George Washington's Ghost

The Royal couple had been welcomed to the old house by the Governor of the Commonwealth of New England’s thirty-five-year-old eldest son, Viscount Frederick Philip Anscombe De L’Isle and his vivacious Indian wife Usha, known within the family as ‘Pippa’. ‘Freddie’ De L’Isle had followed his father into the Guards and was presently attached to the Household Cavalry, a duty he had temporarily been relieved from to perform the honours at Penshurst Place.

“Freddie you look marvellously recovered from that fall you had at Windsor last autumn!” Queen Eleanor beamed the moment the bowing, scraping and curtsying was over and done with.

The dashing cavalry officer’s wife was heavily pregnant with their third child and Eleanor began, gently, to berate her husband, whom, like all the De L’Isle offspring had grown up regarding the ‘accidental’ King and Queen as forbearing and attentive godparents and as quasi Uncles and Aunts.

That was the thing the King and his consort missed the most; the easy informality of those days when they were both ‘minor’ royals; as ordinary a family as it was possible to be.

“Oh, Pippa,” Eleanor scolded fondly.

Usha’s father had been the Minister for Bengal in London for many years, a wise, professorial, witty man who had brought up his four daughters in the ‘English way’, ignoring criticism from nationalist quarters – principally, gangs of religious zealots, Hindus and Islamists – back home in Calcutta. “I feel terrible that we’ve forced you to stand outside in the cold!”

“The rest of the party is gathered in the old Banqueting Hall, sir,” the younger De L’Isle respectfully informed the King as the two couples went inside. For the time of year there was a persistent, bitter wind gusting across the Kentish Weald, a thing the King and Queen tried not to interpret as an ill omen for their coming journey to Germany.

Normally, there would have been a full reception line in the drive and on the steps to the mansion; however, that had been deemed ‘too public’ and the King had not troubled to delve deeper into the matter. His father would have demanded a band, fanfares and that every notable from twenty or thirty miles around attended him on his arrival ‘in the county’; but that was not the sort of monarchy that the firm of Bertie and Ellie ran!

The King and Queen had visited Penshurst Place many times over the years. Situated just thirty or so miles from the sprawl of London, it offered a welcome haven of tranquility. Their own children had played and occasionally, fought with Philip and Elizabeth De Lisle’s large brood and it had been fascinating to observe the often, parallel development of the De L’Isle youngsters and their own ‘brats’. Of the De L’Isle brood, Freddie, the oldest and Henrietta, the youngest, had always been the real stars. Freddie had assiduously cultivated the persona of the devil may care, polo-playing horseman soldier: and it was only a matter of time before he abandoned his military career and followed his father into the Diplomatic Corps. And as for Henrietta, after her recent adventures in Spain, she probably had the world at her feet!

At one time there had been a suggestion that Henrietta might join the Royal Household; but she would have hated being a Lady in Waiting, she was far too free a spirit.

“I received a letter from Hen yesterday,” the Queen confided to her hosts, passing inside out of the chilling breeze.

“Good old Hen,” Freddie De L’Isle guffawed. “You just can’t keep her down, what!”

Although it had not come into the hands of the Sidney family until around 1552, when the child-king Edward VI had awarded it to Sir William Sidney for the services he had rendered his late father, Henry VIII, of ‘six wives’ fame, there had been a manor house at Penshurst Place since the fourteenth century. Back in the sixteenth century, the estate’s previous ‘holder’ had been Sir Ralph Fane, whom Edward VI had had executed for treason. Every courtier walked a very narrow line in those days!

Sir William Sidney’s son, Henry, had married into the Dudley family, themselves murkily entwined in the affair of Lady Jane Grey but survived with his head, and later established one of the most famous gardens in England in the grounds of the old house.

Subsequently, Henry’s son, Sir Philip Sidney, the warrior, poet and Elizabethan courtier who died aged thirty-two of wounds received at the Battle of Zutphen had been but the first of a small regiment of heroic De L’Isles. Notably, the 2nd Baron De L’Isle and Dudley had won membership of the Order of the Garter for leading the charge that broke the French Royal Guard at Vers-sur-Selles and completed the encirclement of the great fortress of Amiens in 1860, early in the Great War, long before the influx of troops from the Empire eventually turned the course of the conflict in France.