The Lovely Lucy Walter

When I published my novel about Lucy Walter, my husband asked, 'Do you  think anyone is going to be interested in her?' As it happened, many people were.

Lucy is believed to be the ancestress of Diana, Princess of Wales. Lucy's portrait is in Althrop, the ancestral home of the Spencer family and another portrait of Lucy hangs in Scolton Manor, now a museum, ten miles out of Haverfordwest.

When the book came out, the local bookshop was crowded with people purporting to be related to Lucy. Many of them came from Rosemarket, a village a few miles out of Haverfordwest, where the Walter family spent some time in the  'Great House'. 

I'm sometimes asked how closely have I kept to Lucy's  lifestory.  I have researched in the Record Office, Haverfordwest and in the National Library of Wales and I have read contemporary accounts of her life. My novel follows Lucy's story in chronological order, tying it in with Charles's life as far as I can trace it. Therefore, I call my work 'faction': fiction based on fact. (I have made up intimate conversations, but I follow Lucy and the Court to The Hague, keeping the dates correct, for example).

I have a theory, and facts of a sort, to support my belief that Lucy and Charles were married in Saint Thomas a Beckett Church, Haverfordwest. Why was the Marriage Register for that particular year requisitioned by Parliament and returned with the relevant page missing?  

But problems arise: When Lucy was eighteen, her rogue of a father sold her to the Puritan Colonel, Algernon Sydney, for fifty broad pieces of gold. Before Algernon could claim Lucy he was called away by his regiment and she was passed to his brother, Colonel Robert Sydney.  It could now be argued that Charles and Lucy met and fell in love in The Hague. Later, she gave birth to their son.

Charles acknowledged James as his son and supported Lucy, James and her daughter, Mary, whom she had by another man.

I wanted to write about Lucy. I felt her presence strongly when working on the book. Lucy died in her late twenties, a prostitute, destitute, on the streets of Paris and Charles paid for her funeral.  He had many loves and mistresses, the most famous of whom was Nell Gwynn, the orange seller, but His first love was his Welsh mistress, Lucy Walter,  and I wanted it acknowledged.