Non-fiction (1)

Extract from  'The Prince's Thorn'

Introduction

In the twilight, with a cold October breeze rattling the shutters and empty rooms echoing the rap of her heels, Louise felt the ghosts begin to gather. Memories came crowding, of a baby’s cries in the nursery, of a young husband’s warmth and laughter, of servants squabbling in the kitchen, and many lonely evenings spent poring by lamplight over account books. Eighteen years...
      All was ended now, the farm stock and equipment knocked down to the highest bidder. Most of the household furniture too. The few things she was keeping had gone to temporary storage in King’s Lynn. Now it was time to say goodbye. Mindful of her status as a gentlewoman, she walked with conscious dignity down the familiar stairs -- one last, painfully final, time.
      In the hallway, her housekeeper Lucy Sparrow wept softly into a damp handkerchief, blotting at her eyes and her nose, murmuring, ‘Oh, ma’am, it’s so cruel. So unfair!’ Louise made no reply. She needed no reminding of the villainy that had brought her to this pass.
      Appleton House was filling with shadows. Beyond the open front door the carriage waited, its driver slumped in his seat behind a pair of tail-swishing horses. On that very spot the Princess Alexandra had sat at the reins of her dainty pony-carriage, sending word that she was so sorry, so very sorry to see her friend Mrs Cresswell leave the home she loved. That memory would provide one of the few bright moments in all this dreary desolation.
      She heard the door close behind her, a dull thud accompanied by another sob from Lucy Sparrow. Louise moved away. Her own eyes stung, but she denied the tears. She felt like some clockwork toy, bereft of feeling, moving only at the whim of a remorseless master – an arrogant, uncaring, inhuman master. How she hated him, His Royal Highness, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. And his willing agent, the detested Edmund Beck, who had been notable only for his absence these last few weeks. Unable to bring himself to face her, coward that he was.
     In the orchard some of the trees she had planted still bore their fruit, apples and pears waiting to be picked by the new tenant and his seven children – seven! Heaven help Appleton House when that tribe arrived. But for now all was silent. Horribly, eerily silent. No horses in the stables, no cattle in the stalls, no sheep in the fold, no ducks and geese on the pond, no chickens in the yard, no steam engine chuntering, no ploughs and harrows waiting... Even her farm labourers had absented themselves, as if they could not bear to witness the end of all her hopes and strivings. The very fields seemed to be mourning.
      A skein of wild geese came winging across the sky in a ragged V, gossiping softly as they made for the marshes to roost. Somewhere in the nearby copses a pheasant cried its harsh warning, seeming to shriek a protest against the slaughter that would begin again when the Prince and his friends arrived for the first shoot of the season. As Louise glanced toward the gate she saw a hare run across the opening. It paused as if it sensed her eyes on it. It sat up, ears erect, taunting her: I’m still here and you’re going away! Haha, haha!
      Pulling her fur tippet closer round her throat, Louise straightened her spine, holding her head proud and defiant. She would not let them say she had scuttled away in defeat. She was not defeated. Far from it. Though the Prince and his lackeys had had the triumph, depriving her of her beloved home, driving her to penury and exile, she had a feeling they would not feel safe so long as she lived. Nor should they. Not while she had pen and ink available, and time in plenty to spare.
     The book she planned to write would expose the full extent of their perfidy. And then, perhaps, they might regret having treated her so ill.

There seems no doubt that when Louise Cresswell left Appleton Farm in the autumn of 1880 she saw herself as the ill-used heroine of a tragic Romance.
      A detached observer may, however, reach rather different conclusions.

* * *

Louisa Mary Cresswell (née Hogge) could truthfully claim to have been ‘a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales’. As a tenant on royal Sandringham estate she was frequently a guest at the big house, for such events as balls, dinners or skating parties. But she was also the woman who dared openly to oppose His Royal Highness, charging into the fray not, as she sometimes longed to do, with a hunting whip (and, happily, not with the pistol she kept beside her when anarchists threatened), but with her tongue, her tears, and eventually with a pen and the help of a publisher. Her exposé, Eighteen Years on Sandringham Estate, was first published in 1887, seven years after she left Appleton Farm. Although it appeared under the pseudonym ‘The Lady Farmer’, Louise could not have hoped to remain anonymous, she was well-known in royal circles, far beyond West Norfolk, and no-one would have been in any doubt as to which particular ‘Lady Farmer’ had penned this diatribe.
      Her memoir covers the years 1862-80, spotlighting her continuing battle with the hedonistic Prince and his conniving local agent. But in it she is vague about dates and time-scales, and she portrays herself as a woman very much alone after her young husband died, except for a farming mentor whom she dubs ‘Mr Broome’, and the kindly Sandringham rector, Reverend William Lake Onslow. Other friends and relatives, when mentioned, remain shadowy, distant figures, referred to in phrases such as ‘the family dandy’ or ‘our worthy kinswoman’, with occasional references to such people as ‘Miss G— C—, a Scots kinswoman’ and ‘dear old F—. Having discovered her story some twenty years ago, I became intrigued to know who these people might have been. And what of Louise herself? She and her husband did not spring fully-grown from nowhere, nor did they exist in a bubble.
      Who exactly was Louisa Mary Cresswell? What influences affected her and made her behave as she did? What of her life before she became Mrs Gerard Cresswell? And what happened to her, and to her son, young ‘G—’, after she left Sandringham? The more I studied her book, and the two pamphlets which she published, the more puzzles emerged.
      And so I set out, with my husband’s help, to search the original records and try to find a more rounded Louise. I won’t say the ‘real’ Louise because no biographer can claim to have all of the truth. Even so, the woman who waited behind the lines of parish registers and near-illegible microfilm, in dusty papers and, most of all, in some startling and highly revealing letters hidden away in obscure corners of Bedfordshire and Luton Record Office, came as a surprise.
      The final enlightenment waited at Windsor Castle, where I was privileged to be granted the Queen’s permission to study a collection of documents relating to Louise Cresswell and her time at Appleton Farm, written by the people at the centre of her disputes with the Prince of Wales, written to Louise and about Louise, and - most tellingly of all -- by Louise. During the two enthralling days which I spent trawling this unexpected treasure, a whole new aspect of the story emerged. Because, as the records reveal, in compiling her book Louise left out a great deal. And even the things she did write are... what shall we say? — told in the wrong order, given a make-over, twisted to suit her own purposes...?
     It turns out that the Lady Farmer was a complex human
being, with virtues and faults, loves and hates, prey to both soaring hope and bitter disillusionment. Members of her family, too, sprang into focus like characters from a historical saga, each one with a fascinating story to tell, and all helping to shed new light on the extraordinary woman who, encouraged by a country neighbour to claim that she had been ‘Rew-ined by Royalty!’, did just that, in a book which Royalty tried hard to suppress.
      Royalty chose to remain silent on the matter, as Royalty is wont to do. But here, at last, is the other side of this remarkable story...

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