These appeared at irregular intervals of several years and may not always have been fairly up-to-date on the time of publication; actually there have been some ambiguities around the time of Mary’s dying. Thomas Sydney’s son, Edmund Sydney, wrote an autobiography, in several phases, between 1867 and 1889. Like other memoirs, written many years after the events which they describe, in some cases episodes which they have been too younger to know of, or remember, straight, they can’t be thought to be wholly reliable in all features of the history they purport to narrate. Edmund Sydney’s account, states that the ‘early years of my father’s married life have been spent in Beeston close to my grandfather Heath’s and there Cary and i had been born.’ He goes on to say; ‘My grandfather had many intimate private buddies within the mercantile world and Mr. Thompson Hankey, an eminent metropolis merchant and i believe a banker, provided my grandmother to take my father into their house, in the first occasion as a corresponding clerk, if he could make up his mind to go to Germany for a time to make himself acquainted with the German language as well as French which he knew.
It is evident from this letter that she had turn out to be frail and was not in the better of health; indeed she appears to be anticipating that her life was nearing its finish. The same account appears in the quick booklet, Brief Sketches of C.M.S. What they claimed will occur in the US seems to be starting in London, a minimum of at this early hour: A man suspected to be a suicide bomber was gunned down by London police on the Stockwell Tube Station. Further on she writes ‘As Edward has consented to stay right here six months his time will not be out till the tip of July consequently I shall stay at house (at?) Midsummer (If I should stay until that time)’; and later, in the same letter, ‘We went yesterday, that’s Lydia and that i went with Sutton Barrow to pay a visit to the previous Palace. Thomas Sydney’s conduct provoked a barrage of censure from Edward Marsh.
We be taught a little bit more about Thomas Sydney and his third brother, Henry, from the diary of Edward Garrard Marsh. Despite this, Henry’s marriage was not lengthy delayed and on Tuesday twentieth January 1818 Edward Marsh records: ‘I walked with Lydia to church, and married Henry to overlook Coldham. However, as noted earlier, Mary Williams had vacated the Old Palace by early 1831 and her reference to Kate and Edward ‘on the inexperienced’ suggests that perhaps Mary had relinquished the reins by then, perhaps following the marriage of Catherine to Edward Heathcote in October 1827. Her sojourn at ‘The Residence’ can solely have been a short lived one, so there stays an unexplained gap in her story. This description is totally at variance with that given by John Marsh, noted earlier, and the discrepancy within the dates suggest, maybe, that the debacle he refers to is the bankruptcy of the linen drapers enterprise in Cheltenham within the autumn of 1817 slightly than the collapse of the family business in Nottingham. Workers, written by Emily Headland in 1897, which has been referred to earlier, in describing Thomas Williams’ status in Nottingham. The George Hodgkinson that Mary Williams mentions in her letter was the son of George Hodgkinson junior.