Princesses (68 page)

As she grew older, Augusta, like her brother Ernest, found change more and more repugnant. ‘The railroads are doing incalculable mischief to the great roads,' she wrote, ‘the innkeepers are in great distress and are obliged to sell their horses and part with their boys which is melancholy – so many turned out of employment.' Instances she had in plenty, and she named a blacksmith in Egham, ‘so very expert a man that he was in constant employ; and by calculation he will now lose the shoeing of 160 horses, which will be the ruin of the poor man'. Furthermore the two ‘capital' inns at Bagshot were to be given up.

‘It is all detestable, I think,' Augusta had written to Ernest on 3 October 1838. Now confined to her chair, she had once been a fervent rider who knew those roads and those inns from her long courses with her father and his equerries. Turning away from what could never please her, she sent a ‘very pretty
book
called “Chit Chat” with agreeable stories' and a magic album to little Mary Adelaide at Cambridge Cottage for her birthday. Augusta had found the bright and boisterous children of her brother Adolphus a great entertainment since the family had returned from Hanover in 1837 and, with Prince George of Cambridge, settled at Cambridge Cottage in Kew. Augusta especially liked seven-year-old Princess Mary Adelaide, whom she entranced with story-telling skills developed long ago as a child at Kew. (Princess Mary Adelaide called Augusta a ‘capital Aunt' when she resumed a story that she had stopped when her niece was naughty.) The print at the top of her letter, Aunt Augusta mentioned, showed the Amphitheatre at Brighton decorated for Queen Victoria's visit to the Pavilion there. ‘You may cut it off and paste it into a book,' she directed her niece.

Augusta gave her older niece Queen Victoria for her birthday in this year of her marriage ‘a turquoise heart with a bit of my old grey locks,' and a blessing incorporating some words of advice for her future:

My hand shakes so I can hardly write – but as long as I can hold it, it will trace the truth from my heart of my affection for you, my beloved Victoria – May you as you increase in years, increase in domestic happiness, and
comfort. Your solid and real happiness must be your home. Thank God you have a happy home. The life of a sovereign cannot be one of peace, it must be more or less chequered. But my dear father always said, ‘I could not have met with such locals and disagreeables, if I had not felt that when my public duty was done – and that, I always thank God, I thought first of, what was my duty to my country and for its good, before I thought of my own feelings – I say, I then thanked God that I had a peaceable happy quiet… home to return to.' As years roll on, dearest dear Victoria, you must expect to meet with trials – for kings cannot do what they will, but what they can. And when, my dearest child, these troubles come upon you, you will have the blessing of the affection, confidence and devotion of dear Albert, which will be like balm to your soul. May God bless you, my dearest children, both together for many and many years, love your affectionate friend and aunt, Augusta.

Augusta became unwell herself at Clarence House in the summer of 1840, following Victoria's wedding. A year earlier Brighton had been thought of as a cure for her deteriorating health, and she had written from there to her niece Victoria in February 1839 that she went out – never later than a quarter to three, and always in the best chaise – ‘with cloaks and an ermine tippet and a vile muff besides Welsh whittles [or blankets] round my feet and legs which is reckoned warmer than anything in the world'. But even so Augusta was eleven days in
bed
with influenza, and she detailed her bizarre appearance, with ‘leeches all round my throat – a brown necklace with a tailed fringe – very disgusting'. She had concluded then, ‘My beautiful writing will betray me, so I may as well tell you that I am still in bed.'

Wright, Princess Augusta's dresser of long service, was with her mistress now at Clarence House. Sir Henry Halford told Lord Melbourne in June that the Princess's condition was not hopeless, but the Duchess of Gloucester was so distressed after seeing her invalid sister that she could not attend a concert. And the members of Princess Augusta's household at Frogmore received a lithograph of their mistress that she sent to them from London, but waited for her in vain, as her condition worsened in town. On 2 July 1840 the Windsor paper carried a report of ‘the serious and alarming illness of the Princess Augusta'. It concluded, ‘the inhabitants of this town (amongst whom Her Royal Highness has
so long
resided, and where her charity has been as unostentatious as her benevolence has been unbounded) … fear the
worst.'

At Windsor and in its neighbourhood, Princess Augusta had been a familiar figure for years, exercising her ‘unostentatious' charity and her ‘unbounded' benevolence even while living at the Castle with her parents.
But when she had taken possession of the Frogmore estate, following the deaths of both parents, this Princess whose personality was always less ‘marked' than that of her sisters had flourished. She relished changes that she made to the garden and the
walks
there. Her mother's estate, although extremely pretty with the ample white house facing the lake, with groves of trees bisected by Uvedale Price's walks, had had, as her daughter saw it, its flaws. Augusta had greatly disliked looking in winter from her favourite room in the house, past a lime tree, at ‘a plain piece of grass, too large to be left unplanted and too small to be called a lawn', in her flower garden, ‘just the other side of the lime tree opposite my own window'. In place of the
turf,
she wrote early on in her occupation of the estate, she had now made ‘a beautiful new basket' so that ‘when the leaves drop from the tree, I shall have a small handsome clump to
look at.'

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.