Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Augusta continued delighted with the ‘basket’ outside her window, and indeed was to sniff at one the King installed at Windsor as not nearly so nice as her own. She had planted carefully, she told a correspondent, so that there was a ‘profusion of flowers’ throughout the year. And the contented mistress of Frogmore laid down her pen in favour of communing with the spirits of the place. ‘I am now going to take my walk.’

  Several visitors to Frogmore commented that the water in front of the house was an eyesore, and a touring German prince, Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, wrote that it was ‘now only a swamp for frogs, though surrounded by hedges of rose and yew.’ John Claudius Loudon, the influential editor of a new publication, the Gardener’s Magazine, gave his opinion of Augusta’s beloved Frogmore as ‘a remarkably dull place’. He did admit that the walled kitchen gardens, where strawberries and melons were successfully grown, were fruitful, and he approved her gardener Mr Thomas Ingram’s wiring of walls and grafting of geraniums and passion flowers. But, recalling the landscaping of the garden when originally planted in the 1790s and ‘rendered interesting by a very long, winding piece of water’ and by ‘extensive planting’, Loudon was disapproving of Augusta’s stewardship of the garden. ‘The trees and shrubs seem now to occupy the greater part of the surface, and the water being very extensive, stagnant, and not very free from aquatic plants, the situation appears to us as unhealthy a one as could well be chosen for a residence,’ he wrote. ‘The shrubbery is too old to have the freshness of youth, the shrubs in general too common to have the beauty of variety.’ In other words, Frogmore – for all Augusta’s ‘baskets’, it had not changed substantially since first laid out by Queen Charlotte and Major William Price in the 1790s – was old fashioned and even overgrown, just what Loudon did not like, and just what Augusta did. ‘It is not tidy from the falling of leaves and that discomposes me sadly,’ she acknowledged one autumn to Miss Garth. But, as she said, her gardener would shortly dig in the leaves and it would look better.

  With their own hands she and her sisters had planted some of the original seedlings which were now large and vigorous bushes. ‘Memory is a blessed delight,’ she wrote, although she admitted that ‘at times it tortures the feelings sadly.’ Frogmore in every season, whatever Prince Pückler-Muskau’s or Mr Loudon’s strictures, was enchanting to Augusta. She loved it, whether the ‘early trees’ were losing leaves, and the garden bore ‘a wintry appearance’ or when, ‘from the beauty of the verdure’, it was uncommonly summer-looking.

  Mary at Bagshot got off more lightly when that stern horticultural critic Mr Loudon visited the Bagshot Park grounds on behalf of the readers of the Gardener’s Magazine. Through a rustic gate, he told them, close to the Duke and Duchess’s house, an arbour trellis gave on to a rosary or rose garden, a showy herbaceous garden and an ‘American garden on turf’ that the Duchess had laid out and planted. Loudon approved what he saw at Bagshot, and he returned there several times, although he regretted that the Duchess’s gardener Mr Toward was not better housed. He kindly included on his first visit a diagram for his readers showing all the features of Mary’s flower garden, and on his second particularly admired the American garden, ‘in which the tufted masses of peat-earth shrubs, magnolias, rhododendrons, andromedas, azaleas, kalmias, ericas, etc., looked admirably.’

  With Edmund Currey and Mr Toward, Mary had undoubtedly created something quite special at Bagshot. Visitors began to come, asking to see the pleasure ground, and on one occasion a dropsical Mary deputed her sister Augusta to escort them where the little garden chair in which she tooled around the paths could not reach. Augusta appears to have borne her sister no malice for her better ‘review’ from Mr Loudon, but she seems also to have been undaunted by criticism in her love of her ‘swamp’ at Frogmore.

  As a hostess at Frogmore as well as in London, Augusta was always generous with her invitations. One year she implored her friends, the Arrans, to visit her come spring. ‘I can promise you that the house is as warm as toast. Your rooms shall be to the south and you shall do everything you please from morning till night,’ sang the siren. But she was content to be alone, whatever the weather. In the wake of a downpour, she toured Windsor in an open carriage, watched the Eton boys play cricket on the playing fields, and observed the Thames crowded with pleasure boats, before she walked in the garden at Frogmore. ‘Everything looks clean and refreshed by the rain,’ she remarked, ‘and the Thames has recovered its beauty, for it was quite dull and low … The Castle is looking magnificent just now from my own little sanctum.’

  Mary stayed with Augusta a good deal, especially when invalid. Miss Garth often stayed with her before Christmas on her way to her brother and his family in Surrey. Her uncle General Thomas Garth kept up ties of friendship with Augusta till his death, sending her once a ‘magnificent present of game’ for which she begged Miss Garth to thank her uncle. If he would ‘now and then be so good as to use his gun for me’, Augusta wrote, she would be very much obliged to him.

  Miss Peggy Planta, Augusta’s old English teacher, stayed at Frogmore with her former pupil, and passed her mornings at Windsor, seeing her old acquaintances there – of which there were many, following her long years in harness to the royal family. Old acquaintances, old stories and old jokes going back thirty years and more provided a comfortable diet for Augusta at Frogmore. Mary ‘laughed ready to choke herself’ on one occasion, Augusta reported, when the Duchess and Miss Garth were both staying with her. Augusta had remarked on the death of an old Windsor acquaintance, Mrs Coleman, whom General Gouldsworthy had used to call ‘cross-patch’ and ‘grumpibus’ when they were young, and Miss Garth in answer had declared herself surprised that the death had been announced ‘in one paper’ only. Did they think, Mary asked, that it should have been announced to the public ‘by the common crier, or … proclaimed like a general peace by the heralds with Sir Bland Burges at their head?’

  Such innocent diversions at Frogmore were at an end now. Three days after the Windsor paper had reported its alarm at Princess Augusta’s illness in London in the summer of 1840, Queen Victoria ordered the park keepers to keep the gates of Green Park closed day and night, so that the traffic would not disturb Princess Augusta. Her death was now expected, but, as Halford wrote on 21 July to Lord Melbourne, the elderly Princess’s strong constitution made it impossible to forecast its date. When Leopold, King of the Belgians, and his wife Louise visited England in August, the Princess was still in this world. Halford spoke at the end of the month to Lord Melbourne again of the Princess’s ‘natural powers of constitution’. And Queen Victoria, down at Windsor, on the same day despatched a messenger ‘by the railroad’ to London to establish the latest information.

  Prince Albert had declined to remain at the Mansion House for the great dinner being given to celebrate his receiving the Freedom of the City that day. Queen Victoria held that he could not appear ‘when our poor aunt is dying’. The Duke of Cambridge, however, did attend the dinner and said robustly that if he, as the Princess’s brother, felt able to celebrate Prince Albert’s Freedom, there was no reason why the Prince himself should hang back. Unfortunately, it became clear that the banqueters, deprived of the spectacle of the Coburg bridegroom, were in a sullen mood, and one or two even turned over their plates in reproach to their hosts. Whereupon the Duke of Cambridge rose, and made a woolly-headed attempt to placate the angry tables with references to Prince Albert’s recent marriage and to the charms of Queen Victoria at Windsor. This speech did nothing to endear him to his niece, who was outraged – at six months pregnant – to be the subject of such immodest talk. And still Augusta bore up and manifested ‘a consciousness of what is passing when she is awake’, wrote Halford in September.

  Leopold and Louise departed England early that month, and still Augusta struggled on. ‘Fixed mischief in the tract of the intestine’ threatened daily to end her life, but manfully she took ‘liquid nourishment’, digested it and lived, as Halford told Melbourne on 16
September. Her niece Victoria wrote, with a hint of irritation: ‘Under the circumstances I can’t well walk in public this afternoon.’

  But now Augusta was in dreadful pain. Moore, the royal apothecary, was at Clarence House all day – and he stayed the night, too, so as to administer the opiates and other drugs he had brought. Prince Albert went up by train to see the Princess, and she was unconscious. The Duke of Sussex, looking ahead now, said that when his sister died word must be sent immediately to the King of Hanover. Ernest would take it ill if he did not hear ‘directly’, and Queen Victoria passed the comment to Melbourne on 21 September.

  The Queen told her uncle Leopold, ‘Almost the last thing she said, when she was still conscious, the day before she died, was to Mr Moore (the apothecary), who wrote me every morning a report: “Have you written to my darling?” Is this not touching?’ Victoria was overcome, when she received that report, and told Lord Melbourne on 22 September, ‘It is wonderful that she even struggles so long.’ But she had heard from Sir Henry that afternoon that her aunt could not live more than a few hours, ‘and that probably before the evening closed in, all would be over’. Victoria wrote in her diary that she talked over that evening after dinner with ‘Lord M’ her aunt’s ‘dying condition, her having no will, and uncle Sussex likely to mix himself up in everything’.

  At Clarence House in London, meanwhile, and oblivious of such worldly considerations, Princess Augusta Sophia of England had died at twenty past nine that evening. Her sister-in-law and friend Queen Adelaide held her hands while her sisters Mary and Sophia and her brother Adolphus looked on. And then the Queen Dowager closed the dead Princess’s eyes.

  Augusta, as a child and later, had greatly valued her family and had delighted in her hours with them at the Queen’s House, at Kew and at Windsor. But at Frogmore and in her London homes after her parents’ deaths she had also been able to enjoy the hours alone without which, as she had said as a young girl, she was not fit for company. Her faith, her duties and works in the parish, and her attentions to the brothers and sisters she ‘doted on’ kept her busy. For recreation she had gardening, walking in the grounds she laid out, and in the evening playing duets with Lady Mary Taylor while the shadows thickened over the lake. In many ways Princess Augusta’s life recalls that of the medieval English gentlewoman, her private passions – for General Spencer and perhaps others – occluded from view. But her lively wit and sense of the ridiculous moor her firmly in the Georgian age, where for some, this reserved Princess was, as King Leopold wrote from Wiesbaden on 1 October 1840, ‘certainly the best of the whole family’. Joining those members of her family whom she had most loved, her father, her mother, her brothers George IV and William IV, and her sister Princess Amelia, she was buried in the vault under St George’s Chapel at Windsor.

  20 Sophia – The Little Gypsy

  Not long after the accession of her niece Victoria, Princess Sophia lost the sight in her good eye, and became blind, as we have seen. Augusta wrote sadly, shortly before her death in September 1840, that her sister’s mind was now made up ‘never to be any better’. She found it painful to ‘witness the poor dear, who used to be so often and so well employed, reduced now only to open [that is, cut the pages of] books and tear up paper for couch-pillows.’ (Sophia had apparently heard that hospital patients found pillows stuffed with paper comforting.) When Princess Sophia attended her sister’s deathbed, she could see neither her sister nor the other mourners.

  A metal mesh firescreen that Sophia had once embroidered stood before the fireplace in her house in Vicarage Place, Kensington and bore a large S within a wreath of pink roses and purple and yellow pansies. The days at Windsor when Sophia had taken pleasure in this ‘work’, the days at Kensington Palace when she had embroidered dresses for her neighbour and niece Victoria, were over. Now she tore her paper or wound silk, while a series of readers came to read to her at Kensington for an hour each in English, French, German or Italian, The Princess would not allow them to read longer – ‘the fatigue would … be too great for them’. And, easily irritated, she refused to have a lady-in-waiting live with her, but relied on her dresser, Mrs Cochrane, for help. ‘Not being able to see,’ she confided to Amelia Murray, ‘she should always fancy the lady sitting opposite her, looking wearied.’

  Sophia had a life that would have made anyone ‘sink’, as she did occasionally. ‘In addition to her blindness she was in some degree deaf,’ wrote Amelia Murray, ‘and could not move from her seat without being carried; yet still she was as patient and uncomplaining as ever.’ The artist Sir William Ross drew Princess Sophia at the task of carding wool, and she looks the picture of composure, with braided loops of hair, under a ribboned cap, and with sleeves massy with lace. The older woman yet has, about her smile and cast-down blind eyes, something of the elusive ‘gypsy’ quality that Lord Melbourne had detected in Princess Sophia when he and she were young.

  However, Sophia did not withdraw from family life, despite her infirmities. On either side of her chair at York House hung two chequered bead-work bags, bordered and tasselled, of maroon and lemon, that she had once ornamented. The one held family letters recently received, the other those ready for despatch. (Those that arrived were read to her, but enough virtually indecipherable letters from these years survive to show that Sophia continued to write at least some of her correspondence herself.) Though she could not see, she could feel the trinkets and bibelots that all her family exchanged and amassed through legacy on tables all around her and within her reach.

  Sophia’s intimacy with her niece Victoria had ended for good and all when the Queen moved out of Kensington Palace and into Buckingham Palace. Moreover, Queen Victoria gave birth months after her aunt Augusta’s death to her first child – another Victoria and a princess royal to succeed her aunt Württemberg. ‘I am very proud of her eyes, they are so large, and so dark blue; her hair is light brown; and her complexion too with pink cheeks is very pretty,’ wrote the Queen to Uncle Leopold on 22 December 1840. From now on, the Queen would be absorbed in her own family, and less curious about and considerate of the earlier generation – except for dear Aunt Mary, who took such a keen interest in Victoria and Albert and in their domestic circumstances. But the Queen still corresponded with her aunt Sophia and, as her family grew, brought them on visits to York House, Sophia’s home in Vicarage Place that had previously been the residence of the clerk of the works at Kensington Palace.

  The Duchess of Gloucester, with her enormous social appetite, was Sophia’s saviour in some ways. Brooking no argument, she carried off the crumpled heap that was her sister on carriage drives around Hyde Park. Augusta’s death had left Mary bereft of a sister with whom she had for twenty years exchanged visits down at Bagshot and Frogmore, a companion at the yearly round of Court events, a friend with whom she could exchange frank remarks on the subject of their vast and vexing array of relations. The Duchess of Gloucester now visited Sophia in her seclusion all the more devotedly for the want of their elder sister.

  The Duke of Cambridge was an affectionate brother too in whose company Sophia rejoiced, and his children had been trained to love Aunt Sophia, although Prince George of Cambridge later recalled her as a ‘shrivelled old lady.’ In addition, the Duke of Cambridge, like his sister Mary Adelaide, was extremely charitable, and no church, hospital or Bible society asked in vain for his presence on a committee. Philanthropy was life’s blood to his wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, and to the other ladies of the ‘old Royal Family’, too. It was said that, as Queen Dowager, William IV’s widow Adelaide spent £20,000 a year on charities benefiting children. And for the Duchess of Kent, religion and education were her watchwords, as patron of the Servants’ Society and of the Kent Dispensary, named after her deceased husband. Indeed, when she moved into Frogmore, following Princess Augusta’s death, this Duchess took over many of her sister-in-law’s pet charities at Windsor.

  In town Sophia, Mary and their sisters-in-law were all successfully courted by
Charles Blomfield, the energetic Bishop of London, with sermons of his own printed for the royal ladies’ delectation and with offers of visits and acceptances of dinners with his wife at their homes. They happily subscribed to his programme of building churches in outlying parts of the metropolis, and supported his work in colonial bishoprics. Indeed, with his encouragement Queen Adelaide gave large sums for the establishment of an Anglican church in Malta.

  Just as her interest in Queen Victoria as a child had helped Sophia to shrug off despond in the 1820s, so the Cambridge children now – George, Augusta and Mary Adelaide – were important diversions for her. In many ways the healthy appetites and boisterous spirits of the three children recreated those of their father and his siblings in youth at Kew and Windsor, and Dolly and Mary themselves – though not Sophia – continued in their seventies to display those characteristics. ‘There is such heartiness and seemingly endless good temper about all the Royal family, to judge from manner and look,’ wrote Lady Lyttelton when a fellow guest with the Duke of Cambridge at Bagshot. Prince George of Cambridge and his sisters inherited from their father, besides, principles of benevolence which were to lead the youngest, Princess Mary Adelaide, into a positive addiction to charitable work. No bazaar was to be free of her. Others might question Adolphus’s intellect, as when he joined in unexpectedly and disastrously with professional singers at a musical evening and then applauded himself. Victoria found fault with her uncle’s extreme deafness, and others with his yellow wig. But Princess Sophia felt only warmth for the family who came so regularly and uncomplainingly to see her at York House.