COULDN’T WAIT TO LEAVE THE CASTLE

The Dowager Lady Ashcombe AMERICAN-born Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe, 80, first visited Sudeley Castle near Cheltenham in the 1960s, when her future husband Mark Dent-Brocklehurst brought her to meet his mother.

The castle — the final resting place of Henry VIII’s last wife Katherine Parr — was spooky, and she couldn’t wait to leave.

With Mark and their two children, she set up life in London.

When it was Mark’s turn to run Sudeley, the family returned. But soon after, Mark suddenly died. ‘I stuck to the plan, but it was a very bad time for us all,’ she said in 2017. In 1979 she married Mark’s friend Harry Cubitt, 4th Baron Ashcombe, who died in 2013. sudeleycastle.co.uk