How to Propose to a Prince (22 page)

B
ecause my stories often include a concoction of real and fictional characters, one question readers often ask me is, “Did this really happen?” Well, this is a difficult question for me to answer…because the answer is both yes and no. While the heart of
How to Propose to a Prince
, the romance of Elizabeth and Sumner, is fictional, the rest of the story is a complex blend of historical fact and my own imagination.

For instance, George IV and Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic, were secretly married until the Crown decided the marriage was illegal and therefore never happened—leaving the prince free to marry Caroline, Princess Charlotte’s mother. There was also speculation, even during
the Regency period, that Maria Fitzherbert may have secretly birthed a child from this union. This rumor was bolstered by the fact that during her lifetime Maria Fitzherbert repeatedly refused to sign a document swearing that she never had a child by the prince.

Prince Leopold’s family did lose vast holdings to Napoleon, and his pursuit of Princess Charlotte very likely arose from the need for him to marry strategically. It is also said that after his marriage to the unruly Princess of Wales, he did come to care for Charlotte and mourned deeply when she died in childbirth a short time later.

The beautiful Miss Margaret Mercer Elphinstone was indeed Princess Charlotte’s only intimate friend. She became a close friend of Prince Leopold’s as well and is credited with being instrumental in bringing the two royals together.

Sir Henry Halford was an influential surgeon to both members of the royal family and to many powerful personalities in Parliament. Most notably, he was physician extraordinary to the mad king, George III. He did, in fact, perform the autopsies to confirm the identities of the skeletal remains of King Henry VIII and King Charles I. He published his findings in
An Account of What Appeared on Opening the Coffin of King Charles I, in the Vault of King Henry Eighth in St George’s Chapel at Windsor (London, 1813).
Reports exist of the baronet frightening and awing his dinner guests by using the severed cervical vertebrae of the beheaded Charles I as a macabre salt cellar. His was a story too outlandish to be a work of fiction. I had to merge it with my own story.

Other than the bridge over the Serpentine, which did not yet exist when this story took place, every scene was set in locations that existed during the Regency period, many still existing today.

As for the Royle sisters and their quest to prove their royal bloodline, sadly, the heroines are completely fictional, but their quest is not. Even today I know of at least one family searching to prove—through DNA instead of clues beneath the false bottom of a document box—that they are descended from a child born to George IV and Maria Fitzherbert. This book is dedicated to that family.

Cheers,
Kathryn Caskie