WIFE TO GREAT BUCKINGHAM by HILDA LEWIS. WHEN I was a child the King would come visiting my home. Then, for weeks beforehand, there would be a scouring and a polishing, a baking and a brewing women would come up from Bottesford village to swell our household staff great though that was. The tailor would come from Lincoln with new liveries for the men, the seamstress with new gowns for the women. Merchants with rare wines and spices would converge on Belvoir from Lincoln and Nottingham yes, and from far Derby, even and with them musicians and tumblers sure of their welcome. Invitations would go out to great houses and Dr. Samuel Fleming, that learned gentleman and heretic, would be bidden from his rectory at Bottes ford to lend our Catholic household an atmosphere more congenial to a Protestant King for James like many a Scot dearly enjoyed a religious gossip he loved to display his own knowledge of the Scriptures. I was an only child and motherless. Of my mother I remember nothing, though my nurse told me much. She was Frances, daughter of Sir Henry Knyvitt of Charlton in Wiltshire, and she was a beauty. I have, my nurse still says, a look of her but my nurse is old and partial and I wish I could believe it. I put down my pen and take up her picture to see if I can trace some likeness. She is so lovely with her dark eyes and her dark curls and her carnation cheeks and the sweetness and the kindness all about her. She died so young yet her few years were filled with happiness. She and my father were like a couple of children, my nurse said at one in everything, even to their names Frances and Francis. And when she died the warmth and the joy went out of him. I was less than four years old when he married again Cecilia, daughter of John Tufton, my lord Earl of Thanet. She was as different as possible from my mother. My mother was dark and lively with a warmth to her my stepmother is fair and quiet she makes no show of love, nor never did, save to her own children.