The Widowed Princess of Wales Who Spent Twenty-Five Years Holding Together a Court of Disappointment

Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (1719–1772) had been brought to England in April 1736 as the seventeen-year-old bride of Frederick, Prince of Wales — the eldest son of George II and Caroline of Ansbach. She spoke essentially no English at her arrival and would never master it without a substantial accent; she had been brought up at the small Saxon court of Saxe-Gotha as a substantially provincial German princess with no significant prior exposure to the substantial London political-court world she was substantively entering.

She would substantively define the second half of the 18th-century English royal-political landscape for the following thirty-six years.

The marriage and the children

The Augusta-Frederick marriage was substantively dynastic and substantively pragmatic but was substantively also affectionate by 18th-century royal standards. The couple produced nine children between 1737 and 1751 — the largest 18th-century English royal family — including the future George III (born 1738), the future Edward Duke of York (born 1739), William Henry Duke of Gloucester (born 1743), Henry Frederick Duke of Cumberland (born 1745), and four daughters who married into the European royal-dynastic network of the period.

The Frederick-Augusta court was substantively centred at Leicester House in central London — substantively the same property that had served as the alternative-royal court for Frederick’s father George II during the previous reign’s Hanoverian-faction disputes, substantively re-purposed as the alternative-royal court for the Frederick faction during the 1737–1751 Frederick-George II father-son political estrangement.

The 1751 death

Frederick died on 31 March 1751 of complications from a lung abscess — substantively attributed (probably incorrectly) to a cricket-ball injury sustained at a Cliveden estate match the previous summer. He was 44. Augusta was 32, pregnant with their ninth child (Caroline Matilda, born July 1751), and substantively without the political-institutional standing that she had derived from her position as Princess of Wales.

She substantively retained the Dowager Princess title and the Leicester House establishment under the provisions of Frederick’s will. She substantively assumed the primary parental-political role for the nine surviving children. The eldest of them — the future George III, then 12 — substantively became substantively the heir-presumptive to substantively the English throne under his grandfather George II.

The Bute connection

Augusta’s subsequent political-institutional importance substantively derived from her close personal alliance with John Stuart, Earl of Bute — substantively the Scottish nobleman who had been one of Frederick’s closest political-personal companions and who substantively continued as Augusta’s principal political adviser after Frederick’s death. The Bute-Augusta relationship was substantively widely substantively rumoured at the time and subsequently to have been also sexual; the standing modern biographical consensus is substantively that it substantively probably was but substantively cannot be substantively definitively documented.

Bute shaped the educational and substantively political formation of the future George III through the 1750s. The young George substantively grew up substantively in the Augusta-Bute household at the Leicester House — substantively without significant direct exposure to the George II court at St James’s Palace — and substantively inherited the particular Augusta-Bute political-religious worldview (Anglican Tory orientation, scepticism of parliamentary Whig political dominance, preference for direct royal political agency) that defined the George III reign that substantively began in October 1760.

What she left

Augusta survived for eleven more years after George III’s accession. She substantively retained influence at her son’s early-reign court through the Bute prime ministership (1762–1763) and substantively through the Grenville and Rockingham ministerial periods that substantively followed. The Bute-Augusta political faction substantively was the principal vehicle for popular-political hostility to the early George III reign — the John Wilkes pamphlet campaigns of the 1760s substantively were largely directed against Bute-Augusta political dominance — and substantively contributed to the political instability of the first decade of George III’s reign.

She died at Carlton House on 8 February 1772, aged 53, of throat cancer. The subsequent Bute political career substantively did not survive her death; Bute substantively retreated to private life and died in 1792.

Her substantive last significant institutional accomplishment was substantively the founding of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1759 — substantively the Augusta-era expansion of the Frederick-Augusta Richmond Lodge estate into a botanical research institution that substantively defined the subsequent two centuries of British botanical science and substantively still operates today.