The Sixth Wife: The Story of Katherine Parr
Page 34
Mama loved drama and although at that time I wept with her I did wonder afterward whether she really did feel so strongly about his death. She was one who liked to have her own way, although she did bend a little to Sir John Conroy. I was told that Sir John looked something like my father, so perhaps that was one of the reasons why she thought so highly of him.
Mama went on to tell me how she was left bereft…no husband, very little money, in a strange land where she could scarcely speak the language.
“I could hope for little help from your father’s family,” she said with that snort of contempt she often used when speaking of them. “True, the miserly Parliament had granted me six thousand pounds a year in the event of my widowhood. I daresay when they granted me that—it was a year before you were born—they had thought they would not have to pay it for a long time.”
“Mama,” I said. “They did give you our home in Kensington Palace.”
“A few miserable rooms!” she retorted. “And there I was…with so little and all your father’s debts on my shoulders. I shall of course do my very best to settle them … in time.”
That was very honorable of her, I thought. She was very good, I was sure; but I did wish she was not so venomous toward my father’s family.
“I had thought there was only one thing for us,” she had gone on, “and that was to go back to Germany, but your dear Uncle Leopold was against that. He said, ‘In view of her prospects the child must stay in England. She must speak English. She must be English. There must be no trace of anything else. The people here like their own kind.’ And so I stayed here and dear Leopold…he gave up so much to stay with us! What I should have done without him I cannot imagine.”
“Dear dear Uncle Leopold,” I murmured.
“He is wonderful. You are fortunate indeed to have such an uncle and such a mother to care for you. True, you are fatherless, but you have had so much to make up for that.”
I replied fervently that I had, but I was thinking of Uncle Leopold rather than my mother, for I was just moving into that state when I was beginning to draw away from her.
“He is so careful of both you and your dear cousin Albert, who has the same reason to be grateful to him as you have. He is three months younger than you so you could say that you are of an age.”
“I am hoping one day I shall meet Albert.”
“I am sure your Uncle Leopold, who so likes to please you as well as instruct you, will arrange a meeting one day.”
“That will be wonderful.” I spoke with honest fervor, but I could not know then how wonderful it was going to prove to be.
Of course Uncle Leopold was right. And because we had not enough money to make the journey from Sidmouth, he paid for our transport to Kensington Palace and there we remained for some years to come.
It appeared that my father had appointed Sir John Conroy as one of the executors of his will and that seemed to me, as I grew older, not a very good choice. My mother did not share that opinion, but it was very repugnant to me that Sir John should actually live in our household.
My mother relied on him a great deal. She was always saying that she had few friends, but while she had Uncle Leopold and Sir John Conroy she felt ready to face the hostile country in which—on my account—she was forced to live.
There were some members of my father’s family who tried to be friends. There were my two aunts, Princess Sophia and the Duchess of Gloucester. They were old then. Sophia had never married but long ago she had been at the center of a scandal. A certain General Garth had fallen in love with her and she with him. The consequences were grave and Sophia had to be hustled out of the palace to give birth to a child. The voluminous skirts proved useful and her sisters helped to smuggle her to Weymouth where she was delivered of a boy. Sophia was unrepentant; she had loved the general and she loved her son, who still came to see her. The children of George III had been brought up so oddly that they all seemed to be involved in scandalous situations. My grandfather had refused to allow any of his girls to marry. He had loved them dearly… too dearly. Poor Grandpapa! He must have been mad for a long time before people realized it. Well, Sophia offered friendship to my mother and so did Aunt Mary of Gloucester, who had married Silly Billy Gloucester late in life.
Another one who would have been kind to her was Adelaide, at that time Duchess of Clarence; but my mother regarded the Clarences as the enemy and was very suspicious of Adelaide who, when she was Queen, I came to know as one of the kindest ladies it had ever been my good fortune to meet. But there was no overcoming Mama’s prejudices. So she need not have been so entirely without friends as she liked to believe herself to be.
Nine days after my father’s death, there occurred another one of the greatest importance.
Poor Grandpapa, blind and mad, passed away; and the Prince Regent became King George IV.
Also by Jean Plaidy
Copyright © 1953, 1969 by Jean Plaidy
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2005 by Three Rivers Press,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division
of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint
of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
www.crownpublishing.com
Originally published in Great Britain by Robert Hale, London, in 1953
and subsequently in the United States by Putnam, New York, in 1969.
THREE RIVERS PRESS is a registered trademark and
the Three Rivers Press colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plaidy, Jean, 1906–
The sixth wife: the wives of Henry VIII/Jean Plaidy.
1. Katharine Parr, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King of England,
1512–1548—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History—Henry VIII,
1509–1547—Fiction. 3. Queens—Great Britain—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6015.I3S584 2005
823. 914—dc22
2004028008
eISBN: 978-0-307-49788-8
v3.0_r2