more than a decade. Her family had repeatedly blocked her wedding plans, and this plea may have been her last chance. No reply has ever been found, and whatever became of that relationship, Augusta Sophia remained unmarried for the rest of her life, spending her days in the same royal household that had denied her the right to choose her own future. Princess Augusta Sophia was born at the Queen’s House in London on 8 November 1768, in the building later remodelled as Buckingham Palace.
She was the sixth daughter and second daughter of King George III of Great Britain and Queen Charlotte. Unusually, the king had wanted a girl, while royal families typically preferred males to secure plenty of potential heirs. When the attending physician, Dr William Hunter, tactfully suggested the possibility of another son, George snapped at the doctor and began complaining to his wife in the middle of her labour about her physician. It was a strange beginning for Augusta Sophia that hinted at many of her family’s peculiarities, which would shape much of her existence.
She was named after her paternal grandmother, the Dowager Princess of Wales Augusta, and her mother, whose full name was Sophia Charlotte. Days after her birth, at the customary public reception for a new royal baby, visitors arrived at St James’s Palace and were offered cakes and posset, a warm mixture of oatmeal gruel and wine. Two young ladies ended up drunk and causing a disturbance. This was the kind of event Augusta would later enjoy, as she was known for a sardonic outlook and had little liking 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. She stammered, for example, when around people she did not know. Her education took place at home, and she learned to speak several languages, including French and German, along with other subjects such as history, music, the classics, and needlework. She was introverted by nature and needed solitude, later remarking that if she did not have an hour of quiet each day for herself, she was good for nothing.
She grew into the acknowledged beauty of the family, with one governess describing her as the prettiest princess ever seen. In 1782, the 13-year-old Augusta made her first formal appearance in society during her father’s birthday celebrations. She was still extremely uncomfortable in crowds, so Queen Charlotte deliberately waited until only two days beforehand to tell her daughter what was going to happen. As Augusta and her elder sisters grew older, they spent more time accompanying their parents to the theatre, the opera, and royal court functions.
Alongside that, their academic education gradually gave way to more music, arts, and 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. A daughter of a major European king such as George III was normally a diplomatic chess piece used to strengthen alliances or treaties.
Negotiations over the marriage of a princess like Augusta Sophia would usually begin when she was almost a child. But it was different with the daughters of George III. He had watched his sister Caroline Matilda marry at a very young age and become Queen of Denmark, then become involved in great controversy at the court in Copenhagen, which ended in her divorce, exile, and early death. George was determined to avoid a similar fate for his own daughter.
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 had received in Copenhagen, no one in the royal establishment wanted that alliance. The most serious offer for Augusta’s hand 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 such a match look particularly attractive. The royal family was generally pleased with him, and for the first time, Augusta seemed to have a realistic chance of marrying. But George III refused. The reason was complicated.
Ferdinand was the brother of Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg, whose first wife, Auguste Karoline, had been George’s niece. She had died in a Russian prison amid ugly rumours surrounding her conduct and treatment there. Whatever the truth of those rumours, George clearly wanted no connection 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 issue. Her father was beginning to suffer from the illness that would change the future of the entire royal family. It was not simply that George did not want his daughters to marry the wrong man because of his sister’s earlier experiences. He was suffering from severe ill health.
In the autumn of 1788, George fell seriously ill for the first time, showing signs of disturbed behaviour and general mania that left him unable to govern. On one particularly bad evening, he insisted on attending the queen, set up a bed for her from a drawing-room sofa, arranged his daughters around her, and then proceeded to ramble on throughout the rest of the night. Augusta turned twenty on 8 November of that first year of the political crisis caused by her father’s illness. For a time, it seemed Augusta’s eldest brother, the future George IV, would have to rule as regent in place of his father, but the king recovered in early 1789.
Further episodes followed in 1801 and 1804, and from 1810 his condition became permanent as he entered a final illness lasting ten years, leading to a decade-long regency until 1820. While doctors struggled to understand what was happening to him, the illness of George III became more severe. At Windsor Castle, the king was confined to his own apartments, while his daughters remained under their mother’s strict supervision. By then 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 harder. Yet sometime around 1800, someone was about to 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 the northeast of 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 thirty-nine and unmarried, and soon an affection grew between him and Augusta.
Augusta had a practical personality that suited the military man who appeared at court in 1799. She seems to have fallen in love with him, and according to her later accounts, she regarded him not merely as a lover but as a substitute husband as she entered her thirties unmarried. He appears to have returned her feelings and soon broke off an engagement arranged by his family 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. However devoted they were to each other, marriage between them would have been considered beneath her royal station, and it was practically impossible as long as her father remained king. Their relationship was forced into secrecy, leaving Augusta waiting and hoping that circumstances might one day change.
Instead, Spencer was sent 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 for 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’s illness and her brother becoming king in all but name, Augusta decided to act.
With her father incapacitated and Parliament having granted the princesses an independent income of £13,000 a year, Augusta finally felt free enough to make her move. On 5 March 1812, she wrote to her brother, reminding him that she had told him about her relationship with Spencer years earlier, and asking him to approve a secret marriage despite Spencer’s modest social standing. She said she had known him for twelve years and that at her age, in her mid-forties, she was unlikely to marry a royal prince or a high-ranking aristocrat. The diplomatic consequences of her marrying Spencer would therefore be almost nonexistent, especially if it were done quietly and privately.
Oddly, or perhaps understandably, Augusta kept the letter for three months, sending it only on 12 June 1812. Perhaps it was hesitation, or perhaps the tense political atmosphere at court, where it was becoming clear that George III would never recover. What happened next remains one of the greatest mysteries of Augusta’s life. No reply from her brother was ever found, leaving us unable to 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 have 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 took an interest in gardening and did much charitable work in the parish, with local newspapers praising her unusual generosity. She replaced a patch of grass outside her favourite window with a planted flower basket and was still pleased with it years later, remarking that 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 entertainments at her home. When her brother William, later King William, dined with her in town, she would play tunes with him too, 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. With the rise of her young niece Victoria to the throne and the beginning of a new reign within the royal institution, Augusta had also become one of the last living links to her father’s court. By that time, Augusta was already in failing health, having spent time on the coast at Brighton learning to walk with a stick after a bout of illness. She was not free of criticism for the new reign.
She privately thought Victoria inexperienced and friendless, and believed the marriage being arranged with Prince Albert, a German aristocrat, would be disastrous, though she was 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 also 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 her a turquoise heart containing a lock of her grey hair, with a letter quoting her father on the value of keeping a royal household free of conflict as much as possible, though that had been difficult to achieve in George III’s reign.
Augusta also 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 the new railways was spoiling the roads. Augusta fell seriously ill at Clarence House in the summer of 1840, with her physician diagnosing inflammation of the bowels. By early July, the newspapers were reporting that she might not live much longer.
Because of this, Victoria ordered the gates of Green Park closed so that the traffic around her London residence would not disturb her. Yet Augusta survived for weeks, defying all expectations of death within hours or days. Instead, she did not die until the evening of 22 September 1840, at the age of seventy-one. She was surrounded by the rest of her family, had never left Britain, and perhaps never married, although we cannot be completely certain of that last point.
Augusta Sophia was then buried in the royal vault beneath St George’s Chapel at Windsor.