Footnotes on Friday

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The Barbary Pirates and coastal villages

The Italian places attacked by pirates between 1516 and 1798. Naturally, people tended to move inland, and to steep places that were harder to attack. Think of that next time you see an Italian village on a steep hill.

In my new release, Hook, Lyon and Sinker, the hero’s life is completely changed by Barbary pirates.

The Barbary states were a collection of North Africa states along what was known as the Barbary Coast. Through until the early 19th century, these states sponsored three kinds of economic activity that other nations eventually ended by force: slave-taking, abduction for ransom, and a protection racket.

The ships that operated out of their ports attacked ships of other nations sailing in the Mediterranean and out into the North Atlantic and also conducted raids into coastal areas in the Mediterranean, the west coast of North Africa, and what is now Europe.

They took goods, but also people who would either become slaves or–if they had wealthy relatives–be offered for ransom. Some of the slaves were offered for redemption, and various charities were set up in Europe and the United States to collect money to buy these captives out of slavery.

Muslims being forbidden to enslave (or even rob) other Muslims, the corsairs attacked any underprotected European or American ship that strayed into their path, thus combining the religious duty of harrying the infidel with the economic pleasure of making a profit.

Except when those ships came under the third kind of activity. The protection racket was an agreement that their ships would not attack ships showing the flag of a nation or merchant who had paid tribute to stop such attacks.

It was not until France took over Algiers in 1830 that the last of the barbary pirates ceased operating out of those ports.

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The day a lioness attacked the Royal Mail

A print of the oil painting that commemorates an unusual danger of the road.

If ever there was a time to change the timeline of a story so that I could include a little known snippet of truth is stranger than fiction, this was it. Researching for the journey to London that my hero and his brother make in Hold Me Tight, I came across a story about a danger that the coachmen of the Royal Mail could not have expected. They were prepared for highwaymen, storms, obstacles left deliberately or accidentally on the road, even attacks by dogs. They could not have expected what happened on 20 October 1816.

It was winter, a Sunday evening, and already dark when the mail coach pulled up outside the Winterslow Hut on the outskirts of Salisbury. Before the guard and coachman could deliver the mail, something large attacked one of the horses. The horses began kicking and plunging, and the passengers, alarmed, leapt out of the coach and raced into the inn, locking the door, leaving the driver, and the guard, Joseph Pike, shut outside.

In the dim lamplight, it took the two men a few minutes to figure out what was happening. A lioness had attacked Pomegranate, one of the lead horses, She was clinging to the horse’s throat with her claws dug in, and was raking the horse with her hind feet. Pike reached for his gun, but was stopped by the owner of a travelling menagerie, who begged them to let him and his men try to contain the beast. He sent his dog to draw the lion off. When the large dog attacked, she abandoned the horse to deal with this new threat.

The people from the menagerie managed to chase the lion into a granary and confine her there. A local paper at the time said:

Her owner and his assistants followed her upon their hands and knees, with lighted candles, and having placed a sack on the ground near her, they made her lie down upon it; they then tied her four legs and passed a cord round her mouth, which they secured; in this state they drew her out from under the granary, upon the sack, and then she was lifted and carried by six men into her den in the caravan.

The mail was delayed by a mere 45 minutes.

I’ve been delayed by wondering if I can move my story back three years without overcomplicating things. I didn’t want my hero and his brother (especially his brother) to be old enough to serve in the long war against Napoleon. Ah well. This snippet of history is not going to go away. I’m sure I can use it in another story.

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Drugs, Sex, and Music

Once again, this time in Hold Me Fast, I’m writing about the use of drugs in the early 19th century. In this case, my heroine has fallen into the hands of a fast set who combine their love of music, poetry and painting with drug abuse and sex.

My heroine is a musician—she sings and she plays the harp. She is also, by the time my hero comes to find his childhood love, solidly addicted.

So what drugs?

Laudanum was legal and easily available. It was sold as the answer to all sorts of things, from sleeplessness and sorrow to toothache in babies. Laudanum is a mix of opium and alcohol. It mightn’t fix what ails you, but you won’t care any more. It is brutally addictive, as many users found to their cost.

The market also contained other “medicines” that contained opium. Dover powder was a mix of opium and ipecacuanha, to be taken in a sweet drink such as a white wine posset. Godfrey’s cordial combined opium with treacle and spices in water.

Opium itself was also readily available, to smoke, chew, or otherwise consume.

In all those forms, the benefit was a euphoric “rush” followed by relaxation. And in all these forms, people became addicted with regular use.

Ether was a new toy for the idle in search of a thrill, too. Sold as a medicine called Anodyne, liquid diethyl ether gave users dissociative effects and a sensation of happiness. Warming it and smelling the vapours worked faster, but ether is highly flammable, which could be problematic in the hands of those high on the effects. Burns were common.

Cannabis and its derivatives weren’t readily available from the neighbourhood apothecary, but its likely that my villain could have found majoun or charas—blocks of cannabis resin—in the docklands, where sailors might well have imported such products for their own use and for sale.

Nitrous oxide parties also fall within my time period, with gatherings to inhale the product held as early as 1799. The idea that laughing gas might have medical applications wasn’t picked up for another forty-give

Spanish fly, a preparation made from blister beetles, was used as an aphrodisiac. It caused a rush of blood to the sexual organs, and was highly toxic. As was Fowler’s preparation, a solution using arsenic for the same purpose.

Were psychotropic mushrooms in use in England at the time? We know that in 1799 a family picked mushrooms in Green Park, cooked them up, and ate them. The father and four sons experienced spontaneous laughter followed by delirium. This was in the news at the time. You can, if you wish, take the view that idle dilettantes like my heroine’s patrons would read about such an event and decide that mushrooms were a step too far. But I’d be willing to bet that some of them had a go. Certainly, my rotten lot did so.

And when all else fails, there’s always alcohol. I’ve written before about the huge quantities consumed as a matter of course at all levels of society. Yes, glasses were much smaller than they are today, and so were bottles. But still, the reported volumes downed in a night are astounding.

The folk tale that inspired Hold Me Fast is Tam Lin, in which a faithful sweetheart is determined to rescue her love from the fairy queen. She is told that she can get him back if she recognises him when the fairy horde parade by, pulls him from his horse, and turns into one horrible and dangerous creature after another.

As soon as I began to think about the mechanics of a fairy tale world with the underlying viciousness and cold-hearted hedonism of the fairies in the oldest tales, I knew I had a group of selfish entitled aristocratic men with too much money and too little conscience. And what is more likely than that a person recovering from drug addiction is going to be changeable, near mindless, and dangerous?

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1792 in England

The book I am about to send off to the publishers is set in 1792–a bit out of my usual era.

Most of my books are set in the Regency, broadly speaking. Technically, the Regency ran from February 1811, when the Prince of Wales was named Regent for his father the King, to January 1820, when the King died and Prince George inherited the Crown.

In common practice, the term is used to mean a longer period, from somewhere around 1795 until the start of the reign of Queen Victoria, in June 1837.

So The Sincerest Flattery isn’t covered by even the longest definition.

It was three years after the storming of the Bastille, but at the time of the story, the King of France, his wife, and his children were still alive, and not yet in prison. The French National Assembly, set up in 1789,were still debating the shape of government, with those who support some form of constitutional monarchy unable to find common ground with one another, let alone those who want a republic. This impasse ended in August 1792, after the events in my story, with the arrest of the king for treason. In January 1793, he was tried and executed.

After the king’s execution, declarations of war poured into France from various European powers and the United Kingdom (who at the time would not have thanked you for considering them European–the more things change, the more they remain the same). From then until the end of the Napoleonic era, France was at war for all but a couple of short respites.

In June 1793, the extremists took over. They ordered more aristocrats to the guillotine. The Reign of Terror had begun. It looms large in historical fiction and historical romance, but lasted around a year.

Political instability continued the Directorate was formed in 1795, their power supported by the army which was now led by a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte.

In 1792, the fashionable Englishwoman was not yet wearing what we think of as Regency fashion. Nor was she wearing the huge ornate gowns and towering wigs fashionable at time her mother made her debut. Instead, waists were still on the natural waistline–though by 1795 they had crept up to the Empire line (so-called because it was favoured by Josephine Bonaparte, and therefore by the women of the French court). They wouldn’t head back towards the waist again for another twenty-five years.

She wasn’t powdering her hair, though, or wearing a wig. Hair powder had already become unpopular with the most fashionable before the British government put a tax on it.

 

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Heirs apparent and heirs presumptive

Cousins and nephews of the title holder can’t be heirs apparent

The heir apparent is the person who

  • is first in the order of succession, and
  • cannot be displaced from inheriting when someone else is born.

A cousin or a nephew would normally be an heir presumptive, which is a person who is currently first in the order of succession, but who can be displaced if the current titleholder has a son (or, rarely, depending on the inheritance conditions of the title, a daughter). It doesn’t matter if the title holder is old, celibate, unmarried, or even medically impotent. As long as he lives, the rules presume he can father a child of his own.

Only heirs apparent get to use one of the title-holder’s lesser titles. The title holder doesn’t get to decide who gets the title. The order of succession is set up in the papers that established the title. Usually, heirs male of the body, which means the first-born son in a direct line.

The title-holder can’t give away lands that are entailed to the title, either. An entail leaves the lands to a future title holder, with the current title holder having right of possession. You cannot give away or sell what you don’t own.

 

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Who succeeds the earl (or any other peer)?

Highclere Castle, country seat of the Earls of Carnarvon

One error that always rips me right out of a story is the idea that a Regency era peer can pick someone to succeed him — disinherit one son and promote another, pass the title on to an illegitimate son, or repudiate a son who has been accepted as his own.

Who succeeds to a peerage is set out in the documents that established the peerage. In most cases, the wording is “heirs male of the body”. What that means is the peer’s oldest surviving legitimate son inherits the peerage.

And by eldest legitimate son, we mean the eldest son born within the marriage. If the peer has three sons by his mistress and then marries her and has a fourth, the fourth son inherits. The other three are not legitimate. If the eldest surviving boy born within the marriage was the result of the wife having an affair with another man, but the peer accepts the boy as his own, then that the boy is the eldest legitimate son.

And he pretty much had to accept the boy as his own. The law assumed that any child born within a marriage was the child of the husband, unless the father could prove otherwise. That was not simply a matter of denying responsibility, he had to produce evidence that the child could not be his; for example, that he was in another country for the entire period in which conception was possible.

Both men marrying their mistresses and sons of other fathers inherited in real life and the same circumstances are found in Regency fiction.

The peer has no choice about this. He can refuse to leave the heir any property that is not entailed to the title, he can run the entailed property down so that it isn’t worth anything, he can throw the heir out of the house and not speak to him for the reminder of his own life. But once he dies, the heir gets the title (and any entailed lands).