Footnotes on Friday

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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).

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Marital and parental discipline

One of the beta readers for Weave Me a Rope questioned the beatings administered by the two fathers. She didn’t think they would be allowed. And they certainly should not have been. In Regency England, however, while it was illegal to maim or kill a wife, child, or servant, anything else was considered to be the perogative of the male head of the household.

fathers could and did beat their children bloody. Their wives, too. English law is based on Roman law, which gave the pater familias, the father of the family, power of life and death over his household. By the modern era in Great Britain, that power no longer included the right to deliberately kill a wife, offspring, or servant, but:

“the Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir Matthew Hale (1709 -1676) wrote that the common law permitted the physical discipline of wives and that husbands had immunity from prosecution if they raped their wives (Historia Placitorum Coronae, Hale, 1736  @ pp 472-474 ). He also said wives, servants, apprentices and children could be subject to ‘moderate correction’ even if such discipline caused death.” (https://womenshistorynetwork.org/history-law-violence-for-women-children-17th-century-notions-are-inexcusable/0

The same views were still in vogue one hundred and fifty years later. ‘Moderate correction’ was open to interpretation, of course, and various people tried to codify it. The phrase ‘rule of thumb’ comes from one such attempt, which held that a man could beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb.

There seems to have been a general agreement that causing permanent injury went beyond moderate correction. Indeed, in extreme cases, wives could go to the courts and seek legal protection. If they won their case, the court might make an order restraining the husband from immoderate correction.

The mind boggles. Under what circumstances would it be a good idea to take such a case then go home with a man who been embarrassed in front of his neighbors but still had the right to administer as many beatings as he liked, as long as he used a thinner stick? One can only imagine how bad things must have been for those who actually did apply to the courts for help.

As for wives, even more so for children, in a culture in which beatings were supposed to maintain the harmony of a home—for the head of the household.

To be fair to the time, corporal punishment was the norm. Schoolboys were beaten. Soldiers and sailors were beaten. Whipping and scourging were punishments for criminal behavior. However, from the middle of the nineteenth century, this would change, and the change had already begun in the home.

Already, by the Regency period, it was widely considered unbecoming for a gentleman to hurt someone weaker than himself, particularly someone completely dependent on him for food and board. Which, of course, made life better for those in the households of men who wanted to live up to this standard.

However, since no one wanted to interfere in what was seen as a private matter, abusers could safely the new idea of marital and child abuse as a social wrong. They had nothing to fear from public censure nor the law.

It would be a very long time before that changed.

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Choosing period appropriate language in historical fiction

A guest post from Rue Allyn

Today I want to talk about the difficulties period appropriate language can cause authors and readers alike. It isn’t that some words common in a given period may be unfamiliar to 21st century readers. The problem is much deeper. One key aspect of using period appropriate language is that meanings and connotations change.

The words used today to discuss the history of people of color in the United States are very different than those used in the past. Mostly this is so because the words used during the period while people of color were enslaved in the US of A have come to be regarded as offensive.

I ran into this problem when I decided to write The Creole Duchess. This novel is about A duke in disguise, a creole miss determined to get her own way, a curse, and the battle of New Orleans.

I sent my duke on a secret mission to try to halt the coming battle. While he was in New Orleans he fell in love with Miss Celestine St. Cyr Duval. That Miss Duval was American, and technically an enemy, was bad enough but she wasn’t just an American or just a Louisiana creole (a person whose family descends from one of the original settlers of that territory), she was also a quadroon.

Today, ‘quadroon’ is a highly offensive word, and with good reason. But in the United States in 1815, quadroon was one of a number of terms used both in everyday language and in legal documents to describe a person of color whose ancestry was composed of only one quarter color. The other 75 percent being white. Very often people with this sort of background exhibit extraordinary physical beauty and rarely are they obviously ‘black’ or ‘white.’

The definition of the term is credited to Thomas Jefferson, himself an owner of enslaved people of color. In a letter to a Mr. Francis C. Gray, Jefferson defined quadroon in purely mathematical terms. Proving, although no doubt without intention, how owners de-personalized enslaved people of color.

“let the 2d crossing be of h. and B. the blood of the issue will be h/2 + B/2, or substituting for h/2 it’s equivalent, it will be a/4 + A/4 + B/2. call it q (quarteroon) being ¼ negro blood …” https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-08-02-0245

Such was how the term was used in 1815.

However, I was writing a novel about human people. People who, regardless of what they might be called had hopes, dreams, working lives and families. How do I resolve this difficulty created by the changing meanings and connotations of words throughout history.

The easiest way might have been to simply avoid the problem and write a different story. But my research into the term and the people it described fascinated me. Celestine was a quadroon in the setting of the story, and she deserved in my opinion to have her story told. Yet, if I use those words throughout the story that offend modern readers, readers whom I pray will continue to purchase and read my books, I risk losing that audience. What to do?

I used a twofold approach. You will notice that the title of the book is The Creole Duchess. Celie was both Creole and quadroon. Why limit her to one descriptive term? So, I used the term ‘quadroon’ where absolutely necessary in the way early 19th century people would have understood it. However, I took great care to balance that descriptor with other terms that would show the range of Miss Duval’s personality and history. Quadroon. Daughter. Wife. Free woman of color. Creole. Freedom runner, for she did in the story assist a number of enslave people of color to escape their bondage. And eventually, Duchess.

Language is not the only area in fiction writing where history and modern sensibilities are at odds. My strong belief is that we owe it to ourselves, our readers and to history to represent that history with accurate plausibility no matter how unpalatable to 21st century readers.

About The Creole Duchess:

A duke in disguise, a creole miss determined to get her own way, a curse, and two nations at war, is love even possible?

New Orleans Creole, Miss Celestine St. Cyr-Duval refuses to live under the thumb of some man chosen by her parents. Celie will do everything to keep freedom of choice for herself and others. But fate interferes in the form of a duke disguised as British businessman, Caleb Elmond. A relationship with Caleb would find approval with her mother, but both Celie and Caleb have secrets that put them on opposite sides of a great conflict and could destroy them both.

With the Battle of New Orleans looming, can these two strangers from warring countries compromise and protect each other, or will fear and betrayal end both their lives?

The Creole Duchess, Duchess Series Book Three is expected to launch in late 2023. The pre-order price of $0.99 for this long-awaited conclusion to the Duchess Series ends on release day, Oct. 30, 2023

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About Rue Allyn:

Author of historical and contemporary romances, Rue Allyn fell in love with happily ever after the day she heard her first story. (She claims she was a precocious little brat who read at the age of two but could hear much earlier than that.) She studied literature for far too many years before discovering that writing stories was much more fun than writing about them. One of her greatest pleasures as an author is being able to read the story before anyone else. Rue is happily married to her sweetheart of many, many years. Insatiably curious, an avid reader and traveler, she loves to hear from readers about their favorite books and real-life adventures. Crazy Cat stories are especially welcome. You can contact her at Rue@RueAllyn.com. She can’t wait to hear from you.

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