The night of February 8, 1772, in the bedchamber at the back of Carlton House, was quiet. The King of Great Britain sat beside the bed of his dying mother, holding her hand. For most of the afternoon and evening she had been silent, her eyes closed, her breathing coming slowly and unevenly. The senior physician stood at the foot of the bed, watching.
The attending women came and went, performing the small physical attentions the dying still required. The chaplain moved in and out, conducting the quiet religious offices of the occasion. Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales, was no longer conscious enough to take part in any of it. The final exhalation came as such endings often do, with no particular drama, no special distinction that marked it out from the slow breathing of the previous hours.
It was simply slightly longer than the moment before it. There was no further breath after it. The physician stepped forward, listened with his ear over her chest, stood up, and looked at the king. He nodded once, slightly.
The king made no sound. He continued for some minutes to hold his mother’s hand, sitting with his head slightly bowed. Then he released the hand, stood, and spoke to the senior officer of the household waiting near the door. In a voice that the witnesses described as steady but very low, he said that the necessary arrangements should now be made.
He left the room and went to a small private room at the end of the corridor, where he remained alone with the door closed for nearly an hour. When he came out, he was composed, and gave the various instructions the death required. He returned by carriage to St. James’s Palace, where his queen, Charlotte, was waiting for him.
Augusta was fifty-two years old. She had spent thirty-six of those years in the country she had come to as a sixteen-year-old, arriving on a yacht in the early morning of an April day in 1736. How she came to be there is a story that begins on that April morning, on the deck of a modest royal yacht making its way up the Thames toward Greenwich. Augusta was the daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, who had died when she was a baby, and of his second wife, who had raised Augusta and her many siblings in the small court of a very small German principality.
Before her marriage she was the sort of princess the European royal marriage market produced in considerable quantities, brought up in the certain knowledge that she would in due course be married to whatever suitable prince the family’s negotiations could secure. She danced. She played a little. She spoke fluent German and a modest amount of French.
She knew almost no English, because she had not, until the marriage was arranged, been given any distinct reason to learn it. The marriage had been arranged by the British King George II, who had been on the throne for nine years, and who had a personal interest in seeing his eldest son and heir, the Prince of Wales, settled into the sort of marriage that would produce children and, with luck, a less troublesome version of his son than the version he currently had. The Prince of Wales was twenty-eight years old in 1736. He had been living in England for eight years, having come over from Hanover only after his grandfather George I had died and his parents had been on the British throne for a year.
Augusta knew almost nothing of any of this. On the April morning when her ship was coming up the Thames, she was simply a young woman doing what her family had told her to do, and feeling, by all accounts, quite reasonably nervous about it. She had been for the previous four days at sea, mostly in the limited cabin arranged for her, with her German waiting woman beside her and the cold of the North Sea in spring producing the steady seasickness that the journey had become a slow recovery from. She came on deck that morning wrapped in a heavy cloak, leaning against the rail, watching the brown water slide past the flat green shore of Kent on one side and the flat green shore of Essex on the other, trying in her own quiet way to begin the work of preparing herself for what was going to happen next.
She did not know that her future husband and his father were not on the whole on speaking terms. She did not know that the queen had expressed her intense dislike of her son in private letters in language that in any other family would be considered shocking. She did not know that her future husband had been conducting his political life in active opposition to his father’s government from his household at Leicester House, which had become a kind of opposition court to his parents’ court at St. James’s.
She knew only that a carriage would meet her at the dock and take her to St. James’s Palace, and that she was expected to perform the ceremonies that would in due course make her the wife of the Prince of Wales. The dock at Greenwich, when the yacht came alongside it that April morning, was already crowded. Word had got out that the new princess was arriving, and the modest crowd that gathered was in a generally good mood.
The British public had not entirely warmed to the Hanoverian royal family. The king spoke poor English. The king preferred Hanover. But a new princess arriving from Germany to marry the heir was the sort of event that could be received with provisional goodwill.
She was young. She was, by the restrained reports that had preceded her, modest in her manner and not unattractive. She might, with luck, give the heir the children the dynasty needed. She came down the gangplank in a green silk dress, with her German waiting woman behind her and a modest group of British court officials assembled in front of her on the dock.
The senior of these, the master of ceremonies of the royal household, bowed; she curtsied. Words were exchanged in French, since neither party spoke the other’s language fluently. A coach was indicated. She was helped inside, the waiting woman climbed in beside her, the door was shut, and the coach moved off.
The journey from Greenwich to Westminster took the better part of three hours. She sat inside, looking out at a landscape that was unfamiliar to her, watching the plain fields and the minor villages go past, keeping her hands folded in her lap. She did not, according to the later testimony of the waiting woman, say very much. She was composed in the manner expected of a young woman in her circumstances, with her training in court manners holding firm against whatever private feelings the morning had produced.
When the carriage reached St. James’s Palace, the king and queen were waiting in one of the smaller reception rooms. The Prince of Wales, her future husband, was also in the room. She curtsied to the king, who took her hand and kissed it.
She curtsied to the queen, who embraced her in a brief formal embrace. She curtsied last and most deeply to the Prince of Wales, who kissed her hand and said the few words of welcome the moment required. The whole exchange lasted perhaps two minutes. At the end of it, the queen led Augusta out of the room and through a series of corridors to the apartments that had been prepared for her.
The marriage took place on April 27, 1736, eight days after her arrival. The ceremony was held in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s, with George II, Queen Caroline, and the assembled guests watching, while the Archbishop of Canterbury presided. Augusta wore a dress of silver tissue with a long train.
She made her vows in English, which she had been practicing during the eight days, and pronounced them with the slightly heavy German accent that would remain a feature of her speech. Frederick made his vows in the fluent English of a man born in Hanover but long enough in Britain to master the language of his adopted country. The ceremony lasted about an hour. The state dinner that followed lasted some hours.
The bedding ceremony that ended the day was truncated by the standards of both the English and German traditions, but it followed the essential outline: bride and groom in their nightclothes, conducted to the bedchamber, the senior officers watching them get into bed, the curtains drawn, the attendants withdrawing. We do not know what either of them said to the other after the curtains were drawn. We know from observations over the next several days that Frederick was in a generally good mood and treated his new wife with kindness and consideration, and that Augusta appeared to be settling into her circumstances with the composed manner that had characterized her arrival. Within a few months observers were describing her as sensible and pleasant.
George II, who had hoped the marriage would settle his son into something resembling domestic stability, judged in those first weeks that matters were going about as well as could be expected. The marriage, in spite of the difficult family politics that surrounded it, settled itself remarkably quickly into a working domestic partnership that surprised several contemporary observers by its evident warmth. Frederick found in his sixteen-year-old wife a quiet companionship he had not had in his life before. She was intelligent; she was observant; she had a native good sense about people that the more sophisticated observers who came to Leicester House remarked on with surprise.
She was willing to make the marriage work in the practical daily ways that mattered. She did not complain when complaint would have been justified about the various inconveniences and humiliations his ongoing quarrel with his parents kept producing in their domestic life. Frederick was by all accounts faithful to her, unusual for a prince of his rank. He consulted her in his private decisions with a frequency that the courtiers noticed with surprise.
Augusta developed for her husband a patient, affectionate loyalty that the difficult parts of his character did not disturb. The household at Leicester House, where Frederick and Augusta lived for most of their married life, was a plain parallel court of considerable cultural and political activity. Frederick assembled around himself a circle of opposition politicians, writers, and wits. The dinners were good, the conversation was animated.
The whole atmosphere was deliberately constructed to suggest that the future of British political and cultural life lay with the heir rather than with the reigning monarch. Augusta presided over it as its mistress, learning to manage the elaborate entertainments the household required, learning in her growing English to make conversation with the politicians and writers who came through the house. She built up an accumulated personal acquaintance with the governing class that no Hanoverian princess had previously possessed. The old king himself, who had been one of the principal architects of the marriage, came over the years to develop for his daughter-in-law a kind of grudging affection he never developed for his own son.
He gave her after the queen’s death in 1737 a small private allowance independent of her husband’s, which she used principally for charitable purposes. The king knew this and never raised it with her. He treated her with a plain measured kindness that suggested he saw in her a young woman who had been delivered into a family situation that was not her fault, and who was conducting herself with dignity. The relationship between Frederick and his parents had deteriorated within a year of his arrival in England.
Within two years it was openly bad. Within five it had become the principal feature of the public political life of the country. Queen Caroline’s letters to her closest confidante contain expressions about her son so harsh that the modern reader has difficulty believing they were written by his mother. She called him the greatest beast in the world, said his lies were so frequent and so without reason that they had ceased to surprise her, and that the more she saw of him, the less she liked him.
The most serious quarrel broke out in 1737, the year after Augusta’s arrival. Augusta was pregnant with her first child, due in the early autumn. The convention of that period required that a royal birth be witnessed in some form by senior members of the family and the government, to ensure that no substitution of infants could be alleged afterwards. The king and queen had instructed that the birth should take place at Hampton Court, where they were in residence for the summer and where Frederick and Augusta were also lodging.
Frederick decided, when Augusta went into labor on the evening of July 31, that he would not have his child born at Hampton Court under his parents’ eyes. He decided instead to remove his wife and take her to St. James’s, where the birth could take place under his own arrangements. Augusta was in active labor.
No one was consulted about the wisdom of moving her. Frederick simply ordered the carriage, ordered Augusta into it, and took her in the dark on a journey of more than two hours, with Augusta in active labor throughout. The child, a girl, was born at St. James’s a few hours after their arrival, in apartments that had not been prepared for the birth and that had to be hastily organized.
Mother and child both survived. The king and queen, when they learned what their son had done, were beyond fury. The queen regarded the action as an open declaration of war on the family. The king ordered Frederick out of the royal palaces.
The Prince of Wales and his wife and their newborn daughter were removed within a few weeks, and the breach with the family was now complete. The court was instructed that anyone who attended the king’s drawing rooms and also attended the prince’s drawing rooms would be considered to have placed themselves in opposition to the king. Politicians and courtiers had to choose. The queen, who was never going to forgive her son, did not blame Augusta for what had happened.
She recognized that Augusta had been in this matter as much a victim of the prince’s reckless decision as the king and queen themselves were. The queen died in November 1737, four months after the night of the carriage journey. She had been suffering from a hernia that she had concealed from her physicians, and that had finally produced complications no medical intervention of that period could correct. She died with her husband beside the bed, with her children other than Frederick around her, and with Frederick excluded from the death chamber by her own explicit instruction.
Frederick, who had presented himself at the gate of the palace requesting admission, was turned away. She held her judgment of her son to the last. The marriage produced children. Augusta bore between 1737 and 1759 children who survived to adulthood, with two more born and died in infancy.
The eldest son was born on June 4, 1738, less than a year after the carriage journey. He was named George. He was the future George III. He was a weak, sickly baby not expected to live, hastily baptized within hours of his birth, with the king and queen of Sweden standing as godparents in absentia because the family had not expected to need to organize a proper baptism so quickly.
The baby survived, grew slowly into a quiet, somewhat dreamy child with a particular attachment to his mother. Other children followed: Augusta in 1739, Elizabeth in 1741, William in 1743, Henry in 1745, Louisa in 1749, and Frederick in 1750, who would die at nine. Caroline Matilda arrived after her father’s death in 1751. Frederick, whatever his other faults, was a genuinely affectionate father.
He played with his children. He took an interest in their education. He composed little pieces of music for them to perform. He had been raised for fourteen years as a kind of administrative orphan, and he had decided very early in his own marriage that his own children would not be raised that way.
Frederick died in March 1751. He was forty-four. He had taken a chill earlier in the month after standing too long in cold, damp clothing in the gardens at Kew, where he had been overseeing the laying out of new plantings he and Augusta had been working on together. The chill developed over ten days into a pulmonary complaint, which the physicians treated with bleeding, blistering, and preparations of opium and antimony.
He worsened; he recovered slightly; he worsened again. On the evening of March 20, sitting up in his bed at Leicester House with Augusta in attendance, he suddenly raised his hand to his chest, gave a brief cry, and slumped forward. He was dead within a minute. The cause of death, as best the post-mortem of that period could establish, was an internal rupture of some kind, something the medicine of 1751 was not equipped to identify.
Augusta was thirty-one. She was pregnant with their last child. She had eight children already, the eldest of whom was thirteen and the youngest nine months old. She did not give way to any extended public display of grief.
She gave instructions about the body, about the household. She wrote with her own hand the short formal letter to the king informing him of his son’s death. The king’s response was oddly muted. He did not display grief, nor by any external sign satisfaction, although there were observers who suspected the underlying feeling was closer to relief than sorrow.
He had been estranged from his son for fourteen years. An anonymous epigram circulated at court in the days after Frederick’s death. It read, in rough English, that here lies Fred who was alive and is dead, and that since it was only Fred, there was no more to be said. The verses ran on through several stanzas, each mocking the dead prince’s relations with his family.
Augusta heard of it in due course and did not respond to it publicly. The funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on April 13, 1751. The king did not attend. None of the king’s other children attended.
The dead prince’s eldest son, who was twelve, walked as the principal mourner in the procession through the abbey. After the ceremony he sat down beside his mother, put his head on her shoulder, and wept, according to one of the attendants present, for nearly an hour without stopping. That moment, more than any other, gave the relationship between Augusta and her eldest son the shape it would have for the rest of her life. The boy was now, at twelve, the principal heir to the throne.
He was a boy of unusual emotional intensity, and the intensity found its principal outlet in the physical proximity of his mother. The bond between them, which had been close before the funeral, became in the months and years after it the central emotional bond of both of their lives. Augusta had not asked for any of this. She had expected to be widowed in her sixties, after the children were placed in the world.
She had not expected to find herself in her early thirties the principal emotional and political figure in the upbringing of a future king. But this is what was in front of her. She accepted it. She organized herself in the months after the funeral to do the work her new position required.
She took up residence at Leicester House with her children. She organized in close consultation with the king’s ministers the arrangements for the boy’s continued education. The education of the new heir presumptive became one of the great quiet preoccupations of British parliamentary life. Augusta selected the tutors, supervised the curriculum, decided who could and could not visit her son.
The boy was kept away from the king’s court, away from the political life of the capital, away from the temptations the city of London offered wealthy young men of his age. He was kept mostly at Leicester House and at the family’s country residences, in the close company of his tutors, his mother, his younger siblings, and a limited handful of trusted household officers. He was, in modern terms, an extremely sheltered young man. The household settled into a specific daily rhythm.
The boy rose at six in the morning by his mother’s standing instruction, regardless of season. Breakfast was light; the conversation was conducted on alternating days in English and in French. From seven until eleven was the formal academic instruction in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. At eleven, a walk in the gardens.
At noon, the principal meal. The afternoon was given over to the smaller cultural studies, music and drawing and the reading of modern history. At four, free time. At five, tea.
At six, the evening tasks. At seven, supper. At eight, a final hour with his mother in the drawing room, where she sat with her embroidery and he sat beside her with whatever book he was currently reading. At nine, he went to bed.
The pattern ran for ten years. It was during this period in the early 1750s that John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute, began to enter the household in a serious way. He was a Scottish nobleman of considerable cultivation, moderate political views, and a manner that people who liked him described as gracious and people who did not described as smooth. He had been introduced to Frederick in the late 1740s and had become a member of the prince’s inner circle.
He shared with the prince a private interest in botany, and the two had been working together on the new plantings at Kew. He was one of the figures from her late husband’s circle whom Augusta knew best and trusted most. He remained close to the household after Frederick’s death, and took an increasing role in the boy George’s education. He spent more time with the boy than most of the official tutors did, and the time spent over several years produced in the boy an admiring attachment.
The relationship between Bute and Augusta in the same period became close. They were thrown together in a working partnership that the management of the boy’s education required. Bute was, in many of the functional roles, the principal figure in her widowed life. The closeness was noticed and discussed, and in due course it produced gossip that they were lovers.
The story was spread energetically by Bute’s opponents, because it offered entertaining material that could be sold in significant volumes. The truth of the rumor has been debated by historians for two and a half centuries. No one knows for certain. The relationship may have been a working friendship; it may have been a romantic attachment conducted with such discretion that no documentary evidence has ever surfaced.
The historical record is silent. What the record does establish is that Bute came through his closeness to Augusta and through her closeness to her son to exercise influence over the future king. He became the boy’s principal mentor. He set out a program of intellectual and moral formation that the boy accepted without significant question.
The program had at its center a vision of what a British king should be: a patriot king who stood above the corrupt maneuvers of political parties, who governed for the broad interest of the whole nation, who by the steady exercise of independent judgment restored to the British constitution the dignity that the long Whig dominance had eroded. The prince absorbed it deeply, as the principal program of his coming reign. George II died on the morning of October 25, 1760. He was seventy-six.
He died in his closet at Kensington Palace, where he had gone by his usual morning custom to take chocolate, and where his German valet, hearing him fall, found him on the floor. The cause of death was a rupture of the right ventricle of the heart. The news traveled to Carlton House, where the dead king’s grandson, the young Prince George, was having his morning ride. He had just dismounted.
The messenger knelt before him on the gravel of the little courtyard and addressed him as Your Majesty, and informed him that his grandfather had died and that he was now king. The young man displayed no visible reaction. He stood with his riding gloves in his hand, looking at the kneeling messenger for what one witness described as the longest minute of his life. Then he lowered his head briefly and lifted it again, and said in a voice steadier than the witnesses expected that he would go inside.
He went to the room where his mother was at her morning correspondence. He told her in a low voice that the king was dead. She stood, crossed the room to him, took both his hands, and said something the witnesses did not hear distinctly. They stood for a moment in silence.
Then she sat down with him on the sofa near the fireplace, and they began the work of organizing the next several hours. The new king was twenty-two. He was the first British monarch since Queen Anne to have been born in Britain. The proclamation took place at St.
James’s Palace later that day, and the political class met him with relieved interest. Within a year of the accession, Bute had been appointed secretary of state for the northern department. Within two years, first lord of the treasury, principal minister of the government, in what we would now call the position of prime minister. The advancement was extraordinarily rapid.
Bute had no parliamentary base; he was a Scottish peer, which made him to the English parliamentary class a foreigner of a particularly unwelcome variety; he had no real experience of governing. He was in his position entirely because of his personal influence with the new king, an influence understood to derive partly from his earlier influence with the king’s mother. The result was the emergence of a distinct kind of opposition that combined several strands of complaint into a single sustained criticism. The charge was on Bute; the campaign was on Augusta.
The first line of attack asserted that the relationship between the Dowager Princess of Wales and her late husband’s friend was a sexual relationship conducted under the cover of the political partnership. The caricatures that appeared in the early 1760s were so coarse that the modern historian looking through the surviving examples in the print collections of the British Museum has difficulty believing the British public of the 1760s was prepared to consume material of that character about a member of the royal family. The second line of attack asserted that the new king was dominated by his mother, that the public face of his government was a screen behind which his mother and her favorite conducted the business of the state. The third line was about Augusta’s German origins, drawing on a long-running anti-Hanover thread in British public opinion.
The combined effect made Augusta, by the middle 1760s, perhaps the most publicly hated member of the royal family Britain had seen in living memory. She was abused in pamphlets, caricatured in prints, hissed at by crowds when her carriage was recognized. On at least one occasion, returning to Carlton House from a public event, a small mob gathered along her route and threw rubbish at her carriage. She sat in the back with her hands folded and looked straight ahead.
She arrived composed, and did not refer to the incident in any conversation anyone subsequently recorded. It was during this period that George’s union with Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz took place. The match was arranged by careful negotiation among trusted court officials, with George involved at the principal decision points and Bute as the principal adviser. The choice fell on Charlotte, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the late Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a German principality of even smaller consequence than Augusta’s Saxe-Gotha.
The diplomatic reports on her appearance were unflattering: slight, with a long face and prominent features, a complexion not considered fashionable. She was modest, well educated, devoutly Protestant, entirely lacking in political encumbrances. George examined the painted miniature, considered the question for some hours, and gave his approval. Charlotte arrived in London on September 7, 1761.
The marriage took place on the same evening, at the Chapel Royal at St. James’s, with the king and the bride meeting for the first time only a few hours before the wedding. The compression was deliberate; the diplomats had reported that the bride was nervous, and the advisers thought it kindest to dispose of the ceremonies with as little intervening time as possible. She was met at the dock, driven directly to St.
James’s, dressed for the wedding, brought to the chapel, and married. The new queen was considerably more nervous than Augusta had been, not in good health after a difficult sea crossing, somewhat shy and overwhelmed. Augusta’s relationship with her new daughter-in-law in the early months was managed with careful diplomacy. On the surface she was warm, attentive, supportive.
Beneath the surface, the relationship was more complicated. Augusta had for a decade been the principal woman in her son’s life. Charlotte was now in a position to take some of that emotional space. The two women managed a distant peace.
They did not develop warmth; they did not openly quarrel. The king’s relationship with his mother, even after his marriage, remained the most emotionally important relationship of his adult life. He continued to call on her almost daily, to consult her on ministerial decisions, to address her with the dependent affection he had developed in childhood. Charlotte made her adjustments.
She did not compete. She did not complain. She built instead the kind of long marriage that did not require her to be the principal woman in her husband’s life. Augusta, after Bute’s resignation in April 1763, continued to live the life she had been living.
The public abuse did not decline with the decline of her real importance. The pamphlets continued, the caricatures continued. She lived principally at Carlton House in London and at the establishment she had built up at Kew on the south side of the Thames. Kew was the place she preferred.
It had been acquired by Frederick with Augusta’s enthusiasm in the late 1740s, and the two had begun the slow work of laying out the grounds. After his death she took it up again, and over the next twenty years developed it into one of the most important botanical gardens in Europe. She was a patron rather than a practitioner. The principal gardener she selected was William Aiton, a Scottish gardener trained at the Chelsea Physic Garden under Philip Miller, who came to Kew in 1759 on Bute’s recommendation.
New plantings were brought in, new hothouses built, plants imported from the overseas territories of the British Empire. By the late 1760s the gardens at Kew contained more identified species of plants than any other garden in Britain, probably more than any other in Europe except possibly the Jardin du Roi in Paris. There was a classical temple, an orrery, a ruined arch, and most famously a pagoda built by the architect William Chambers between 1761 and 1762, which became the most discussed piece of garden architecture in Britain. Chambers, whom Augusta hired in 1757 on Bute’s recommendation, published in 1763 an illustrated volume describing his works at Kew, which became one of the most influential books in European garden literature.
The later career that made him the principal architect of the British state was made possible in significant part by the patronage Augusta gave him when he was still a young architect looking for his first major opportunity. The illness that would kill Augusta began in the late 1760s. The first signs were quiet: a hoarseness in her throat, hearing that became harder, a recurring discomfort. She did not bring them to the attention of her physicians.
By 1770 the hoarseness had thickened, the difficulty swallowing had become consistent, there was occasionally a trace of blood. When her physicians were finally consulted, they could see a thickening of the tissues in the back of her mouth. They had no reliable means of diagnosis beyond visual inspection, and no reliable treatment. The preparations they prescribed did not help.
Medical historians looking back at the descriptions of her final illness have generally concluded that she was suffering from cancer of the throat. The progress of the disease produced increasing difficulty swallowing, the slow starvation that accompanied the disease in its terminal months, the gradual loss of weight and strength. The death, when it came, was usually by the combined effects of starvation, exhaustion, and secondary complications. By 1771 she was visibly ill, losing weight, her voice a low rasp that had difficulty producing words.
She continued to receive visitors, to attend when ceremony required it, to write the modest letters her position required. The king visited her constantly. The dependence that had been the central feature of the relationship for nearly forty years was now manifesting itself in a quiet, constant, anxious need to be near her. He came in the mornings, in the afternoons, in the evenings.
He sat with her in the domestic rooms at Carlton House. He held her hand, talked to her in the low gentle voice her difficulty in hearing required. Charlotte made her own plain visits, with the same restrained courtesy that had characterized the relationship. She did not become a constant presence the way her husband did.
The two women, in spite of the surface civility, had never developed any genuine private warmth. There is in the surviving correspondence on either side no letter suggesting the confidential exchange that would mark a real friendship. In the last months, the two women remained courteous rather than intimate. It was not a warm reconciliation, but it was a workable peace made by two women who had spent a decade learning the limits of one another.
Augusta died on February 8, 1772. She had been declining rapidly for several days. The king had been informed in the morning that the end was close and had come immediately. Charlotte came briefly in the early afternoon, paid her formal respects, spent a quarter of an hour at the bedside, and then withdrew to allow her husband the final hours alone with his mother.
The funeral took place at Westminster Abbey on February 15. The king attended in the principal mourner’s position, as he had attended his father’s funeral twenty-one years earlier. The body was interred in the family vault, near the body of the husband who had died twenty-one years before her. The response to the funeral was muted.
There was no great popular outpouring of grief. The Dowager Princess had been for so much of her later life the principal object of popular hostility that her death did not produce in the public mind the warm response a more popular figure would have received. The opposition press, which had been attacking her for two decades, made a little effort to continue the attacks even into the mourning period. It was not successful.
There is something about a death, even the death of a long-disliked public figure, that produces in even the most hostile critics a quiet moment of pause. Her legacy, revised by careful modern historians, is mostly confirmed in one direction. The picture of Augusta as the secret political ruler of the country has been mostly dismantled. The picture of Augusta as the patient builder of one of the great plant institutions of Europe has been mostly confirmed.
The pagoda is still there. The orrery is still there. The basic plan of the gardens is still there. The horticultural collection that Aiton built up under her patronage formed the foundation of what would become the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, now by general agreement the most important institution of its kind in the world.
The crowd that had gathered at Greenwich on that April morning of 1736 did not know any of what was coming. They saw a young woman in a green silk dress come down the gangplank of a yacht. They saw her get into a carriage. They saw the carriage move off.
They went back to their ordinary mornings. They did not know that the young woman they had briefly seen would over the course of the next thirty-six years bear nine children, manage two royal households, build one of the great gardens of Europe, raise the king who would lose the American colonies, and die in the end of throat cancer in a back bedchamber of Carlton House on a winter evening in February. They saw only the public arrival. The rest of the story was on that morning in the future, where stories always are.
The pagoda at Kew in the dark gardens at this hour is standing as it stood when she last saw it, with its painted dragons quiet on their corners and its plain classical companions in the surrounding plantings keeping their slow vigil. The story remains. The candles in the bedchamber at Carlton House are still burning.
The household, in the absence of its mistress, keeps vigil through the long, late hours of the February night.
