Jean Plaidy - The Sixth Wife: The Story of Katherine Parr

“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

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