She was a most remarkable woman, with a most powerful, energetic, almost masculine mind, accompanied with great tenderness of heart and extreme love for Nature.
She was adored by her children, particularly by her sons, King Leopold of Belgium being her great favourite. She had fine and most expressive blue eyes, with the marked features and long nose inherited
by most of her children and grandchildren. Both Prince Albert and his brother were exceedingly attached to their grandmother and they lived much with her in their younger days, as Queen Victoria recollected in "The Early Years of the Prince Consort".
Augusta was a daughter of the Count of Reuss-Ebersdorf, a family in which all males bore the name of Heinrich and, as counts, were inferior in rank to the ducal house of Saxony. She married Franz, Duke
of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, in 1777 when the Emperor had installed a Debt and Administrative Commission or receivership because of the virtual bankruptcy of the Duchy of Coburg. Duchess Augusta's parents were "Herrnhuter". Her father's aunt Erdmutha Dorothea had married Nicholas
Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf, on whose estate at Herrnhut the Moravians found sanctuary and organized their missionary activity from there to all continents, while Countess Erdmutha, who administered the estate in her husband's frequent missionary absences, also composed hymns.

This background accounted for Duchess Augusta's strong piety and often narrow, moral views which she imparted in large measure, like her physical features, to Prince Albert. Her experiences in the Napoleonic period imbued her with strong anti-French resentments. She gave expression to these in her attitude to Madame Panam, her son Ernst I's French mistress of Greek origin, with disastrous results for him.
The Duchess, widowed in 1806, lived at Ketschendorf near Coburg. She visited her son Leopold at Claremont in 1825. Queen Victoria met her then and remembered her grandmother clearly.
 

Source: "The Prince Consort", Godfrey and Margaret Scheele.