Lady Hussey’s scholarship should be part of the overall picture of her

I do not know Lady Susan Hussey personally, but when I was writing a book about the Crown’s relationship with Ireland, she meticulously corrected my sources, taken from the Royal Archives, and saved me from quite a few errors (‘Lady Hussey has been damned with undue haste,’ December 3).

I was much impressed by her care and attention to detail, and my book, ‘Crown and Shamrock’, served as a reliable background to the Queen’s state visit to the Republic of Ireland in 2011 – reliable because Lady Hussey had checked the archive sources. She only asked for one editorial change: I had written that George V was deliberately killed by his physician, Lord Dawson of Penn (an advocate for euthanasia), by a lethal injection. At her request, I altered the phrasing.

This may not be directly related to the present controversy, but in any rounded perspective of Lady Susan Hussey’s character and record, her long service and, in my case, the exacting standards of scholarship she showed, should be part of the overall picture.

Lady Hussey declined to be thanked in my acknowledgements.

She preferred to remain anonymous at the time.

Mary Kenny, Deal, Kent​​​​​​