Georgian era research

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News and journalism in Regency England

Researching for one of my works in progress, I came across an article by journalist, author, and academic Brian Cathcart about the arrival of the official despatches from Waterloo.

He points out that no one in London on 18th June 1815 knew that the great battle had taken place, let alone who had won. The news was slow to arrive, too. The battle was on a Sunday, and it wasn’t until late on Wednesday that Wellington’s messenger, Major Henry Percy, arrived in London, with a French eagle sticking out of each window of his yellow post chaise. Escorted by a delirious crowd, he brought the report to Cabinet, who were dining in Grosvenor Square. After they’d read it and made an announcement to the crowd, Percy continued on, with an even larger crowd and followed by most of the Cabinet, to the house of the banking family where the Prince Regent was dining that night. In the words of the hostess, Mrs Boehm:

The first quadrille was in the act cf forming and the Prince was walking up to the dais on which his seat was placed, when I saw every one without the slightest sense of decorum rushing to the windows, which had been left wide open because of the excessive sultriness of the weather. The music ceased and the dance was stopped; for we heard nothing but the vociferous shouts of an enormous mob, who had just entered the Square and were running by the side of a post-chaise and four, out of whose windows were hanging three nasty French eagles. In a second the door of the carriage was flung open and, without waiting for the steps to be let down, out sprang Henry Percy – such a dusty figure! – with a flag in each hand, pushing aside everyone who happened to be in his way, darting up stairs, into the ball-room, stepping hastily up to the Regent, dropping on one knee, laying the flags at his feet, and pronouncing the words ‘Victory, Sir! Victory!’

In another article, Cathcart makes the point that not a single war correspondent was in Brussels to cover the battle, and explains why. Journalism as we know it had not yet been born, though London had many many papers. Indeed, the news they printed came from reports from ordinary civilians who happened to know something, official reports printed verbatim, or articles lifted from other papers.

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Waterloo, with Christopher Plummer as Wellington

This is great! A few historical inaccuracies, but superb for seeing the lay of the land. We watched the full movie, also available on YouTube (Link below). I was particularly struck by the scene in which the imperial guard attack the British squares. I’ve read about it, and seen diagrams, but watching it play out in front of me was a much more visceral thing. And the two leads were amazing.

 

 

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Militia, volunteers, and regular army in Regency Britain

A Review of the London Volunteer Cavalry and Flying Artillery in Hyde Park in 1804, unknown artist.

When including a soldier or a military unit in a Regency romance, an author has to ask who was in the area at the time, and what sort of military unit was it. At the time, the regular army was heavily committed overseas, in Portugal and Spain, in India, in the Americas–though, depending on the year, there were regiments who were not on active duty, or who were on home defense duty. The two other options were the militia and the volunteers. Think of the militia as a sort of army reserve, and the volunteers as the home guard. Not quite, but sort of.

The regular army and the milita had long been a feature of Britain. The army was relatively small before the Napoleonic threat–just 45,000 men, two thirds of whom were stationed abroad. They had recruiting issues, and the rank and file were notoriously those who had few other choices–the poor, the unskilled, those who didn’t fit in.

Militia on parade

The militia in Georgian Britain, by contrast, were part-time soldiers serving one month a year in peacetime. There had been a militia since 871, so they were an older establishment than the army itself. By the mid 18th century, every county had to supply, and pay for, a certain number of militia. They were chosen by ballot, though they had the option to pay someone else to serve in their place. They had to serve for four years and did one week’s training four times a year. They served in their home county, and could be called out to deal with an emergency.

With the rising threat from France, the government first passed a law to increase the militia by a further 60,000 men. The innovators didn’t provide any money, so the spaces were filled by those who could afford to pay for their own uniforms and weapons. In other words, the upper and middle classes. Then, after a major military defeat in 1797, the government called for each county to find out how many men were within their borders, and how many would volunteer to defend Britain.

They were stunned by the response. By 1803, 380,000 men had volunteered. The officers tended to be from the upper classes, and the ranks from the lower middle class. Volunteers were exempt from military service and from taxes. They committed themselves to local defense in case of invasion or insurrection, but otherwise remained civilians.

The volunteer forces proved to be a problem. The State couldn’t afford to outfit and train them, and the small local volunteer forces operated outside of military rule, and often refused to serve outside of their own area. There were also manpower problems in the other military units, since men would rather be volunteers than militia, and militia than regular army.

The government went down the compulsory service line, and between 1806 and 1815, volunteer units were disbanded. In many cases their members were taken into militia units. However, this was not the last time Britain raised volunteer forces to its defence.

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The dangerous years

Once again, I’ve found myself researching a common childhood killer that, in our Western world, has had its fangs drawn by the twin powers of vaccination and antibiotics.

Diptheria, previously known as the Boulogne sore throat, malignant croup, was described by the Greeks 2500 years ago. In the year I’m writing about, 1825, it has just acquired the name by which we know it today, but effective prevention and treatment were still a century or more away. All my characters could do was keep their patient calm and hope that the ghastly false membrane growing from one tonsil to her uvula would not close the throat entirely, and that the child’s heart and kidneys did not become affected by the toxins the bacteria produces.

Sitting with my hero and heroine as they watched and worried, I once again gave thanks for the era and the country in which I raised my children.  Some forty years ago, one of my daughters had scarlet fever as a complication of mumps. When I told our doctor her temperature and that she was rambling in and out of consciousness, he put snow chains on his car and drove up the hill to give her an introvenous shot of antibiotic. Within half an hour, she was sitting up complaining that she wasn’t allowed to play with her brothers and sisters out in the snow. It’s an experience I have never forgotten.

We live in a time and a country of miracles. In Regency England slums, overcrowding and poor nutrition meant that diptheria, scarlet fever, influenza, mumps, small pox, and other epidemic illnesses spread easily and killed frequently, but a wealthy home was no protection. Children died in numbers that we, who expect to raise our children to adulthood, find it hard to comprehend. One third of children born in the early 1800s did not reach their fifth birthday.

On the whole,  I sanitise this world for my readers. My sick child survives, unharmed. I don’t make a habit of marching through my characters’ nurseries with a scythe. I am

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Not just Bow Street — the other police offices

There’s a bit of a fashion for Bow Street runners in Regency romance. I thought I’d have one myself, come to arrest my hero on a false charge of murder. Except when I looked into it, I found out they weren’t necessarily from Bow Street, and they weren’t called runners.

Bow Street Magistrate’s Court was the prototype, of course. Henry Fielding and his brother established the Runners. (They preferred to be called Principal Officers, since they thought ‘runners’ made them sound like servants.)

The model was successful, and in 1792, more than forty years after Fielding started his experiment, the government passed the Middlesex Justices Act. This established seven more police offices. Each had three paid magistrates and up to six paid officers or constables.

So in Westminster, there were Bow Street, Great Marlborough Street, and Queen’s Square. I picked Great Marlborough Street, which was closest to the townhouse where my hero was staying. Police offices in the rest of London were Worship Street in Shorditch, Lambeth Street in Whitchapel, Union Hall in Southwark, and also Shadwell and Hatton Garden. In 1798, the Thames Police Office (the river police) was opened in Wapping. There had been a couple of changes by the time of my story, in 1813, but good to know!

My hero’s powerful friends payed for him to have a private room instead of being in the police cells, where he countered two attempts to murder him. Corruption was a significant issue with some police offices, so a bribe to look the other way was not unlikely. He appeared before the three magistrates in a preliminary hearing a few days after he was arrested, and the case was dismissed when the person he was meant to have murdered stood up in court, alive and well. Other cases heard that day might have received an immediate judgement and penalty for a minor crime, or been bound over to appear at a full court hearing before a judge and possibly a jury.

They were different times, but already shifting in a direction that is more familiar to us today.

Note: when the Great Marlborough police office closed in 1839, as the Metropolitan Police took over all policing duties, the building continued in service as a Magistrate’s Court. A case against John Lennon for exhibiting sexually explicit material was heard in this court in the 1970s. It is now a boutique hotel, and the courtroom itself is an Asian Fusion restaurant.

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Constitutional monarchy and the power of a living symbol

State Opening of British Parliament in 2019

Britain has a constitutional monarchy, as do 14 realms like my own who share its monarch. There are others, including Belgium, Cambodia, Jordan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Thailand.

A constitutional monarch is a system of government in which power is shared according to the country’s constitution. The monarch may be the head of state, have purely a ceremonial role, or have certain limited powers allocated by the constitution. All other powers of government belong to the legislature and judiciary.

Britain has a democratically elected legislature that holds all the political power, an independently appointed judiciary that has the power to decide whether the legislature is breaking the law, and a monarch whose power is almost entirely symbolic.

The path to a politically powerless but socially effective monarch was a long one. Some suggest it started when the barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta. There were other steps along the way, as Parliament tried to rein in the monarch, including 1649, when a monarch who thought he should have absolute power was tried by Parliament and executed (for treason). Then came the so-called Glorious Revolution, which led to a compact in 1689 between Parliament and the monarch. The monarchy was maintained and the herditary succession continued, but only on Parliament’s terms.

1708 is the last time that a British monarch denied royal assent to a bill (that is, refused to allow a piece of legislation passed by Parliament). From the time of George 1, kings stopped selecting Cabinet Ministers and getting involved in discussions at Parliament. William IV, in 1831, dissolved Parliament at the request of the prime minister but against the will of the majority of Parliament. Again. Last time.

Monarchs still give assent, approve Cabinet Ministers and the Prime Minister, open and dissolve Parliament. But now, they only do so when asked by Parliament.

Since the Georgian kings, the monarchs of Britain have had three rights and only three:

  • the right to be consulted
  • the right to encourage
  • the right to warn.

The monarch is not so much a ruler as a parent of adult children, acting in an advisory capacity only, and making sure he or she does not embarrass or challenge the government of the day by stating opinions in public. They have no policies, no platform, no axe to grind or wheel to grind it on. To blame them for the decisions of the governments of the past 250 years is to completely misunderstand history.

The monarch also, of course, gives the British a centrepiece for the pomp and pageantry they do so well.

Personally, I hope my own country keeps its link to the monarchy. I don’t want a head of state with political power. I especially don’t want a head of state with political policies and affiliations. They cannot possibly promote unity or represent it, which seems to me to be the vital function of the monarch. I could stand having an elected head of state who was non-political. France and Ireland do that. But why pay the cost of elections when we already have a head of state who is stuck with the job, poor sod, because he was the first born male in the wrong family? (Take a look at the relative costs in various countries of heads of state. It’s enlightening. The British have it cheap.)

Long live the King.

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The horror of Georgian-era asylums

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, asylums for those afflicted with mental illness existed to keep the inmates in custody. Some of them were huge affairs, run by charitable foundations, such as Bethlem Hospital in London, popularly known as Bedlam. Others, such as the one I invented for my story Lady Beast’s Bridegroom, were private establishments run for profit, often by someone who  had set himself up as a doctor with few, if any, qualifications.

Few of them were nice places, and none of them offered any effective treatments. The keepers were guards—untrained in anything except confining those who did not want to be there. Patients were often restrained. Treatments were barbaric: being bled, purged, blistered, beaten.

The system was ripe for abuse, and it was abused. Those with mental illness were undoubtedly not helped by being in such surroundings, but asylums also held those who were not insane. Even into the 20th century, deaf people and people with severe physical disabilities were committed to asylums because they could not talk.

Children and women were admitted to asylums on the word of the male head of their family—husband, father, brother, or even, in some cases, a male friend of a woman or of a child’s mother.

Epilepsy was reason enough to be committed until the 1950s.  Depression after the loss of a loved one. Abusive language. Being over religious. Even being overtired! Or, for that matter, for no reason at all except that a person’s continued freedom was inconvenient to someone.

In one case, a man confined his wife after she objected to her niece, with whom her husband was having an affair, being named as mistress of the household. Her incarceration came to an end when she managed to persuade a boy working in the garden of the house next door to take a message—and her shoe (to identify her)—to friends who rescued her and hired a lawyer to defend her.

In Snowy and the Seven Blossoms, another book in the same series, I envisage a private asylum that was truly a place of security and sanctuary, thanks to the physician in charge. Perhaps such places existed. If so, they were certainly greatly outnumbered by barbaric institutions that hurt rather than healed.

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Poison and other google searches for murderous authors

When I needed a commonly available poison that would put my Snow White into a death-like state, the internet came to my rescue, telling me that even small doses of hemlock caused paralysis. Even today, the treatment for hemlock poisoning is artificial support for breathing and heart until the paralysis wears off.

So then I had to find out about what we in my youth called mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and (as it turned out) the Georgian era called expired-air ventilation (EAV). Medical history reports the use in 1732, when a surgeon at Alloa, Scotland, successfully used mouth-to-mouth to resuscitate a miner who was, to all appearances, dead.

There are other intriguing references going back over millennia that might have been mouth-to-mouth, but certainly, the practice became better known in the 18th century after the Alloa surgeon wrote his account.

The first humane society to promote artificial respiration was established in Amsterdam in the middle of the century, and was followed by others, first promoting EAV, and later the use of inflating bellows. Mouth-to-mouth, however, continued to be something any bystander could do.

So there it was. All I had to do was make apple pies my Snow White character’s favourite treat, and Bob’s your uncle [1].

Snowy ate the hemlock-laced apple pie and dropped down apparently dead. His Princess Charming gave him the kiss of life. It’s a classic!

Bob’s your uncle, for those not familiar with British slang, mean’s “job’s done” and is used at the end of a simple list of actions.

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The rose craze

Because I’m a sucker for punishment, I’ve made my latest heroine a rose breeder. Which means research into 18th century and early 19th century roses, and how to develop new varieties using 18th century methods. Which is fun, and not punishment at all.

Wild roses grow without the northern hemisphere, and have been cherished and cultivated since the beginnings of human settlement. They split into two groups, both of which have helped to form modern rose breeds.

First, and most familiar to my English gardener in 1825, are the Western roses: Gallicas, Albas, Damasks, Damask Perpetuals, Centifolias, and Mosses. These bloom once a year, in the Spring.

The Netherlands, thanks to their trading ships and geography, became great producers of all sorts of flowers. They still are. Tulips, of course, but also hyacinths, carnations, and roses. Where there were once dozens of cultivars, by 1810, a couple of hundred existed.

The French rose industry was fueled by the French Empress Josephine, who consoled herself with her garden at Malmaison after her divorce from Napoleon. Here, she encouraged breeding and hybridising, and several breeders inspired by her produced several hundred new cultivars.

The second group, the Oriental groups were newcomers to Europe between 1750 and 1824: primarily China and Tea roses. These bloom more or less continuously. Initially, they were hard to hybridise with the Western roses, and not hardy. But crosses between East and West finally happened, and by the 1830s, repeat-breeding hybrids began to appear. By the 1840s, hybrid perpetuals were the favourites of most gardeners. Experimentation continued and does to this day, as rose breeders seek to perfect colour, perfume, disease resistance, length of blooming season, size, growth pattern, and other features.

Sources:

  • https://home.csulb.edu/~odinthor/oldrose.html
  • https://archive.org/details/lesroses1821pjre/page/n5/mode/2up (this one is in French, but includes colour plates of the Malmaison roses)

Excerpt

Pansy Turner was never happier than among her roses, so her current low mood was evidence of her general dissatisfaction. She refused to call it unhappiness. After all, what did she have to be unhappy about?

Eight years ago, yes. But eight years ago, she had been a harridan in training with no friends, largely ignored by her more ruthless mother and younger sister except when they had a use for her.

She was making her way along the seedlings in her succession houses, examining the opening blooms to see if any of the offspring of her controlled fertilisation efforts had the characteristics she hoped for.

If she was in the mood to count blessings, the successions houses would be on the list.

She would ever be grateful that her stepbrother Peter had taken her in and made her part of his family. She showed her gratitude by lending a hand wherever she was needed, with the house, with the children, and especially with the garden, which had become her great joy — and roses her passion.

As well as Peter, she had three sisters: Peter’s wife Arial and his sisters, Violet and Rose. She was Auntie Pansy to the children that filled the nursery and the schoolroom, four of them belonging to Arial and Peter, and three cousins of Arial’s.

Her life was full, productive, and rewarding.

In January, when she opened the rosehips produced by her breeding programme and planted them in the succession houses, she had been full of joy and hope.

Then, Rose and Violet made their debut, being presented first at Court and then to the ton at a magnificent ball. She smiled at the memory. They had been so lovely, and had from the first attracted much attention. Pansy was so pleased and proud.

And yet… It seemed like only yesterday they were little girls, and she was the debutante, full of hopes and dreams. Her mother and sister had blamed poverty for their failure in the marriage market, but the truth was they had scuppered their own chances by being horrible people.

Pansy had made amends — was still making them. Today’s debutantes knew her only as the older sister of Rose and Violet, the one with the odd hobby of designing gardens and breeding roses. But still, Society abounded with people who remembered her as she was before. She would never truly be comfortable around them.

No. Pansy did not envy Rose and Violet their success. Their hopes and dreams though; those made her wistful. She would be thirty at her next birthday, and her time to marry had long passed. Without a husband of her own, without children, she would always be an extra on the edges of family life.

She was, she knew, very fortunate. She never needed to worry about a roof over her head. She had a generous allowance, much of which she spent on her gardens. Peter’s and Arial’s gardens, for, though Pansy had made them, she did not own them.

It made no difference. She was guaranteed a free hand; given all the labour, materials, tools and building she required. She was also appreciated. Arial, a busy mother as well as an investor and owner of a number of businesses, said she did not know what she would do without Pansy.

She was needed. It was enough. It would have to be enough, and this maudlin patch would pass.

She bent to examine another of the new blooms; the hybrid children of rosa centiflora and rosa mundi, whose lovely vari-coloured white and magenta she hoped to replicate in other shades. None of her babies had the yellow tones she had been hoping for.

True, some of the plants were worth keeping for another season, and growing on to multiply by making cuttings. But none of the dozens of hips she’d harvested for seed and the hundreds of plants she’d planted had produced the blooms she had seen in her mind’s eye. Perhaps that was the reason she felt so low today.

Here were the centifolias, beautiful in shades of pink and cream. She had hoped for a deep pink. A friend of her brother had given Arial a bunch from his garden that was the exact shade she had in mind. It had, impressively, survived in water on the long journey from Cumbria where the man lived to their home in Leicester. But when she asked him for cuttings, he did not reply.

She had, in fact, sent four polite letters and had received not a single acknowledgment. Which was rude. Her misery flared into irritation. She should write to him again, and tell him exactly what she thought of him.