In the summer of 1812, the 43-year-old daughter of King George III wrote to her brother, the Prince Regent, begging permission to marry the man she had loved for more than a decade. Her family had repeatedly denied her the chance to marry, and this plea may have been her final opportunity. 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 court that prevented her from marrying and choosing her own future. Princess Augusta Sophia was born at Buckingham House in London on November 8, 1768, the sixth daughter and second daughter of King George III and 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 rebuked the doctor and began complaining to his wife mid-labor about her physician. It was a strange beginning to a life that would reflect many of her family’s peculiarities.
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 customary public reception for the new royal baby, visitors arrived at St. James’s Palace and were offered cakes and drink, a warm mixture of oatmeal porridge and wine. There, two young ladies ended up drunk and caused a commotion.
This was the kind of event Augusta would later enjoy, possessing a sardonic outlook and little patience for excessive court formality, unlike her sisters. Augusta’s nursery was managed by Lady Charlotte Finch and Miss Mary Dacres, who showed patience with Augusta’s natural shyness as she grew up. She stammered around people she did not know. She was educated at home and learned to speak several languages, including French and German, as well as other subjects such as history, music, 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 recognized beauty of the family, described by one governess as the most beautiful princess ever. In 1782, the 13-year-old Augusta made her formal debut in society during her father’s birthday celebrations. She was still deeply uncomfortable in crowds, so Queen Charlotte deliberately waited until just two days beforehand to tell her daughter what was happening.
As Augusta and her older sisters aged, they spent more time accompanying their parents to the theater, opera, and court. 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 her family had no intention of allowing her to choose her own husband.
Normally, the daughter of a major European king such as George III was a diplomatic pawn used to strengthen alliances or agreements. Negotiations for the marriage of a princess like Augusta Sophia would typically begin when she was barely out of childhood. However, it was different with George III’s daughters. He had watched his sister Caroline Matilda marry at a very young age and become Queen of Denmark, only to become embroiled in major controversy at the Copenhagen court, ending in divorce, exile, and her early death.
George was determined to avoid his daughter suffering a similar fate. When the Danes inquired in 1785 whether Augusta might be a potential bride for Prince Frederick of Denmark, George flatly refused. 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. With Britain preparing for the coming conflict with revolutionary France, an alliance with a prominent German duke serving Austria made the match look especially 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, was George’s niece. She had died in Russian captivity amid ugly rumors surrounding her behavior and treatment there. Whatever the truth of those rumors, George clearly wanted no part in the proposed marriage, and once again, Augusta’s hopes of marriage were dashed by her father.
After this latest disappointment, Augusta became more reclusive, retreating into books, religion, and the ancient Greek and Roman authors she loved. But soon, a far more serious matter overshadowed the question of Augusta’s marriage: her father began suffering from the illness that would change the future of the entire royal family. In the autumn of 1788, George became seriously ill for the first time, showing signs of disturbed behavior and general mania, rendering him unable to rule. On one particularly bad evening, he insisted on nursing the Queen, made up a bed for her from a drawing-room sofa, arranged his daughters around her, and then raved 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 eldest brother, the future George IV, would have to rule as regent instead of his father, but the King recovered in early 1789. Further episodes followed in 1801 and 1804, and from 1810 his condition became permanent, entering a final illness lasting 10 years and leading to a decade-long regency until 1820. While doctors struggled to understand what was happening to him, George III’s illness 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 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 harder. However, around 1800, someone would soon enter Augusta’s life—a man who might finally give her a chance to escape. Augusta may never have married, but she did begin a relationship as she grew older. 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, although he 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 39 years old and unmarried, and a mutual affection soon developed between him and Augusta. Augusta possessed 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 did not regard him 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 to a cousin while he was serving in India. Their relationship became publicly known at court by 1803, and she confided details to her brothers, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. But there was one enormous problem: Augusta was a princess, and Spencer was not.
No matter how devoted they were to each other, marriage between them would have been considered beneath her royal station and was practically impossible as long as her father remained king. Their relationship was forced into secrecy, leaving Augusta waiting and hoping 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, after her father’s illness had taken hold and her brother had become king in practice, Augusta decided to act. With her father incapacitated and Parliament agreeing to grant the princesses an independent income of £13,000 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 earlier, and asking 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 done quietly and privately. Oddly, or perhaps understandably, Augusta kept the letter for 3 months, only sending it on June 12, 1812. Perhaps this was due to 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 unsure 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 be made 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 home 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 into Frogmore and begin making the house her own.
At Frogmore, Augusta took an interest 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 planted flower basket and was still pleased with it years later, noting it overshadowed 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 played melodies with him as well, 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 learning to walk with a cane after an illness. She was not without criticism of the new reign. In particular, she thought Victoria inexperienced and friendless, and believed the marriage being arranged with Prince Albert, a German aristocrat, would be disastrous—though she proved wrong on that point. After her sister Elizabeth’s death 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 gray hair, with a message quoting her father on the value of keeping a royal household as free from conflict as possible—though that was hard 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 new railways was ruining the roads.
Augusta fell seriously ill at Clarence House in the summer of 1840, diagnosed by her physician as inflammation of the bowels. By early July, newspapers were reporting she might not live 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 clung to life for weeks, defying all expectations of death within hours or days.
Instead, she did not die until 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—though we cannot be 100 percent certain of that last point. Augusta Sophia was then buried in the royal vault beneath St.
George’s Chapel at Windsor.