The Children of George III: Sophia

Princess Sophia Matilda, the twelfth child and fifth daughter of George III and Queen Charlotte, was born November 3, 1777 at Buckingham House in London, after a mere fifteen minutes of labor—after twelve children, the queen was clearly well-versed in childbirth! She entered the family at a fraught time; Britain was at war with its American colonies, and walking on eggshells waiting for word on whether the French were about to join the war on the American side (which they did a few months later, in March 1778.)

Flora Fraser, author of Princesses, the excellent group biography of the daughters of George III, (Amazon affiliate  link), posits that the three elder daughters (the Princess Royal, Augusta, and Elizabeth) and the three younger (Mary, Sophia, and Amelia) were almost more cousinly than sisterly. They generally lived in separate houses in Windsor, and the elder group received much more attention from the queen, who by the time of Sophia’s birth was simply overwhelmed by the demands of her large family. As a result the younger girls, mostly left to nurses and governesses to raise, received a much more haphazard and superficial education.

Sophia received even less attention from her parents when, around her eleventh birthday, the king suffered his first period of madness. But aside from that frightening time, she seems to have had a quiet, pleasant childhood. She was delicate and blonde, with her father’s somewhat protruding eyes (she remained child-like in appearance all her life) and despite her extreme nearsightedness was an avid reader and accomplished needlewoman, even if her handwriting was terrible.

In her teens, a bad case of chicken pox led to month of ill health, with frequent “fits”, difficulty swallowing, and low spirits. She was sent to the spa at Tunbridge Wells and seemed to eventually recover, but this would be only the first episode of poor health she would suffer, necessitating frequent visits to various spas and seaside towns for sea-bathing.

Like all of her sisters, Sophia suffered from her parents’ unwillingness to allow them to marry—a problem exacerbated by the Napoleonic Wars, which made finding appropriately royal husbands almost impossible, much to the princesses’ dismay. She did find a new friend, at age twenty, in the form of Miss Frances Garth, a sub-governess to Princess Charlotte and niece of the king’s favorite equerry, Colonel Thomas Garth…with whom Sophia had fallen in love. It was hardly surprising, considering the circumstances; nor was she the only one of the sisters to do so. What set Sophia’s experience apart was the fact that Colonel (his knighthood came later) was more than thirty years her senior…and that in late July or early August 1800 she bore him a son.

Colonel Garth eventually “adopted” the boy and was a fond parent—perhaps a little too fond, as Thomas Garth turned out to be a bit of a rotter, later on trying to blackmail the royal family and running away with a married woman. But the Colonel continued as the king’s favorite equerry, while for all intents, Sophia’s life was over. While her three of her sisters would eventually marry, she would remain a spinster all her life, condemned by her youthful mistake to live more or less retired (though she hints in her correspondence to having tender feelings for an unnamed man at court.) General Garth’s very public embrace of his child eventually drove them apart, and Sophia dedicated herself to being a companion to her father before his final descent into illness…when she herself was not ill. By 1812 she had become a semi-invalid, “nervous and weak”—the victim of psychosomatic illness, perhaps?

The king’s permanent illness left her to devote herself to other members of her family. She was a favorite of Princess Charlotte, and was devastated by her death in 1817; the death of the queen the following year was a further blow, though their relationship had generally been a chilly one. But it was the king’s death in 1820 that was the hardest…yet it also set her free. She moved to London, taking a house near Kensington Palace (and eventually moving into the palace itself), and actually began to venture out for walks and rides and invite a few friends to visit in the evenings. And she became the friend of her brother Edward’s widow, the Duchess of Kent, along with her tiny niece, Victoria…and of the Duchess’s comptroller, Sir John Conroy.

For several years, the extended family lived a mostly peaceful life at Kensington; Sophia doted upon her niece, who returned her affection. We’ve seen the extraordinary influence Sir John exerted over the Duchess; he exerted the same over Sophia, who was ever susceptible to a strong man—especially one who kept Thomas Garth, her now-grown illegitimate son, from importuning her for money. But Sir John’s machinations set Victoria against not only him and her mother, but Sophia as well. On becoming queen Victoria paid dutiful visits to her aunt, but the old affection was gone.

Almost totally blind by 1837 and forced to leave the dilapidated Kensington, Sophia still had two sisters left. After Augusta’s death in 1840, Mary devoted her still considerable energies to Sophia, and the children of her youngest brother, the Duke of Cambridge, also visited frequently. But the last years of her life were twilight ones, in all sense of the word: blind, mostly deaf, and crippled, she could do little but wind yarn and write illegible letters to her remaining family members. She passed away in May 1848.

Children of George III: Mary, Duchess of Gloucester

1776 might not have been the best of years for George III, but it was not without its bright spots; one of those occurred on April 25, when his eleventh child and fourth daughter was born. Mary (yes, that’s all—had her parents grown tired of bestowing multiple names on their numerous offspring, or had they just run out??) came into the world at Buckingham House in London, and was destined to outlive her numerous siblings…but let’s not get ahead of ourselves!

Just as her elder three sisters formed a sort of subgroup within the family, Mary would become the eldest in a second sisterly subgroup, along with future siblings Sophia and Amelia.) The practical upshot of this was that my now, with eleven children, the king and queen simply didn’t have as much time and attention for the younger ones, and Mary and her sisters would not receive the same careful academic education that the Princess Royal, Augusta, and Elizabeth had.

As it happened, though, Mary did fine without it, for her intelligence was less academic than it was interpersonal. She was a charming baby who grew into a charming toddler, already described at sixteen months by one of the royal household as “a lovely elegant made child” and by another, a few years later: “There never was a child so consummate in the art of pleasing, nor that could display herself to such advantage.” While still small, she became the lifelong favorite sister of her eldest brother, the Prince of Wales, and indeed of many of her siblings.

After that rocky start in 1776, the world in which Mary grew up remained a rocky place, especially after the French threw in their support for the American independence effort and, a few years later, had their own revolution. It was a world that the king hesitated to allow his daughters out into, and so Mary’s debut at age 15 meant she was joining her elder sisters in spinsterhood. Unlike them, though, Mary seemed reasonably content in her single state; her name would never be connected (at least not seriously) with a secret lover’s, though she did strive to be out in society as much as possible; she loved attending the theater and such balls and parties as she was allowed to. She had grown into the beauty of the family, darker of hair and finer of feature, and had an excellent fashion sense (sharing her love of clothes with the Queen)…but emotionally, seems to have cared only for her parents and siblings and her cousins the Gloucesters, children of one of her father’s estranged brothers.

As her younger sister Amelia’s health declined in the first decade of the new century, Mary became her devoted companion and nurse (and conspired in Amelia’s doomed love for Charles Fitzroy. Amelia’s death in 1810 and the king’s subsequent final descent into madness marked the beginning of changes for the family; by 1813, the remaining sisters, now in their thirties and forties, were settling into new homes and routines around London and Windsor. Many of those routines revolved around visits from their niece Princess Charlotte, whose tempestuous teenhood was at hand; Mary, always sided faithfully with her brother in the upheavals surrounding Charlotte and her estranged mother, Caroline.

Eventually, though, Charlotte’s troubled youth resolved into happy marriage in May 1816 with her Leopold…and to everyone’s surprise a month later, Mary announced her own upcoming June wedding…to her cousin William, Duke of Gloucester. To this day, speculation about their relationship remains rife: some sources say he’d been in love with his beautiful cousin for years, while others state that since he’d been unable to charm Charlotte into marriage, Mary was his second choice to worm his way back into royal favor (and regain the title of “royal highness” that had been stripped from his father after his runaway marriage.) Some fondness seems to have existed between them, but William did not prove to be a kind husband to his bride: in general, he did not enjoy the reputation of being an intelligent or even vaguely sensible person. But Mary now had the pleasure of being a married woman, mistress of her own establishment and even freer now to go about in society—and to serve as hostess for her beloved eldest brother’s court, something only a married woman could do.

Mary’s difficult marriage lasted till 1834, when the Duke died suddenly. Mary took to widowhood quite happily, and continued her comfortably busy social life, though no longer the first lady at court after George IV’s death in 1830. She traveled to visit her sister Elizabeth in Germany, became quite a favorite of her niece Victoria (that's Mary at right, with Victoria and her children Bertie and Alice), and helped nurse her sisters Augusta and Sophia through their final illnesses; the last, in 1848, left her the last daughter of George III. Her own health became of occasional concern, but Victoria continued devoted to her, a source of much comfort through the 1840s and 1850s. After a period of declining health she died just a few days after her 81^st birthday, on April 30, 1857, and was sincerely mourned by the queen and her family.

 

Children of George III: Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge

His Majesty’s seventh son, Adolphus Frederick (notice all the name recycling; by this time naming the kids must have been quite a chore) was born on February 24, 1774, at Kew, almost exactly a year after his brother Augustus...and like that brother, he would be a bit of a mold-breaker...but I’m getting ahead of myself.

As the third son in a sequence of three boys born within three years, Adolphus was lumped with his older brothers Ernest and Augustus and a pair of tutors into one household at Kew Green, which contained a whole set of houses for the royal children, for just about all of his childhood.

This lumping continued when the three brothers were sent to the University of Göttingen in 1786, when Adolphus was a lad of twelve. He seemed to thrive at the university and actually applied himself to his studies; being of such tender years, he couldn’t apply himself instead to the rowdier pastimes of university students like drinking to excess, dueling, or womanizing.

But by 1790 his college days were past, and Adolphus, like his older brothers, had entered the army. He saw active service in Holland, including being badly wounded and temporarily captured by the French in 1793 (though he was rescued by a timely sortie.) He returned to active military service until the Hanoverian forces withdrew in 1795, and returned with them to Hanover, where he lived for the next several years, still serving with honor and distinction in the army and generally charming everyone with his excellent manners and real interest in the arts and sciences (he was, it seems, an excellent violinist.) Napoleon’s advance across the continent forced his unwilling return to England—he would far rather have stayed to fight—after Hanover decided not to resist the approaching French forces

Adolphus (who had received his ducal title of Cambridge in 1801) lived quietly in London for the next decade or so. He spent much time with his parents and siblings and, unlike his brothers, lived within his means, proving to the world that not all of the king’s sons were “damned millstones” around the country’s neck (as the Duke of Wellington would at a later date describe them.) It is perhaps an indication of his character that even after Adolphus heartily promoted his eldest brother’s marriage to Caroline of Brunswick—an utterly disastrous marriage if there ever was one—the brothers remained the best of friends.

By 1813, with Napoleon’s fortunes on the wane, Adolphus was begged to return to Hanover and became its Governor-General, expecting to settle down and once more be of service to his family...until the death of Princess Charlotte a few years later kicked off the race for the king’s sons to produce a legitimate heir to the throne. Within two weeks of Charlotte’s death, Adolphus had proposed to and been accepted by Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassel, all of twenty years old to Adolphus’s forty-three...but as it turned out, theirs was a very happy union. They duly produced a son in 1819, but the birth of children to Adolphus’s older brothers Edward and Ernest meant that the boy would likely inherit neither the throne of Great Britain nor Hanover. Two daughters followed over the years—Princess Augusta, who would be a close friend to her slightly older cousin Victoria, and Princess Mary, who would herself one day produce a queen for England.

Adolphus continued to serve Hanover until the death of his brother William in 1837 meant that the throne of Hanover would go to big brother Ernest, as Victoria, being female, could not inherit it. So he retired at last to England and spent the rest of his life doting upon his wife and continuing to do his duty for his family and country. Though his increasing eccentricities (he liked to sing along at concerts, make loud comments about sermons in church, and always wore a distinctive blond wig) made him a bit of a joke, they were harmless; and he showed his continued good sense by keeping out of politics (though he couldn’t resist trying to encourage a match between his son George and Victoria—neither of who were interested.) Family relations remained strained at times between him and Victoria (and Albert) because of a few small, foolish squabbles about nothing very important; eventually though, their relationship improved, and when Adolphus died in 1850, he was sincerely mourned by all.

Children of George III: Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex

The sixth son (and ninth child) of King George and Queen Charlotte made his way into the world on February 16, 1773, at Buckingham House in London. Although very much a “middle” child in terms of birth order, Augustus would wind up very different from his eight brothers...but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

He was lumped in with his brothers Ernest and Adolphus, in the way that the children of this large family seemed to be grouped into subsets by their parents—there were only three years between the youngest and eldest of the trio. After leaving the nursery, the three were given their own house at Kew Green, near to their other siblings’ establishments. Augustus seems to have been an intelligent, bookish child, a tendency that was reinforced by the fact that he was subject to severe asthmatic attacks and could not lead as boisterous a life as his brothers.

In July of 1786 at age thirteen, Augustus was bundled off to the University of Gottingen with Ernest and Adolphus to perfect his German and to prepare for military service like their older brothers. But for Augustus, this was not to be; though he harbored romantic dreams of joining the navy, his health would not permit it...and thus he became the only one of George III’s sons not to have a military career.

Indeed, his asthma was sufficiently bad that it was decided that he should spend winters in a warmer climate, and so for the next several years he was shipped off to Italy to avoid winter cold. He enjoyed his Italian travels, soaking up art and architecture as well as sunshine. He had hopes of perhaps returning home and becoming an academic...but what happened instead was that he fell in love, at age twenty, with Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the Earl of Dunmore, who was traveling in Rome in the spring of 1793 with her mother and sister. Lady Augusta was some years his senior and, it seems, perhaps a tad on the predatory side...for by April, she’d gotten him to propose, and they were secretly married.

What Lady Augusta seems to have forgotten is that any marriage contracted by a child of the sovereign without his permission was immediately void. The couple returned to England and remarried there—by which time Lady A. was pregnant—but the result was the same. Eventually Augustus was sent back to Italy, his tail between his legs, while Lady Augusta was hauled before the Privy Council  where the marriage was declared invalid and the first of the king’s 50-odd illegitimate grandchildren was formally declared a bastard.

Augustus mostly continued to live abroad for the next few years, which included a brief reunion with Lady Augusta which produced a daughter (though some dispute that the child was the prince’s) until the continental situation and a certain French general named Napoleon made that impossible; thereafter, he moved into Kensington Palace and began to accumulate an enormous library. He was made a royal duke in 1801, and seems to have spend much of his time with his books and with patronage of various societies, from Masons to orphans’ hospitals to the Society of Arts, of which he became president. In 1806 he received custody of his children, and was a gentle, loving papa to them.

These years were quiet ones for him, for if he was unlike his brothers in not having a military career, he was also unlike them in being an avowed liberal Whig and spoke in Parliament in favor of many Whig causes, including Catholic Emancipation. He did not get on well with his eldest brother, the Prince of Wales (due in great part to his siding with Princess Charlotte in her marriage travails and with his estranged wife, Princess Caroline) and so kept to himself and his books until George IV’s death. Though his asthma eased, he remained something of a hypochondriac all his life, and insisted on wearing a black skullcap at all times to protect his head from drafts. With William’s ascension, he had more of a public life: William made him Keeper of St. James and Hyde Parks, and he was named president of the Royal Society in 1830 and was an active participant in its meetings.

In 1830, Lady Augusta Murray died, and a year later, Augustus was married again—once more without formal permission—to another earl’s daughter, the widowed Lady Cecelia Buggin, whom Queen Victoria later created Duchess of Inverness in gratitude to her uncle’s giving precedence to Prince Albert (and by the way, Augustus gave the bride away at Victoria's wedding.) Augustus and his second wife had a happy marriage for the next thirteen years, until Augustus was felled by an attack of erysipelas, a bacterial skin infection, in 1843.

On the whole, he sounds like the best of George and Charlotte’s sons (with the possible exception of his younger brother Adolphus). Unlike his brothers he was not a spendthrift (aside from his collector’s passion for books—his library exceeded 50,000 volumes!) and seems to have been a genuinely good—if at times eccentric—person.

The Children of George III: Ernest

It’s been a while since we’ve met another one of George III’s numerous brood. As it happens, we’ve already met this particular son. But I’m getting ahead of myself...

The king’s fifth son and eighth child, Ernest Augustus, was born on June 5, 1771 at Buckingham House. His childhood seems to have been uneventful; it was spent growing up at Kew with his numerous siblings and sharing a household with his two younger brothers, Augustus and Adolphus. Ernest was a handsome, boisterous boy; unlike most of his brothers, he would never become corpulent, but remained lean his whole life.

At fifteen and still with his two younger brothers in tow, Ernest was sent to study at the University of Göttingen in Hanover, and received his earliest military training there as well. By 1792 he was commissioned as a cavalry colonel, being an excellent horseman and shot, and went on to fight against the French in several battles over the next few years, receiving a saber wound to his head (that would eventually result in a loss of vision in one eye) and other wounds. Though he would continue to serve in the military for another twenty years, returning to the continent and eventually attaining the rank of field marshal, his battle days were past.

However, his interest in politics was just beginning. When his father awarded him the title of Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale in 1799, he took his seat in the House of Lords and actually got involved. A dedicated Tory unlike his brothers Prinny and the Duke of York, he voted against bills for Catholic Emancipation and other liberal legislation and became a leader of the conservative end of his party. Also unlike his brothers, he was circumspect in his personal habits, which may have backfired on him as he acquired a reputation as a sinister figure who preferred to enjoy his vices privately. Rumors likely circulated by political opponents whirled around him, reaching their apex in the scandal around the death of his valet, Joseph Sellis.

The army and politics kept him sufficiently busy until 1813, when he became smitten by a cousin, Princess Frederica of Meckenburg-Strelitz. Though she was already married, the marriage was not a success and discussion of a divorce was underway when the princess’s husband died unexpectedly—a fact which became more grist for the rumor mill after Ernest and she married in 1815. Since Queen Charlotte did not approve of the marriage and would not receive her daughter-in-law, the couple eventually moved to Germany and had a son.

Over the next decade and a half, lurid rumors of murder and assault continued to circulate around Ernest, many of them probably politically motivated as he continued to involve himself in politics, being especially active in questions involving Ireland during the 1820s. The issue of the line of succession to the throne was an especially fraught one; after Prinny’s death in 1830, Ernest was next in line for the throne after young princess Victoria, and rumors that her life was in danger from her wicked uncle were rife even after she came to throne; only the births of her first children put those rumors to rest.

On the death of his older brother William IV Ernest became the king of Hanover, since Victoria as a female could not inherit the Hanoverian throne. He left England within the month to take up residence in his new kingdom, where he ruled according to his highly conservative bent (though he did eventually approve a more liberal constitution for Hanover.) He wasn’t very popular, but wasn’t unpopular either, and was appreciated for the fact that he kept Hanover out of the reaching grasp of Prussian expansionism. He died in 1851, at the age of 80.

The Children of George III: Elizabeth

The first year of the new decade saw the birth of George III’s seventh child and third daughter, Elizabeth, on May 22, 1770. Her birth would complete the elder trio of royal daughters who would share governesses and tutors and live in close contact with their parents—their younger sisters, born later, would form a separate trio and receive less attention...but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. (That's Elizabeth in the green dress at right, age about 12.)

This princess soon became known for two things: her girth, and her artistic abilities. She was a fat baby, and remained heavy all her life; indeed, in her sisters’ correspondence she is often referred to as “Fatima;” evidently she was especially rotund, even in a family known for its tendency to fleshiness. And while the queen had many talented tutors for her elder daughters and indeed spent much time herself with them in drawing, painting, etching, sculpting, and various other artistic pursuits, Elizabeth’s skill and devotion were noteworthy. When the queen purchased a “cottage” at Frogmore, near Windsor, Elizabeth took great pleasure in designing the extensive gardens, scattering gothic ruins, classical temples, and other architectural embellishments about. She was a talented silhouettist, cutting portrait profiles and entire scenes from paper without drawing them first, and illustrated several books. And after George III’s descent into madness, she purchased her own cottage at Windsor and gardened and painted to her heart’s content.

What did not content her was her single status. As he did for her sisters, George refused all suitors for Elizabeth, who longed for a husband and children. In 1808, the exiled Duc d’Orleans offered for her hand—a match she was eager to agree to, while there was still a possibility she could have children—but the queen made it abundantly clear that she would never allow her daughter to marry a Catholic. And so poor Elizabeth painted and drew and gardened, helped spoil her eldest brother’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, and grew ever stouter.

And then, much to her surprise, in 1818, she received a proposal. Frederick, the Hereditary Prince of the tiny German principality of Hesse-Homburg, wrote asking for her hand. It wasn’t a romantic proposal—the prospective bride was 48,  and he himself was a not-very-cultured military man of 49 with an extensive beard who smoked like a chimney. But Elizabeth would finally have a husband and a home of her own, and the chance to escape from under her mother’s thumb, for the queen had grown difficult with age, while Frederick would get the prestige of a British princess as his wife, not to mention her dowry, much needed in his impoverished state. The Prince Regent gave his blessing, and the queen, after doing her best to put the kibosh on the marriage, finally assented. And so Elizabeth and her husband, whom she nicknamed Bluff, were married at the Queen’s House on April 7. After a honeymoon on the Sussex coast, they left for Bluff’s home near Frankfurt—and a surprisingly warm and harmonious marriage. Elizabeth embraced her tiny new country and her husband’s family—he had several brothers—and jumped into renovating the family palace in Bad Homburg. The Prince’s father died in 1820, and so Bluff and Elizabeth became Landgrave and Landgravine.

Unfortunately, their time together was not long. Bluff died in 1829, leaving Elizabeth a widow. She remained dedicated to her adopted country, though, partnering with the new landgrave (Bluff's next youngest brother, Louis, with who she was on the best of terms) to build a spa at Bad Homberg to bring in tourism revenue; she also shared his interest in improving the principality’s schools. When Louis died in 1839, the heart seemed to go out of her; the next of Bluff's brothers to inherit, Phillip, didn't share Bluff and Louis’s interest in bettering his country. She died early in 1840, age 69, and is buried in Homberg

1810, What a Year It Was: the (Final) Madness of King George

We’ve talked about the some of the most noteworthy public events of 1810, from literary to sporting to true crime...but perhaps the most momentous was what happened in its final months: the descent of George III into permanent debilitation.

Everyone’s heard of “mad King George”, and doctors and medical historians have derived endless hours of diversion from trying to figure out just what it was that the poor man suffered from. The most recent thinking seems to be that he was indeed suffering from some form of mental illness, perhaps aggravated by arsenic poisoning (arsenic was commonly used in medical treatments of the day) and not porphyria, a metabolic disease. No matter the cause, the last months of 1810 would also be his last months as reigning monarch.

First, a little history: the king’s first confirmed demonstration of mental illness began in the fall of 1788, when various physical symptoms (rash, rheumatic pains, gastric distress, and fever) manifested, quickly followed by delirium, hysteria, and mania. He talked for hours on end, making grandiose, delusional plans and pronouncements until he was out of breath and foaming at the mouth. Though his physical symptoms eased, his behavioral ones did not (on November 17 he talked for nineteen straight hours), and between his ministers and his family, plans were made for a regency to rule in his stead...a plan that fell through when, early in the new year, he began to recover and was able by March to call himself mostly recovered.  He seems to have suffered a brief relapse in 1794 (though not as severe as the 1788 illness) and again in 1801. After that point, his condition seems to have remained highly fragile, with more relapses and recoveries occurring over the next few years.

By October 1810, George III was 72 years old and suffering from cataracts and painful rheumatism. He’d been devastated by the deaths of two of his children in the 1780s, while they were quite young. But now it appeared that he would be facing the death of an adult child—one whose very existence had helped him over those earlier losses.  Princess Amelia, his youngest daughter, had been a semi-invalid for years, probably suffering from tuberculosis, and by this time, was on death’s doorstep. The king’s poor eyesight had perhaps cushioned him somewhat from the truth—he could hardly see how ill she was—but toward the end even that could not shield him from the reality of his daughter’s condition. As her life ebbed, his old, familiar symptoms began to reappear: nervousness and excitability, over-talkativeness, sleeplessness. In her last week of life, he too slipped away into a twilight world, and was too ill to comprehend that Amelia was dead.

The king had realized, early on, that he was in for another period of illness, and instructed his physicians that he was not to be entrusted to any “medical man specially engaged in the department of insanity,” but the doctor who had looked after him in earlier periods, Robert Willis, was brought in to consult. Poor George had days when he seemed almost normal over the course of November and December, but enough bad days encouraged the revival of the Regency bill that had first been drafted (and nearly passed by Parliament) back in 1789.  Everyone—his family, servants, and ministers—waited with bated breath to see what would happen. More lucid days in January occurred, but while there were hopes that he would once again recover, the Regency bill was voted on and passed Parliament, with George’s knowledge, at the end of the month, and Prince George became Regent with limited powers, to be reviewed in one year’s time (presumably in case the king recovered.)

However, it became clear through the spring that recovery was unlikely: while he still had periods of lucidity, the king slipped inexorably into his delusional world, talking and giving commands to people who weren’t there, and seemed to forget his affection for his family. The lucid periods became fewer, and in the fall it was expected that at the one-year anniversary of the Regency Act in January 1812, the regency would be made permanent. Poor King George would hang on for another eight years, growing blinder and sicker, until his death in 1820.

The Children of George III: Augusta

A sister (finally!) for the Princess Royal joined the royal nurseries at Buckingham House on November 8, 1768 in the form of Princess Augusta Sophia, much to the King and Queen’s pleasure.

By all accounts Augusta was a shy child; all the royal children lived sequestered lives, interacting only with members of the royal household. She (and in time her younger sister Elizabeth, to whom she would be close) shared their elder sister’s education at their mother’s knee, studying both academic and more “womanly” accomplishments—lessons which Augusta sometimes shirked in order to keep up a lively correspondence with her elder brothers, whom she dearly loved.  Like the Princess Royal, as she came to adulthood Augusta was a victim both of the political circumstances of the time and of her father’s unwillingness to lose any of his daughters to a foreign marriage. Augusta, who was reckoned quite good-looking by all accounts (her portraits are all charming) received proposals from both the King of Denmark and the Prince of Sweden—both of whom were rejected.

In 1799, when Augusta was 31, the King appointed a new aide-de-camp, an Anglo-Irish general who had served under Augusta’s brother the Duke of York. General Sir Brent Spencer made a strong impression not only on the king, but on his daughter. They seem to have fallen thoroughly in love; in fact, Spencer broke off his engagement to another young woman that summer. Over the next several years they maintained their affection, a period in which Spencer served under fire with high distinction in several military campaigns (and drove poor Augusta mad with worry.) When the king made his final descent into incapacity, Augusta evidently had very serious discussions with her big brother, the Prince Regent, as to whether she and Spencer might be able to contract a “private marriage.”

Unfortunately, the years of dealing with the King’s controlling behavior and his erratic health had soured the temper of the Queen, who continued to cling to her unmarried daughters even while behaving with capricious coldness to them; though legally Augusta could have received her brother's permission to marry, her filial feelings toward the Queen probably made her decide against such a course. Nevertheless, rumors abounded that they had indeed married, and on his death in 1828 Spencer was holding a miniature of Augusta.

And so Augusta lived her quiet life—she was a noted gardener in particular—much loved by all her siblings. She kept up that correspondence with them that she'd begun in childhood as well as with other friends (many former members of the royal household) that show her to have had a lively intelligence and a clear-eyed but kindly appreciation of their faults and foibles. She remained on good terms with Prinny when he became king, and was a favorite of William and his queen Adelaide.  She died in 1840 at the age of 71, a few months after attending the wedding of her beloved niece, Victoria, who seems to also have regarded her aunt with great affection.

The Children of George III: Edward

I’m rather glad, for Queen Charlotte’s sake, that she finally got her baby girl in September of1766...because a year later, on November 2, 1767, yet another boy would be arriving in the nursery at Buckingham House. The new baby happened to arrive while his papa’s favorite brother, Edward, Duke of York, was awaiting burial just a short distance away at St. James’s Palace...so it seemed natural to name this newcomer after his late uncle, Edward.

Though he was fond of telling acquaintances later in life about how he’d been destined from birth to lead a life of gloom and struggle, Edward's first seventeen years seem remarkably gloom- and struggle-free. Just as the King’s two eldest sons were paired together, so Edward and his brother William would be: Edward was sent from the nursery at age nine to live with William in a pleasant house on Kew Green, and after William went to sea, Edward had the house and staff and a generous housekeeping budget to himself.

All that changed when he was sent to Germany in 1785 to start his education as a soldier. His governor, a Baron Wangenheim, was evidently a bit of a hard case, and Edward, himself more than a little spoiled, chafed under his tutelage—enough that finally, after receiving his first commission in Geneva, he bolted back to England without leave in early 1790. His highly annoyed father sent him to Gibraltar in disgrace, but at least he’d rid himself of the Baron...and acquired a “chère amie” in the form of a Madame de Saint-Laurent, who would remain faithfully with him for the next twenty-eight years until...but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Edward did not make himself loved in Gibraltar; he was a stickler for discipline (thanks to his training under Wangenheim, probably) and ferociously extravagant. The soldiers and shopkeepers of the Rock breathed a sigh of relief when he was sent next to Canada, where he would remain for the next nine years, once again deeply unpopular with the army but wildly popular socially. He was briefly stationed in the West Indies, then sent back to Canada, then back to Gibraltar in 1802 as its governor. But he lasted just a year before being recalled to England because his harsh discipline sparked a mutiny among his troops. His recall home pretty much ended his military career, though he retained some honorary military positions and honors (and the governorship of Gibraltar, though he never set foot there again.)

The next decade and a half were spent in his various houses (he seemed to regard four as the minimum he required) in England with Madame de Saint-Laurent while Edward’s debts only grew—he still hadn’t unlearned his habit of extravagance. He might well have lived out his life in this fashion, spending money and taking an interest in science and political theory, but the unexpected death in childbirth of his niece, Princess Charlotte, in 1817 precipitated him into the great matrimonial race of1818, when the sons of George III scrambled to find wives in order to provide a legitimate heir for the next generation. Edward’s choice landed on Victoire of Leiningen, the widowed sister of Charlotte’s husband Leopold; Edward proposed and was accepted...and according to legend, let his chère amie Madame Saint-Laurent find out about his upcoming marriage by reading about it in the newspaper. (She retired to a convent after their parting.)

Edward settled contently with his new bride at her home in Amorbach, where the cost of living was cheaper than in England, spending money he didn’t have on improvements to the ducal manor. But when Victoire became pregnant, Edward resolved that his child, a potential heir to the throne, should be born on English soil, and accordingly, when Victoire was seven months pregnant, Edward ordered an expensive traveling coach and they trundled across Europe and back to England (despite big brother Prinny telling them not to.) Edward’s daughter was born in May and christened Alexandrina Victoria. He was delighted with the sturdy baby and not at all disappointed in her gender; doubtless he assumed a brother or two would eventually join her in the nursery.

But little Drina would have no further brothers and sisters; when she was but eight months old and the family visiting the Devon coast, her papa caught a cold...and though he'd often declared his health vastly superior to that of his brothers and that he'd survive them all, his cold devolved into pneumonia...and within a few days, in January 1820, he was dead. Though Victoria would later idolize her late father (note the miniature of him she's clutching in the picture at right by Henry Bone), he doesn't seem to have endeared himself to many in his lifetime...and yet, you can't think too badly of a man who remained so faithful to his mistress for so many years.

The Children of George III: The Princess Royal

After the birth of three bouncing boys in four years, George III and his consort, Charlotte, were more than ready for a daughter when the Queen again found herself pregnant in 1766. Their hopes were realized on September 29 with the birth of Charlotte Augusta Matilda, who was immediately declared Princess Royal by her delighted papa. It is a style bestowed on the eldest daughter of a reigning monarch—and Royal more or less became her nickname from then on. It was an appropriate name: she would in time be the eldest of six sisters, not to mention six other younger brothers.

Royal and her two next sisters, Augusta and Elizabeth, were raised more or less at their mother’s knee; the Queen involved herself in all aspects of their education, which was rigorous but also emphasized the arts and “womanly” accomplishments such as sewing, painting, and other handiwork. Royal in particular was carefully educated in history and languages, for she was destined to make a very grand European match one day—or so it was planned.

By the time Royal was of marriageable age, however, Europe was a very different place: unrest in France was brewing, unsettling most of Europe...and in 1788, George III suffered from his first attack of “madness,” which lasted a year and changed the dynamics of the family forever. The Queen clung to her daughters, not wishing to lose them to foreign marriages; the King himself, in fragile health, also was reluctant to let them marry, possibly influenced by the terrible experience of his own younger sister’s marriage to the King of Denmark.  So Royal languished, longing for a home of her own; she and the Queen did not bring out the best in each other, and tempers grew short as the Queen continued to treat her grown daughters like children and the King to refuse offers of marriage.

But in 1797, after nearly two years of backing-and-forthing, the King finally consented to allow Royal to marry. Her groom was the widowed Hereditary Prince Frederick of Württemberg, heir to the reigning Duke of Württemberg; though he was enormously fat, rumored to be bad-tempered, and had a previous marriage which had ended mysteriously, Royal was delighted to finally be escaping. Their wedding was in May, and in June the couple left for the continent.

By August, Royal was delighted to write home that she was pregnant; in addition, her father-in-law’s death a few months later made her and her new husband the Duke and Duchess of Württemburg. But a quiet life was not to be theirs: war between France and Austria often overspilled into the duchy, and then Royal’s child, a daughter, was born dead. She had no more children, but became a very loved step-mother to the Duke’s children and indeed was very popular among her new subjects.

In 1800, Württemburg was overrun by the French, and Royal and her new family fled to Austria. The Duke chose to negotiate with Napoleon, and in time was reinstated as Elector of Württemburg and then in 1806 as King, joining the Confederation of the Rhine. Royal’s step-daughter Catharina was married to Napoleon’s brother Jerome. Poor Royal was now officially the enemy of her birth country, which she felt deeply. So it was probably much to her relief that the Duke switched sides again in 1813, and rejoined the Allies. After Napoleon’s fall he was re-confirmed as king of his enlarged kingdom but did not have long to enjoy his position; he died in 1816, leaving Royal a very wealthy widow thanks to her large dowry.

Royal professed herself heartbroken, but her family wondered; rumors over the years of his abusive treatment of her had reached them even during the war years. But she settled into a comfortable widowhood, being very attached to her step-grandchildren, two of whom she was raising, and growing so fat that she was forced to adopt the use of a Bath chair to get around. Various brothers and sisters came to stay with her, and finally, in 1827, she herself returned for a visit to England, thirty years after she'd left it. Her reunion with her remaining siblings and the chance to meet their children, among them Princess Victoria, was on the whole a happy one...and didn’t take place too soon, for growing ill-health was to catch up with her; she died in 1828, and was buried next to her lost daughter.

Note: for anyone interested in Royal and her sisters, I can't recommend highly enough Flora Fraser's excellent group biography, Princesses: the Six Daughters of George III--a highly readable and sympathetic view of these quintessential "poor little rich girls."

1810, What a Year It Was, Part 4: Poor Princess Amelia

1810 was not a good year for Britain’s royal family. As we saw in this post last year, the Duke of Cumberland came close to losing his life in May; in November his youngest sister Princess Amelia would lose hers...with far-reaching effects.

Amelia was the fifteenth and last child of George III and Queen Charlotte, born August 7, 1783, just as the American Revolution was coming to a close and just a few months after the death of her brother Octavius, who had been the apple of his father’s eye. Amelia (named after the king’s aunt) came to somewhat take Octavius’s place; she was by all accounts a charming, beautiful child, adored by all her older siblings.

Amelia grew up mostly in the company of her elder sisters Mary and Sophia, grouped in a triad as were her eldest three sisters, Charlotte, Augusta, and Elizabeth. They received the what seems to have been a watered-down, less intellectual version of the education their elder sisters had received, and were much less directly supervised by the Queen than their elders had been.

By her mid-teens, Amelia was a tall, buxom, handsome young woman...but her handsome, sturdy appearance was misleading. In the summer of her fifteenth year, she was stricken with an inflamed knee that kept her partially bed-ridden through Christmas. Although she apparently healed, the likelihood is that this illness was the first manifestation of tuberculosis.

Amelia’s life continued its sheltered path, like that of all her sisters...until she fell in love, at eighteen, with one of her father’s equerries, the Honourable Charles Fitzroy. He was more than twenty years her senior, but her affections seem to have been returned. Amelia dreamed of marrying her Charles, but of course this was quite impossible...but that didn’t stop her from carrying on a passionate correspondence with him, holding hands with him under the card table and sneaking whatever private moments they could, or ordering silver engraved with their initials for the home she hoped to have with him someday. She kept her hopes up by planning for her 25^th birthday, for according to the Royal Marriages Act, members of the royal family could marry at that age without the king’s permission, so long as they gave Parliament a year’s notice of their intentions. But by that time, the King’s health, both mental and physical, had become sufficiently precarious that she knew she could never go through with it lest the shock destroy him.

Moreover, Amelia’s health remained difficult, necessitating frequent visits to the seaside to recover. By her mid-twenties, royal physicians realized that the princess was indeed consumptive...and by 1809, she was almost incapacitated by a terrible pain in her side, which her doctors tried to cure by inserting a drainage tube.  At the beginning of the new year she was afflicted with a painful skin infection, erysipelas, which just made matters worse. It was clear that Amelia was not long for the world; she made a will, leaving all her worldly goods to her beloved Charles Fitzroy. In September 1810 she begged her physician, Sir Henry Halford, to ask the king if she could be allowed to marry Fitzroy. Halford refused to intercede...and the poor princess continued to decline, ravaged by a further outbreak of erysipelas. Her elder sister (and devoted nurse) Augusta did manage to sneak Fitzroy in for a visit sometime in October, when it was clear that the end was coming.

But Amelia wasn’t the only member of the royal family whose health was of concern. The king, now nearly blind, had been giving his ministers and courtiers great cause for worry, for symptoms of the fits of madness he’d suffered in previous years seemed to be returning. When poor Amelia breathed her last on November 2, the loss of this beloved daughter seemed to provide the final push...and by January, the king would be declared incompetent and a regency declared.

The Children of George III: William, Duke of Clarence (and later King William IV)

Poor Prince William Henry, third child (and third son) of George III. A girl was supposed to make her way into the world on August 21, 1765 at  Buckingham House—or so his parents had hoped. After two bouncing boys, they were ready for a sweet little daughter to join their nursery.

Not this time.

As George was already heir to the throne and Frederick slated for the army, it was decided that William should make the navy his career, so at 13 he was sent off to be a midshipman—and actually functioned as one, doing the same work as his fellows, though on any shore visits he was generally received as the King’s son. He visited New York during the American Revolution (where a kidnapping plot approved by Washington was discussed but not carried out), and over the course of his active naval career also visited the Caribbean and Canada on multiple occasions. A good friend of Admiral Nelson, he loved the naval life and was a good sailor, if not a terribly bright officer, bur his active duty ended upon his being made Duke of Clarence at 23. William would have liked to settle down and marry—he was one of the most domesticated of George III’s sons, unlike his two elder brothers—but didn’t particularly wish to marry a foreign princess. So he compromised, wooing and winning the favor of one of the most popular comedic actresses of the day, Dorothea Jordan—and spent the next twenty years with her in non-wedded bliss, eventually raising a family of ten children with her.

Those twenty years were also spent in a bit of a funk; William constantly offered his services to both the Navy and as a political figure, and was consistently refused. In many ways he was his own worst enemy, because he simply couldn’t shut up—while his basic views on a topic might be sound, he talked so much nonsense around it that any meaning was lost. So he puttered around his estate at Bushey while Mrs. Jordan became the bread-winner, and so things went—until the  problem of the lack of the next generation of legitimate heirs to the throne began to loom very large indeed. William was next in line after his two elder brothers, and of those two brothers, only one had a child capable of inheriting the throne. So William parted (unhappily) with Mrs. Jordan and went in search of a wife—preferably a wealthy one. The death of the Prince Regent’s daughter, Charlotte, sent him into high gear, and eventually he was accepted (after being turned down by others) by Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, twenty-seven years William’s junior. But to everyone’s surprise, they had a happy marriage, though neither of their children lived more than a few months.

William became king upon his elder brother’s death in 1830; his reign is notable chiefly for the passage of the Reform Act of 1832, which cleaned up the rotten and pocket boroughs and more fairly apportioned representation across the population, and for the abolition of slavery through British territory. And of course, he’s known for staying alive long enough to hand the throne directly to his niece, who became Queen Victoria in 1837.

The Children of George III: The noble Duke of York

Do you remember that rhyme about the noble Duke of York and his ten thousand men, marching up to the top of a hill and marching down again? More about that shortly. ☺

The second child and second son of George and Charlotte was born a year and a day after his elder brother George, on August 16, 1763, and unusually for royalty was given just one name—Frederick. The brothers were to remain fast friends their entire lives, and were raised almost as twins and educated by the same tutors; but from an early age young Fred manifested an interest in all things military which would lead his father in 1780 to send the boy off to Germany, to receive a military education from his uncle the Duke of Brunswick, regarded as the finest soldier in Europe. He didn’t return to England until almost seven years had passed, and amazingly, much of the correspondence between him and his family has been reserved, giving us a picture of a young man whose passion for the military was probably somewhat greater than his ability...but who retained a fundamental kindness and sweetness of character despite years of living amongst the less-than-kind-and-sweet royal military caste of the continent.

After a few years of riotous living in England (following in his elder brother’s footsteps once again, much to their father’s dismay) Frederick proposed to a girl he’d met during his years on the continent, Frederica of Prussia, great-niece of Frederick the Great. It wasn't a love match, and the fact that they had no children allowed them to drift apart, but they always remained good and loyal friends and Frederick visited her frequently at the country estate she preferred to live at, Oatlands, where she was able to indulge her extreme fondness for dogs and other animals. Her husband, in the meanwhile, continued his military career; though Frederick tried, he ended up doing poorly not through incompetence but through bad luck and unreliable allies (the “noble Duke of York” rhyme might have come about from his participation in the disastrous Flanders Campaign against France in 1793-94.) A further campaign in 1799, a joint invasion of Holland with the Russians, also ended badly.

After that, Frederick retired to England to take a desk job back home as Commander-in-Chief...and finally came into his own. His bad experiences as a field commander with the woefully undersupplied and inadequately trained British army led him to a program of military infrastructure building: among other things he strongly supported the establishment of the military college at Sandhurst to train officers and encouraged promotion by merit, not birth or wealth. This work made possible the success of the Peninsular Campaign, driving Napoleon out of the Iberian peninsula, and laid the foundation for the future British Empire’s military might.

A scandal in 1809 involving the sale of officers’ commissions by the Duke's mistress Mary Ann Clark, supposedly with his tacit permission—a scandal that seems to have been constructed by poor Fred’s political opponents—led to his resignation as C-in-C, though the uncovering of the plot came to light soon after, and he was reinstated by his brother, now the Prince Regent, in 1811. Fortunately, the rest of his life went on quietly—he did his job, continued to amiably carouse and gamble away vast amounts of money, and remained a fundamentally nice guy. To Prinny’s enormous sadness his favorite brother died in 1827.