Princess Sophia of Gloucester
British princess
Princess Sophia of Gloucester (Sophia Matilda; 29 May 1773 – 29 November 1844) was a great-granddaughter of King George II of Great Britain and niece of King George III.
Life
Princess Sophia was born in Grosvenor Street, Mayfair. Her father was Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, the third son of The Prince Frederick, Prince of Wales. Her mother, the Duchess of Gloucester and Edinburgh, born Maria Walpole, was the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole.
She was privately baptized in a drawing room at her parents' home in Mayfair, Gloucester House, on 26 June 1773, by Charles Moss, Bishop of St David's. She had three godparents: the Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn, her paternal uncle; the Duchess of Cumberland and Strathearn, her aunt by marriage; and the Queen of Denmark and Norway, her paternal aunt, who was represented by a proxy. George III had been asked to stand as godfather, but he declined, upset by his brother's marriage to Maria Walpole, a commoner.
Sophia was considered as a potential bride for her first cousin Prince William, Duke of Clarence and St Andrews (who later ruled as King William IV), but she expressed no enthusiasm for the match.
She lived at Gloucester Lodge on the Gloucester Road from about 1805 and remained there after her mother's death in 1807, but by 1809 she had sold the villa to George Canning. She also lived at New Lodge in Winkfield, near Windsor in Berkshire.
In 1811, Sophia visited the Royal Yacht Squadron, at Northwood on the Isle of Wight with her brother the Duke of Gloucester: the Gloucester Hotel, by the Parade, was named in their honour.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q468715. VIAF identifies the subject as 91088783. The Library of Congress control number is nb2009016288. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1773, 1844, 1805 and 1807.
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This entry incorporates text from “Princess Sophia of Gloucester” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.