In the summer of 1812, the 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 forbidden the match again and again, and this plea may have been her final chance. No reply to that letter has ever been found. Whatever became of the 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 wed and to choose a future of her own.
Princess Augusta Sophia was born at the Queen’s House in London—the building later reshaped into Buckingham Palace—on 8 November 1768. 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, while royal families usually preferred males to ensure a plentiful supply 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, in the middle of her labour, about her physician. It was a strange beginning to Augusta Sophia’s life, and one that hinted at many of her family’s peculiarities, which would shape much of her existence. She was named Augusta Sophia 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 causing a stir. That was the kind of occasion Augusta would later enjoy, for she had a satirical eye and no love for the excessive formalities of the court, 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 would stammer, for example, when she was 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, the classics, and needlework. She was introverted by nature and needed solitude, later noting that if she did not have an hour of quiet to herself each day, 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, Augusta, then thirteen, made her first formal appearance in society during her father’s birthday celebrations.
She still felt deeply 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 two older sisters grew older, they spent more time accompanying their parents to the theatre, the opera, and the royal court. Alongside that, 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. Normally, the daughter of a major European king such as George III was a diplomatic chess piece, used to strengthen alliances and diplomatic agreements. As such, negotiations for the marriage of a princess like Augusta Sophia would usually begin when she was still a child. With the daughters of George III, however, things were different.
He had watched his sister Caroline Matilda marry at a very young age and become Queen of Denmark, only to become embroiled in a major scandal at the court of Copenhagen 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 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 satisfied with him, and for the first time, it appeared Augusta had 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 this proposed marriage, and once again Augusta’s hopes of marriage 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 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 suffering from a severe health condition. 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 caring for the queen, made up a bed for her from the drawing-room sofa, arranged his daughters around her, and then proceeded to rant for the rest of the night.
Augusta turned twenty on 8 November of that first year of 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 attacks followed in 1801 and 1804, and from 1810 onwards 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. While doctors struggled to understand what was happening to him, King George III’s illness grew more severe.
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 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 would soon enter Augusta’s life, a man who might finally give her the 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.
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 personality that suited the military man who appeared at the royal court in 1799.
She appears 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 without marrying. He seems to have returned her feelings, and he soon broke off an engagement arranged by his family with a cousin of his 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 enormous problem.
Augusta was a princess, while Spencer was not. However devoted they were to each other, a marriage between them would have been considered beneath her royal status, and it was effectively impossible as long as her father remained king. Their relationship was therefore forced into secrecy, leaving Augusta to wait and hope 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 a man she could not marry. Finally, after her father’s illness had taken hold and her brother had become de facto king, Augusta decided to act. With her father incapacitated and Parliament having agreed to grant the princesses an independent income of 13,000 pounds 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 before, and asking him to consent to a secret marriage despite Spencer’s modest social standing. 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 nil, 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 that was due to hesitation, or perhaps to 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, meaning 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 married Spencer secretly 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 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 to Frogmore and begin making the house her own. At Frogmore, Augusta took an interest in gardening and did a great deal of charity 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 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 in 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 playing 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 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 a bout of illness. She was not without criticism of the new reign. In particular, she thought Victoria inexperienced and friendless, and she 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, 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 in February. On Victoria’s birthday that year, she sent the queen 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 was difficult to achieve in practice during George III’s reign. Augusta also became opposed to what she saw as excessive change in Britain.
For a woman born at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, she grumbled that the spread of 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 survive much longer. Because of this, Victoria ordered the gates of Green Park to be closed so that traffic around Augusta’s London residence would not disturb her.
Yet Augusta survived for weeks, defying all expectations of her 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. She had never left Britain, and perhaps she had never married—though we cannot be one hundred percent certain of that last point.
Augusta Sophia was then buried in the royal vault beneath St George’s Chapel at Windsor.
