Princesses (69 page)

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.

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.

The rest of her family visited her, too – the Duke of Sussex and Lady Cecilia Buggin, the widow whom he had married on Lady Augusta Murray's death in 1830 and whom Queen Victoria, on coming to the throne, had created Duchess of Inverness. Uncle Sussex took Victoria's part against his brother Ernest in a matter of royal precedence, and this elevation
of his wife – the second whom he had married without reference to the Royal Marriages Act – was by way of a reward. Characteristically, there was an exact value placed on the Duchess of Inverness's honours. She was never to be seated at the royal table for dinner, and was to approach it only after the most junior of other duchesses had advanced. But at the words, ‘His Grace the Duke of Sussex and Her Grace the Duchess of Inverness', the couple could enter shambling and smiling into a reception or ball. And together the elderly Graces visited Sophia.

In April 1843, only three years after his Cecilia was made a duchess, the Duke of Sussex died, from that old-established family complaint, erysipelas. Most unusually he was buried in a granite sarcophagus in the new public cemetery of Kensal
Green,
north of Paddington. Incompetent arrangements for his brother William's interment in St George's Chapel at Windsor in 1837 had upset the Duke, it was said. But that had not stopped their sister Princess Augusta being buried in that chapel very decorously, three years later. The more romantic truth was that he wished Lady Cecilia to be laid at his side when she died, and so he arranged for the huge grey tomb in the public plot at Kensal Green to be his resting place.

News of other family matters was brought to Sophia in her Kensington home. There was the birth of another great-niece – Victoria and Albert's second daughter Alice – in April 1843, four days after her brother Sussex's death. And in July of that year her niece Gussy – Princess Augusta of Cambridge – departed to make a home in Germany following her marriage to Friedrich, Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. At Gussy's wedding at Buckingham Palace, Ernest, King of Hanover, as the male head of the English royal family, rather than her father, gave the bride away. Although seventy now, bent and ‘grown very old and excessively
thin',
Ernest was still combative, and tried to stop Prince Albert taking precedence over him when it came to signing the marriage register. But the Queen defeated her uncle, who was poised to take the pen from her fingers after she had signed. She ‘nipped round the table like lightning, had the register passed across to her, signed and gave the pen to the Prince before the King of Hanover knew what was
happening.'

A year later, the expected death of Prince Albert's father, Duke Ernest of Coburg, led Princess Mary to ruminate: ‘This Court mourning coming just as one season begins and when all our shops are full of their new fashions does not please the
trades people.'
The death of her sister-in-law Princess Sophia Matilda struck deeper, reviving memories of Mary's childhood as much as of her marriage to the deceased Princess's brother. From the age of twelve, she wrote, Sophia Matilda had been ‘a warm and kind
friend', and ever ‘the same towards me'. It was a blank that would not easily be filled up, she wrote, and the loss would be greatly felt at Blackheath, where, like a medieval saint, Princess Sophia Matilda had done ‘much good to the poor and passed her retired life in acts of charity'. Mary had forgotten those days when Sophia Matilda, as her sister-in-law, had been that ‘meddling fussy sister'. Unfortunately, Sophia Matilda's ‘anxiety to save pain', the Duchess wrote, had made her order those about her to give no alarm when she fell ill. As a result, there was no family with her when she died, and the news came upon all of them ‘like a
thunderbolt.'