In the summer of 1812, a 43-year-old woman who had spent her entire life inside the British royal court wrote to her brother, the Prince Regent, begging his permission to marry the man she had loved for more than a decade. Her family had refused her again and again, and this plea may well have been her last chance. No reply survives. Whatever became of that request, Augusta Sophia remained unmarried for the rest of her days, living out her life in the same royal household that had denied her the right to choose her own future.
Augusta Sophia was born at the Queen’s House in London on 8 November 1768, in the building that would later be reshaped into Buckingham Palace. She was the sixth child and second daughter of King George III of Great Britain and his wife, Queen Charlotte. Unusually, the King had wanted a girl, at a time when royal families normally preferred sons to guarantee a plentiful supply of heirs. When the attending physician, Dr William Hunter, tactfully suggested the possibility of another boy, 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 to Augusta Sophia’s life, one that hinted at many of the family’s peculiarities that would shape much of her existence. She was named for her paternal grandmother, Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales, and for her mother, whose full name was Sophia Charlotte. Days after the birth, at the usual public reception for a new royal baby, visitors arrived at St James’s Palace and were offered cakes and caudle, a warm mixture of oatmeal gruel and wine. There, two young ladies ended up drunk and caused a commotion.
It was the sort of occasion Augusta would later enjoy, for she was known for a dry wit and had little liking for excessive court formality, unlike her sisters. Her nursery was run by Lady Charlotte Finch and Miss Mary Dacres, who were patient with Augusta’s natural shyness as she grew. She stammered, for instance, when surrounded by 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, the classics, and needlework.
She was introverted by nature and needed solitude, remarking later that unless she had an hour of quiet to herself each day, she was good for nothing. As she grew, she became the acknowledged beauty of the family, with one governess describing her as the most beautiful of all the princesses. In 1782, Augusta, then thirteen, made her first formal appearance in society during celebrations for her father’s birthday. She was still deeply uncomfortable in crowds, so Queen Charlotte deliberately waited until just two days beforehand to tell her daughter what was to happen.
As Augusta and her older sisters grew older, they spent more time accompanying their parents to the theatre, the opera, and court functions. Their academic education gradually gave way to more music, art, 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 letting her choose her own husband.
A daughter of a major European king, as George III was, typically served as a diplomatic chess piece, used to strengthen alliances and diplomatic agreements. Negotiations for the marriage of a princess like Augusta Sophia normally began when she was still almost a child. With the daughters of George III, however, things were different. He had watched his sister, Caroline Matilda, marry very young and become Queen of Denmark, only to become embroiled in a serious scandal at the Copenhagen court that ended in divorce, exile, and her early death.
George was determined that his own daughter would not suffer a similar fate. So when the Danes inquired in 1785 whether Augusta might be a possible 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 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. 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 nothing to do with the proposed marriage, and once again Augusta’s hopes of marriage were dashed by her father.
After this latest disappointment, Augusta grew 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 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 experiences.
He was severely unwell. 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 rule. On one particularly bad evening, he insisted on nursing the Queen, made up a bed for her from the drawing-room sofa, arranged his daughters around her, and then proceeded to ramble through 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 that 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 that lasted ten years and led to a regency that lasted a decade until 1820. As doctors struggled to understand what was happening to him, George III’s illness grew worse. At Windsor Castle, the King was confined to his own apartments, while his daughters remained under the strict supervision of their mother.
By that time, their lives had become so secluded that the princesses began calling Windsor “the Nunnery. ” For Augusta, it was a life of increasing isolation. 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 would soon enter Augusta’s life, a man who might finally give her the chance to escape. Augusta may not 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. He was Sir Brent Spencer, an Irishman from County Antrim in the north-east 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 a mutual affection soon grew between him and Augusta. Augusta had a practical character that suited the military man who had appeared at the royal 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 he soon broke off an engagement that his family had arranged for him with a cousin while he had been serving in India. Their relationship had become 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 enormous problem. Augusta was a princess, and Spencer was not.
However devoted they were to each other, a marriage between them would have been considered beneath her royal station, and it was effectively impossible while her father remained king. Their relationship was forced into secrecy, leaving Augusta to wait and hope 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 in recognition of his service.
While he risked his life on battlefields across Europe, Augusta was left behind, waiting for a man she could not marry. Eventually, with her father incapacitated by illness and her brother ruling in his place, Augusta decided to act. With her father incapacitated and Parliament having agreed to grant the princesses an independent income of £13,000 a year, Augusta finally felt free enough to act. On 5 March 1812, she wrote to her brother, reminding him that she had told him about her relationship with Spencer years before, and asking his approval for a secret marriage despite Spencer’s modest social rank.
She said she had known him for twelve years, and that she was now in her mid-forties and unlikely to marry a royal prince or a high-ranking aristocrat. The diplomatic consequences of her marrying Spencer were therefore almost non-existent, especially if it were done quietly and privately. Oddly, or perhaps understandably, Augusta kept the letter for three months, only sending it on 12 June 1812. Perhaps it was hesitation on her part, or perhaps it was the tense political atmosphere at court, where it had become 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 to wonder whether he refused her request or simply chose not to answer. This has led historians to question whether Augusta went ahead and secretly married Spencer anyway. There is no surviving marriage record, and without her brother’s consent, finding a clergyman willing to conduct 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 token 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 died in January 1820 did Augusta finally move to Frogmore and begin to make 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 she was still fond of it years later, noting 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 entertainment 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. She had also become one of the last living links to her father’s court as her young niece Victoria ascended the throne and a new reign began within the royal establishment.
By that time, Augusta was already in failing health, having spent time on the coast at Brighton to learn to walk with a stick after an illness. She was not without criticism of the new reign. In private, she thought Victoria inexperienced and friendless, and she saw the marriage being arranged with Prince Albert, a German aristocrat, as certain to be a disaster, though she proved to be wrong on that point. After the death of her sister Elizabeth in January 1840, it was Augusta 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 that 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 as free from conflict as possible, even if that had been a difficult thing 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 an 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 traffic around her London residence would not disturb her. Yet Augusta remained alive for weeks, defying all expectations that she would die 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. She had never left Britain, and perhaps she had never married, though we cannot be entirely certain of that last point.
Augusta Sophia was then buried in the royal vault beneath St George’s Chapel at Windsor.
