Miss Prince
(1818-1895)
16 August 1862
Volume 9, page 78, sitting number 11,310.
[The sitter is identified only as 'Miss Prince' in the Silvy daybooks, but given the context of the album in which the portrait was found, this is almost certainly the step-daughter of Henry Charles Hoare, and the half-sister of Frances Annette Hoare, whose portrait is opposite.]
Born in Westminster on 15 March 1818, Mary Ann Caroline Prince was the daughter of Anne Penelope née Ainslie and her first husband, Captain John Prince. Her parents’ marriage took place on 30 April 1817.
‘On Wednesday last, at Elsham, in Lincolnshire, Captain Prince, of the Coldstream Guards, son of Lieutenant-General Prince, [married] Anne Penelope, youngest daughter of the late General Ainslie’ (Morning Chronicle, 6 May 1817).
Captain John Prince died, aged 27, on 2 January 1818 in Hanover Street, Mayfair, two months before the birth of his daughter.
On 6 October 1821 his widow married secondly Henry Charles Hoare, son of Sir Henry Hugh Hoare, 3rd baronet. This second marriage produced four daughters and one son.
Mary Ann Caroline Prince appears on the 1851 census, aged 32, living with mother and step-father and her half-siblings at Wavendon House in Buckinghamshire.
She never married. When the census was taken in 1891 she was living with her half-sister Frances Annette Hoare at 35 Charles Street in Mayfair. She died there, aged 77, in 1895.
‘PRINCE — On the 29th ult., at her residence, 35, Charles-street, Berkeley-square, Mary Ann Caroline Prince, only child of the late Captain John Prince, Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, and Anne Penelope, his wife, in the seventy-eighth year of her age. No flowers, by request’ (Morning Post, 4 July 1895).
‘The will (dated July 27, 1893), with two codicils (dated January 4 and November, 1894) of Miss Mary Ann Caroline Prince, formerly of 9, St James’s-square, who died on June 29, was proved on August 8 by Henry Gerard Philip Hoare and Charles Ranken Vickerman Longbourne, the surviving executors, the value of the personal estate amounting to £26,035. The testatrix bequeaths £1000 to the Rev. John Cox Edghill, D.D., Chaplain-General to H.M. forces, […] to apply the same in building Church of England soldiers’ and chaplains’ rooms in connection with St George’s Church, Stanhope Lane, Aldershot, or if the same shall have been built at her death, in building similar rooms at some other garrison; £200 to the Soldiers’ Daughters’ Home, Hampstead; £100 to the Guards Industrial House, Francis-street, Vauxhall Bridge Road; her furniture and effects to her half-sister, Frances Annette Hoare; her share and interest in 35, Charles Street, to her said sister for life, and then to her half-brother, Sir Henry Ainslie Hoare for life; and other legacies. The residue of her real and personal estate she leaves upon trust for her said half-sister for life, then to pay £100 each to the Community Fund of the Clewer House of Mercy and the Gordon Boys’ Home; £500 each to the Home of the Sisters of Charity and Servants of the Poor (Bedminster), the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, and the Indian Mission of St John the Evangelist (Cowley, Oxon), and some further legacies’ (York Herald, 6 September 1895).
[From an album compiled by Lady Augusta Frances Hoare, wife of Sir Henry Ainslie Hoare, 5th Baronet.]