Footnotes on Friday

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Philanthropy and charitable causes in Regency England

In the Regency, supporting charitable causes was a social obligation. For a start, it was a religious obligation, and parishes were one of the mechanisms through which people supported those in need. Owners of land and buildings were subject to a poor rate tax, collected and administered by the parishes. This funded the workhouses and other support to the poor of the parish. Your local minister would also present causes from the pulpit, or during visits to parishioners, and ask for support.

The involvement of the church was a legacy of medieval times, when institutionalised giving meant giving to the church, since the church ran the orphanages, hospitals, homes or other support for elderly pensioners, the medieval equivalent of soup kitchens, and so on and so on.

The dissolution of the monasteries removed the vast array of religious orders through which these many services to the poor were delivered. Nonetheless, the new Church of England did its best to pick up the strands, and certainly continued to collect tithes, donations and bequests.

Whereas Catholic doctrine had focused on the act of giving itself and the role it played in securing the donor’s immortal soul, Protestant teaching focussed far more on what was actually achieved with donations. This meant a new focus on understanding the actual issues of the day and trying to address their underlying causes. [Rhodri Davies, https://www.cafonline.org/about-us/blog-home/giving-thought/the-role-of-giving/the-history-of-civic-philanthropy-in-the-uk-what-can-we-learn ]

From the Middle Ages to the middle of the eighteenth century, church and state struggled ‘for control of the substantial financial resources involved in the act of giving’ [Sherwin, David, ‘The Great Charity Debate in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa’, Journal of Church and State, 2000]

Slowly, the emphasis moved from supporting the church’s charitable ventures to supporting philanthropic ventures set up by a non-church organisation such as a guild, or by a group of interested people. And, while men fronted many of the organisation, an army of women made them work.

By the Regency era, the role of private philanthropic associations was firmly established. The characters in my books and those of the Bluestocking Belles who are actively involved in fund raising for good causes are firmly rooted in history. And The Ladies’ Society for the Care of the Widows and Orphans of Fallen Heroes and the Children of Wounded Veterans, which we invented for the Bluestocking Belles collection Frost Fair (and which some of our characters mock as The Society for Brats) would not be out of the ordinary in an age that gave us The Female Friendly Society for the Relief of Poor, Infirm, Aged Widows and Single Women of Good Character Who Have Seen Better Days.

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The Rakehell in Fact and Fiction

A Rake’s Progress, Hogarth (1732-33). This progress was a series of eight paintings by William Hogarth showing the decline and fall of a man who wastes his money on luxurious living, sex, and gambling.

In modern historical romantic fiction, the hero is often described as a rake. Frequently, he has the reputation but not the behaviour. He is either misunderstood, or he is deliberately hiding his true nature under a mask, perhaps for reasons of state.

Even the genuine player is not what they would have called a rakehell back in the day. He cats around, sleeping with multiple lovers (either sequentially or concurrently) or keeping a series of mistresses, or both. But when he falls in love with the heroine he puts all of that behind him, and—after undergoing various trials—becomes a faithful husband and devoted family man.

Yesterday’s rakehell was a sexual predator

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester was part of the Merry Gang, the original Restoration rakes who surrounded Charles II. He is known for his lovers, his poetry, his profligate behavior, and an unending stream of scandal. He is said to have been constantly drunk for five years, and died at only 33 years of age.

The Georgian and Regency rakehell was a far less benign figure. Back then, a rakehell was defined as a person who was lewd, debauched, and womanising. Rakes gambled, partied and drank hard, and they pursued their pleasures with cold calculation. To earn the name of rake or rakehell meant doing something outrageous—seducing innocents, conducting orgies in public, waving a public flag of corrupt behaviour under the noses of the keepers of moral outrage. For example, two of those who defined the term back in Restoration England simulated sex with one another while preaching naked to the crowd from an alehouse balcony.

Then, as now, rakes were self-centred narcissists who acknowledged no moral code, and no external restraint either. Their position in Society and their wealth meant they could ignore the law, and they didn’t care about public opinion. What they wanted, they took. A French tourist, writing towards the end of the 19th century said:

“What a character! How very English! . . . Unyielding pride, the desire to subjugate others, the provocative love of battle, the need for ascendency, these are his predominant features. Sensuality is but of secondary importance. . . In France libertines were frivolous fellows, whereas here they were mean brutes. . .”

Real rakehells were sexual predators and morally bankrupt, seducing innocents and partying their estates into debt and themselves into early graves. Not at all befitting a romantic hero!

Most 18th and early 19th century aristocrats (1700 to 1830) would not have called themselves rakes

Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer, fount time between his political duties and his promiscuous sexual activities to found and run the Hellfire Club, whose members included some of the most powerful men of the day. They gathered to share their interests: sex, drink, food, dressing up, politics, blasphemy, and the occult.

Historians have commented that we see the long Georgian century through the lens of the Victorian era, and our impressions about moral behaviour are coloured by Victorian attitudes. The Georgians expected men to be sexually active, and where women were concerned, they worked on the philosophy that if no one knew about it, it wasn’t happening. If visiting brothels, taking a lover, or keeping a mistress, was all it took to be defined as a rake, most of the male half of Polite Society would be so called. And a fair percentage of the female half.

Drunkenness certainly didn’t make a man a rake—the consumption of alcohol recorded in diaries of the time is staggering. (Even taking into account that both glasses and bottles were smaller.) Fornication and adultery weren’t enough either, at least when conducted with a modicum of discretion (which meant in private or, if in public, then with other people who were doing the same thing).

In the late 18th and early 19th century, one in five women in London earned their living from the sex trade, guide books to the charms, locations, and prices of various sex workers were best-selling publications, men vied for the attention of the reigning courtesans of the day and of leading actresses, and both men and women chose their spouses for pedigree and social advantage then sought love elsewhere. The number of children born out of wedlock rose from four in 100 to seven (and dropped again in the Victorian). And many women had children who looked suspiciously unlike their husbands.

The more things change, the more they remain the same

Lord Byron. Described as mad, bad, and dangerous to know, Byron was admired for his poetry and derided for his lifestyle. When a series of love affairs turned sour, he married, but within a year his wife could no longer take his drinking, increased debt, and lustful ways (with men and women).

Some of today’s sports and entertainment stars, and spoilt sons of the wealthy, certainly deserve to be called rakehells in the original sense of the word. And just as the posted videos and images of today show how much the serial conquests are about showing off to the rake’s mates, the betting books that are often a feature of historical romances performed the same function back then.

Given access to social media, yesterday’s rakehell would be on Tinder.

Lord Byron earned the appellation ‘rake’ with many sexual escapades, including—so rumour had it—an affair with his sister. His drinking and gambling didn’t help, either. But none of these would have been particularly notable if they had not been carried out in public.

The Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova mixed in the highest circles, and did not become notorious until he wrote the story of his life.

On the other hand, William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire, lived with his wife and his mistress, who was his wife’s best friend. The three did not share the details of their relationship with the wider world, so there was gossip, but not condemnation. Devonshire is also rumoured to have been one of Lady Jersey’s lovers (the mother of the Lady Jersey of Almack fame). He was not, at the time, regarded as a rake.

(This is an update of a post I wrote in 2016, when I published A Baron for Becky, in which an actual rake hires a mistress, falls in love with her, falls out of love with her, and arranges for her to marry his best friend. This year, I’m publishing the book in which he finally is the romantic hero.)

Also see a couple of posts on some of the consequences of the lifestyle:

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The Tiffany effect: strong-minded women, medical hygiene, and other ways truth is stranger than fiction

I read the reviews of my books, though most pundits advise authors never to do that. A good review can give me a lift for days. I’m grateful for the ones that pick up a mistake (such as the fact that To Wed a Proper Lady still has chapter 22 and 23 transposed even though I loaded a new file for it months ago–will fix again! And check afterwards to see if it is right.) And people who just don’t like the kind of books I write don’t bother me. There’s stuff I don’t like, too, and I can only wish them happy reading.

Modern names that aren’t

Every now and then, though, there’s a review I steam over. The only ones that upset me are examples of what has been called the Tiffany Effect. The Tiffany Effect is named after the idea that Tiffany is a modern name, when it was common in the thirteenth century and achieved the modern spelling in the seventeenth. Here’s more about the Tiffany Effect and other names that seem modern but have actually been around for a while.

Strong-minded and independent women

Lady Hester Stanhope was a famous woman explorer.

Another idea I hear quite a bit is that my women are too strong-minded for the Regency era. Really? It is, of course, true that the dominant (male) opinion of women in Regency times saw them as adjuncts to their husbands; meek creatures who needed to be protected from the harsh realities of life, and who did not have a thought their husbands didn’t put there. Women lacked the physical strength or mental capacity, so such men said, to understand anything outside of the domestic sphere. Some women undoubtedly accepted their assigned role. Some did not.

Here’s an article about Regency business women, including the owners of two highly successful banks. And here’s another about Georgian and early Victorian women who didn’t so much as break the mould as refuse to even get into it. And yes, a woman — or at least a lady — who refused to conform faced consequences. How serious those were depended on how much power she held. If she was wealthy and single or a widow, or if her marriage settlement gave her control of her own finances, people might gossip behind her back, but that would be it.

Those further down the social scale faced less of a barrier to independence, at least in terms of income-earning. Women still commonly worked alongside their men in the family trade, though this would change in more successful merchant families in the Victorian era. And women, since they were cheaper than men, filled many positions that required deftness rather than strength in industries as diverse as cotton mills, mines, and china painting.

Marriage as a bad life-choice

Many people believe that, in the past, marriage was the only option for women, and that unmarried women were to be pitied. Certainly, men wrote this way during the Regency era, and especially in the Victorian era that followed. I write romance, so marriage tends to be on the table as reasonable choice. But research suggests one third of all women never married. Shortage of men during the Napoleonic Wars might be one reason. Loss of independence and the risks of childbirth were right up there, too, as I’ve written in an earlier post. And the frequent incidence of two close female friends who set up house together and are fond companions may well include many platonic relationships, but we have some rather frank diaries that witness to what today would be same-sex marriages.

Women warriors

Kyz Saikal, a woman warrior from Turkish history, as featured on a Turkish stamp

The Victorian era, was also responsible for removing the glamour of woman as warrior.

Women played an important role in the British military, performing a wide range of services until the mid-nineteenth century. In the eighteenth-century stories, songs and ballads about female soldiers — women who in real life dressed as their male counterparts to go to war or sea — enjoyed an enormous popularity and serve to challenge our contemporary notion that Florence Nightingale was the first woman to work in a modern combat situation. The Amazons’ stories, however, changed over time and by the nineteenth century had to be sanitized to conform to a more genteel and fixed concept of femininity. Gender had increasingly become identified as a biological entity rather than a social and external construction. Thus the female soldiers came to be regarded as aberrations of nature rather than slightly risqué heroines and military historians rewrote earlier armies into all-male institutions. [Julia Wheelwright. “Amazons and Military Maids” in Women’s Studies International Forum: Volume 10, Issue 5, 1987, Pages 489-502]

As for military sports, archery was popular with both genders, and we have evidence of women fencers in the Georgian and the Victorian eras, so presumably in the Regency too. The participants were ladies, who had the leisure for such sports. Women boxers were of the lower sort, but a popular drawcard. My own women warriors are outliers, being foreign-born, in an imaginary Central Asian kingdom headed by a non-traditional woman and her supportive husband. Iran and Central Asia have an ancient tradition of female warriors, which certainly would have been legendary by the end of the eighteenth century, when my Mahzad was kagana in Para-Daisa Vada, east of the Caspian Sea. But Mahzad had the stories there to build on as she raised her own daughters and their female bodyguards.

Healers and hygiene

Dr James Barry trained in Edinburgh, performed the first Caesarian in which both woman and child lived in around 1820, and was discovered to be a woman after his/her death in 1860.

A recent review assured the world that my female healer in To Mend the Broken-Hearted was anachronistic in her insistence on cleanliness in her sick room. The reviewer claimed special knowledge because of her profession, and pointed out that the relationship between hygiene and patient health depended on developing a germ theory of health, and even after that, was established only with great difficulty between the end of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth century. Which is true, as far as received wisdom passed on in the medical training of Western physicians. It is an incomplete truth, however. Established medicine fought vigorously to resist the idea that doctors were killing their patients by refusing to wash their hands.

But as early as the mid eighteenth century, James Lind (the same man who introduced citrus fruit to naval vessels to reduce scurvy) observed that patients in clean sickrooms were more likely to get well than patients in dirty conditions. He later practiced as a physician in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh-trained doctors have been prominent in the history of medical hygiene. I’ve mentioned Alexander Graham, another Edinburg man, in my article on hand-washing and puerperal fever. Doctors continued to resist the idea that they carried disease from sick people to the birthing chamber for a long time after Graham proposed it.

Meanwhile, though, the navy continued Lind’s prescription of clean sickrooms, and a number of others practiced cleanliness as part of the more general idea of disinfection, a custom that goes back to at least the Greeks, if not earlier. Without a proper theory of the causes of illness, our ancestors could still see that cleanliness and disinfection made a difference.

The practice of keeping women sequestered in their own quarters made medical practice by women essential in the Eastern world.

Add to this, my female healer was trained in Persian and Arabic medical practice. Persian treatises on cleanliness in the sickroom go back into ancient history. The holy texts of both Islam and Judaism command hygiene as a response to illness.

Islamic medicine developed further through many translations from the East and West in the Abbasid Period. Muslim and non-Muslim physicians combined early Indian and Greek medicine and systemised it further. Some works during this period are devoted to hygiene (hifz al-sihha), while the maintenance of health is included in general medical books as well. For example, Ibn Sīnā (or Avicenna; d. 1037) discussed hygiene in his Canon of Medicine (Al-Qānûn fi’t-tıb). In his system of medicine, medical practice was combined with physical and psychological factors, drugs and diets — or “holistic” medicine. [Hakan Coruh, Theology, Health, and Hygiene]

My reviewer’s knowledge of the history of her profession is undoubtedly excellent, but only as far as it relates to main-stream Western medical training in the past 150 years.

Another reviewer was scathing about my villainous vicar’s misappropriation of funds in Lord Calne’s Christmas Ruby. The bishop gets the tithe, not the rector, she said. In the Regency era, the tithes went straight to the rector, and there was such abuse of the system that it led to legislation a few years later. I’ve written about the regency system here.

Sucking it up

Ah well. If I’m going to continue resisting the whole author’s note idea, I suppose I’m going to see more reviews where I’m wrongly accused of poor research. And I’m still not intending to have a character called Tiffany, because truth is stranger than fiction.

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The life of a servant

This BBC series is great. Episode 1 looks at servants in England from the mid 18th century to the end of the 19th. Well worth watching. Here’s an excerpt, about the requirements of a doctor’s wife (lower middle class) in Victorian London.

This is what she wants the housemaid to do,

“Seven o’clock, bring in my hot drinking water.

“Sweep down, thoroughly clean the stairs, “get the bathroom ready and lavatory.”

And then, the servant has her breakfast.

“Eight o’clock, bring my hot water. “Draw up blinds, empty and take away bath. “Always use basin cloth and wipe tumblers.

“8:30, clean grate in drawing room, thoroughly sweep and dust room. “Wipe round parquet, clean all brass.” “Open windows front and back. “Water and wipe with a wet cloth all plants.”

“How to clean a looking glass. “Blow the dust off the gilt frame, “as the least grit would scratch the surface of the glass. “First, sponge it with a little spirit of wine or gin and water, “so as to remove all spots.

“Then, dust the glass over with a powder blue tied in muslin “rubbing it lightly and quickly off “and polishing with a silk handkerchief.”

And then, what you’ll see here is that every minute is accounted for,

taking us through to the evening.

Seven o’clock, we find her tidying the drawing room.

“Put the cushions tidy and tidy the papers. Dust tables and the piano. See to the lights and sweep the fires.

“Eight o’clock, assist and wait at table and after see to bedrooms. Turn down beds, washstands wiped, hot water, chambers and so on.”

Nine o’clock, she has her own supper in the kitchen.

Ten o’clock, she can fall into bed, and that’s the end of her day, until, of course, she gets up and does it all again the next day.

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A 15 foot wave of beer

The Horseshoe Brewery, St Giles

St Giles was one of the roughest parts of London in 1814. Its residents were poor–labourers, piece workers, criminals, prostitutes, and others down on their luck. That luck was about to get a lot worse near the Horseshoe Brewery on 17th October 1814.  The brewery stood on the corner of Great Russell Street and Tottenham Court Road, and produced more than 100,000 barrels a year of dark porter.

When a storehouse clerk, George Crick, inspected the 22 foot high fermentation vat in the afternoon of that day in October, he noticed that one of the 700-pound iron hoops that held the vat together had slipped off. His supervisors said it was nothing to worry about, and told him to write a note asking for it to be fixed. At 5.30, George heard an explosion. The hot fermenting ale had burst free with such force that it tore the vat to splinters, knocked down the brewery’s back wall, and set off a chain reaction among the other fermentation vats and barrels in the building. Workers climbed on tables, and scrambled up walls. But several needed to be pulled free from rubble or rescued from the surging liquid.

An engraving of the event made at the time.

The first death was a 14 year old servant girl, who was scouring pots at a pump when the wall of the Tavistock Arms fell on her. The 1.3 million pints of beer in the first vat, augmented to 3.23 million pints by the rest of the burst containers, flooded from the building in a wave 15 feet high. The flood swept away everything in its path. It inundated basements causing the tenements above to collapse.  In one of those basements, five women were holding a wake for a two year old boy who had been killed the previous day. All five drowned. In all, eight women and children died.

Hundreds of people gathered the spilled beer in containers, or simply drank what they could on the spot. As the flood subsided, spectators came from all over London to see the sight of the disaster, and the local watchmen made a bit of money charging a penny or two to see the damage the flood had done.

That part of St Giles reportedly stank of beer for months afterwards.

Note to self. To Claim the Long-Lost Lover is set in London in the last months of 1814.  Mention the smell in the scene I set in St Giles towards the end of November.

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Paradise is a garden

The Paradise Garden at Hamilton Gardens

Creative inspiration is a strong and wonderful thing. Artists — storytellers in particular — are often asked where their ideas come from. The answer ‘everywhere’, though true, is unhelpful. What questioners really want to know is ‘why did this idea strike you at this time’.

The Greeks credited the muses — nine goddesses who inspired the arts. The Jews spoke of Holy Wisdom. My friend Caroline Warfield calls inspiration the girls upstairs. I tend to blame an infestation of plot elves.

Stories and the elements that enrich the weave of a story are all around us all the time. Most people notice one or two of the hundreds of possible ideas that pass them every day. An author might pick up a dozen. Knowing what to do with them matters more.

Several years ago, Caroline and her beloved visited New Zealand. On the day they arrived, we had lunch at Hamilton Gardens, which has more than a dozen themed gardens: Japanese, English cottage, Chinese, Maori vegetable, formal Italian.

We were both writing novellas for the coming Belle’s Christmas collection, Follow Your Star Home, and in the Mughal garden, I found a unifying idea that later became the inspiration for the title of the book, the name of the kingdom my hero and heroine rule, and one of the locations for the story. My photos of that garden also appear on the cover.

The hero and heroine were the parents of the lead characters in my current series, The Return of the Mountain King, and the novella is now published as a prequel. It is called Paradise Regained. I’m currently publishing the companion volume, about the girl James left behind when he left England, on Mondays. It is called, of course, Paradise Lost. Once I finish the fourth novel in the series, which will be within the month, I’m going to write a happy ending for my poor duchess, call it Paradise Attained, and publish it in a volume with the other two novellas.

Paradise is a garden

The garden we found in Hamilton was a chahar bagh. The term means ‘four gardens’. It’s a quadrilateral layout, with the quarters divided by walkways or flowing water into four smaller parts and a pavilion at one end raised on a terrace. One of the world’s most famous tombs, the Taj Mahal, was originally a chahar bagh, though only two of the gardens remain.

Gardens divided by watercourses first appeared in Mesopotamia, and were later adopted by the followers of Islam. It may have been the Islamic influence that fixed the shape to four, referencing the four gardens of Paradise that are mentioned in the Qur’an. Genesis, too, mentions the central spring that feed four rivers, each flowing into the world beyond. The concept travelled with Islam, so charar bagh gardens are found from India to Morocco.

“In  Chahār-Bāghs,  terraces symbolize  the  cosmic mountains,  the  creation of  the  edifice  or throne  at  the highest level represents the position of God. A great pool is placed in front of the edifice representing the cosmic ocean as the source of all waters which can irrigate the whole garden. The presence of trees, flowers and animals around the edifice complement the figure of the universe” (Farahani, Motamed & Jamei, 2016 — from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321014499_A_discourse_on_the_Persian_Chahar-Bagh_as_an_Islamic_garden).

The wall is a crucial design feature in making this a Paradise Garden. Indeed, the words para daisa mean walled garden — pairi = around, daeza = wall or brick.

As a gardener myself, I appreciate the protection a wall can offer a garden, and I also think of Francis Bacon’s quote as I garden.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

Paradise Regained

In Paradise Regained, you’ll find the heroine, Mahjad, relaxing in the chahar bagh her husband built for her as a wedding present. Mahzad and James have called their kingdom, built high in the Kopet Dag mountains between Iran and Turkmenistan Para Daisa Vada — Paradise Valley. And the story is about temptation — particularly for James.

In discovering the mysteries of the East, James has built a new life. Will unveiling the secrets in his wife’s heart destroy it?

James Winderfield yearns to end a long journey in the arms of his loving family. But his father’s agents offer the exiled prodigal forgiveness and a place in Society — if he abandons his foreign-born wife and children to return to England.

With her husband away, Mahzad faces revolt, invasion and betrayal in the mountain kingdom they built together. A queen without her king, she will not allow their dream and their family to be destroyed.

But the greatest threats to their marriage and their lives together is the widening distance between them. To win Paradise, they must face the truths in their hearts.

Find buy links at Books2read https://books2read.com/paradiseregained

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This video shows the Paradise Gardens section of Hamilton Gardens. The chahar bagh is on from 3:12 to 3:46, but the rest are lovely, too.

https://youtu.be/OmbwDsBF7y4

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Excerpt

The courtyard had been designed to catch and hold the fickle warmth of the mountain sun. Even in early winter, Mahzad and her ladies chose to settle in the pavilion, out of the direct heat, though the children and their nursemaids played on the paving by the cross-shaped pool at the centre of the garden.

James had ordered it built: a paradise garden on the Persian chahar bāgh model, centred on water and divided into four quadrants, each richly planted in vivid colours. It had been her wedding present, and somehow, their tribe had managed to keep it a secret from their queen, though the qaḷʿa, the citadel, buzzed with intrigue until James had brought her here, blindfolded.

It had been full summer, and the garden had been glorious but not as beautiful to her eyes as the face of her husband, eyes alight with mischief, with love, and with a promise for later that night when the court was asleep. They had crept down when the qaḷʿa fell silent, giggling when the patrolling guards politely averted their eyes. Mahzad was confident their eldest son, Jamie, had been conceived that night.

She had been so in love, had been convinced that James had forgotten the English woman for whom he was exiled from his home and had fallen in love with her.

Eleven years and eight children later, her love was deeper and stronger than ever, but she no longer believed that James returned the feeling. He was fond of her, yes. He respected her as his wife and queen, katan to his kagan, but the passion of the soul? No. She reached for it with her own and met only the barrier of blank civility with which he armored himself from the world.

When he was home, he was distant if polite, and he had not been home in more than seven months. His trips away had become longer and longer, his letters home more and more formal. He was about the business of their kaganate, which prospered under their rule, but he had never before failed to be home for a birth of one of their children.

Mahzad dropped a kiss on baby Rosemary’s dark hair, handed the sleeping baby to the hovering nursemaid, and sent one of her ladies to summon her secretary. She had work to do. She was co-ruler of their people and did not have time to waste mourning the fickleness of men.

The messenger was only halfway down the long side of the garden when Patma came hurrying down the steps from the zenana, the women’s section of the palace. Even from the other end of the garden, Mahzad could see that her secretary was agitated about something. She had lost the calm she had adopted as chief of Mahzad’s scribes, her usual elegant glide abandoned for a walk that bordered on a run, her eyes wide with excitement. She was not surrounded by the bevy of undersecretaries who carried her desk and writing tools, prepared her ink, ran her messages, and made copies of lesser documents.

No. There they were, just stepping out of the long doors onto the zenana’s terrace. Patma must have hurried some distance to have so outstripped them.

The secretary did not pause when she passed Mahzad’s messenger, speaking over her shoulder as she skirted a small child pushing a toy pony and hurried up the steps to the pavilion. She stopped at the top of the steps to kick off her footwear before venturing on to the rugs that lay everywhere and then composed herself enough to offer a polite greeting, bowing as she said, “Peace be upon you, my queen.”

“Peace, most excellent of scholars,” Mahzad responded, inclining her head as she waited for the younger woman to burst with whatever news she carried.

(The original version of this post was written for Highlighting Historical, Caroline Warfield’s blog, in 2019.)

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Working men of the ancient highway

A Thames waterman soliciting for passengers

From ancient times, boats have used the Thames as a highway, carrying goods and passengers to, from, and around London. The Romans built the first bridge between their city of Londinium and what become Southwark. It was of wood, and needed to be replaced many times until the stone bridge was built in the twelfth century.

That bridge, the famous London Bridge of the nursery rhyme, with its shops and houses, remained the only bridge until Westminster bridge was built until 1750. In all that time, wherrymen and lightermen and their boats of all sizes remained the main way of crossing the river or of negotiating up and down its current. Wherrymen carried passengers; lightermen goods and cargo. By the sixteenth century, some 40,000 men made their living on or around the river. In this century, too, an Act of Parliament regulated the fares wherrymen could charge, and another, a few decades later, appointed a ruling body, the Company of Watermen and established seven year apprenticeships.

“As may easily be imagined, they formed very much of a caste by themselves… They were a rough, saucy, and independent lot, if we may judge from allusions to them which occur in the novels, comedies, farces, and popular songs of the last century.” —Old and New London Vol 3

The coat of arms of the Company of Wherrymen and Lightermen

As London grew in the second part of the Georgian era and on into the Victorian years, more and more bridges were built. Still, the Thames remained a vital thoroughfare, for both pleasure and business. In the Regency, there were still over 3000 wherries (or water taxis) plying their trade in London.

Slowly, in the Victorian years, as more and more bridges connected the city to the increasingly well maintained road network and railways began to stretch over and under the river, the importance of the watermen diminished. Today, they still have more than 900 members who ply their ancient craft of the Thames, albeit mostly in a ceremonial role.

Im my novella, Melting Matilda, my hero argues about the fee that a waterman wants to charge when Charles and Matilda want walk on the frozen Thames. (The fee and the role of the watermen is accurate, the conversation is fictional.)

On Monday the thirty-first, the Thames was a complete field of ice from London Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge. The watermen, who had been barred from their usual profession for most of the month by the dangerous ice floes, quickly organized to test and then to control access to the ice. When Matilda went down to view the area she and Lady Hamner had chosen for the Haverford marquee, they demanded payment for helping her and her party over the small rivulet that had formed at the bank.

“That is outrageous,” complained Charles, at her elbow as had become usual.

“Na, jes’ think about it,” the waterman coaxed. Matilda focused to translate his thick accent into words she could understand. “People pay us to take them on the river. Doesn’t matter whether it is wet or dry. We did the same twenty odd years back, and before that, I reckon.”

“Were you here for the last Frost Fair,” Matilda asked? He certainly looked bent and wrinkled enough, what she could see of him in his greatcoat, cap, and scarf.

“That I were, me lady. And this bids fair to be a better one, it does.”

Charles paid the couple of sixpences the man demanded, and then Matilda pointed out that he had now received the value of a boat ride. “Would you escort us, and tell us about the last Frost Fair, and what you expect for this one?”

They spent half an hour listening to the waterman’s stories while they looked for a good site for the marquee and its subordinate tents—far enough from the main booths and activities of the fair that access was easy to control, and yet close enough that the ticket-holders could stroll the fair at their pleasure.

“That was clever,” Charles noted, as they settled themselves back under the furs in his sleigh. “You’ve convinced the watermen to keep that part of the ice clear, and have negotiated a fee to make entry to the ice free to anyone who shows a ticket.”

Matilda was pleased, too. “They shall do very well out of it: a lump sum deposit before the event and another afterwards, and all they have to do is keep our space clear, let our servants onto the ice to set up, and pass people who show a ticket on the third of February. Not that I grudge them. Imagine being unable to earn a living because the river you depend on freezes solid.”

“You are a remarkable woman, Matilda Grenford,” Charles said.

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City liberties and marriages of the fleet

Now that I’m aware that the different London entities exist, I keep noticing bits of information about the relationship between the City of London (the City), the City of Westminster (called Town by the Polite World), the County of Middlesex and Southwark, not just historically, but right through to the present day.  For example, I was watching a documentary on Jack the Ripper, which pointed to his straddling the boundary between the City and Middlesex. Having two different police forces involved hampered the investigation. A news item at the time of the death of Prince Phillip the Duke of Edinburgh speculated about the death of the Queen, and claimed that, historically, the City of London is not part of the United Kingdom after a new monarch is proclaimed, until it choses to be so when the Lord Mayor swears fealty to the king or queen, and that part of their charter is that the monarch must ask permission to visit. (I’m not saying that’s correct–in fact, I did a bit of research and I think the conclusions the news article drew misinterpreted the facts.)

Nonetheless, the City of London is a peculiar place, which retains much independence as a result of medieval agreements, beginning in 886 and repeated down through time.

With its powerful City-wide authorities of the Lord Mayor and the Courts of Aldermen and Common Council, its overlapping local jurisdictions of wards and parishes, and the separate corporations of the guilds, the City was governed differently and more intensively than any other part of the metropolis. Throughout the century, the City successful defended its independence from all other forms of metropolitan government, as exemplified in its exemption from the 1792 Middlesex Justices Act. [London Lives: https://www.londonlives.org/static/CityLocalGovernment.jsp]

One result of the ancient liberties that the City enjoyed was that certain places enjoyed the residue of rights granted to the religious institutions that previously thrived there, and were exempt from ordinary laws. The example you’ve probably heard of allowed what they called Fleet marriages.

Various bylaws made prosecution of Fleet clergy impossible, even for conduction bigamous or over-hasty wedding services, and so the Liberty of the Fleet became the Las Vegas wedding chapel of London… It was possible to walk in, sign and get out in under fifteen minutes, as the mammoth number of records for the period show: over a quarter of a million in fifty years. Marrying ‘at the Ditch-side’, as it is called on some certificates, might not have been romantic but it was fast, fuss-free and didn’t require parental consent. [Georgian London: Into the Streets. Lucy Inglis]

On sundown on 24 March 1754, the Hardwicke Marriage Act became law, bringing in rules about parental consent, and guidelines for banns, licenses, and church celebration. That day, the Fleet Chapel recorded close to one hundred marriages, but the Liberty of the Fleet was over.

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Lies, spies, and unsung heroes

Colonel Edward Despard was arrested before he and his radical friends could seize the Tower of London as part of a revolutionary strike against the Crown.

We’ve loved our spy fiction for over 100 years. The early years of the twentieth century saw the start of the genre, with Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, several books by Joseph Conrad, The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orkzy, even some of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sexy heroes, thrilling encounters, mysterious beautiful women, and ghastly villains. Spy novels had it all. How things have changed.

Disreputable and dishonest

In the past, spying was a murky hidden business, and spies despised as liars who sold their honour. The British Secret Service was not founded until the twentieth century, and before that spies were seen as dishonest and disreputable. Yet without them, the history of England would be very different.

Henry VIII and Elizabeth I both had spymasters whose extensive spy networks helped keep their royal majesties on their throne.

John André was a British Army officer hanged as a spy by the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War for assisting Benedict Arnold’s attempted surrender of the fort at West Point, New York to the British.

Sir Anthony Standen—torn between loyalties

One of those spies was a Catholic refugee from Protestant England, whose reports on the Spanish Armada allowed the English to attack the Spanish Fleet at Cadiz. Drake fired ships and sunk galleys, putting the invasion off for years.

Poor Sir Anthony Standen. His love for England and his love for his faith conflicted, and — although he eventually returned to his home country — he was not welcomed by a grateful nation. Indeed, though he was sent on further spying missions, he was also imprisoned for a time in the Tower of London.

It is an interesting juxtaposition: his sterling work for the Crown did not (in the eyes of some) prove his patriotism, but rather his lack of moral fibre. He spied, therefore he could not be trusted.

Spying at home as well as abroad

Walsingham and his successors were as likely to spy on Englishmen as on enemies from abroad. William Pitt the Younger, in more than tripling the amount spent by the government on spying and infiltration of potentially rebellious organisations, was walking in well-trodden footsteps. The budget passed through the hands of a few civil servants at home, and ambassadors and military commanders abroad, with no more accounting than this oath.

I A.B. do swear, That the Money paid to me for Foreign Secret Service, or for Secret Service in detecting, preventing, or defeating, treasonable, or other dangerous Conspiracies against the State…, has been bona fide, applied to the said Purpose or Purposes, and to no other: and that it hath not appeared to me convenient to the State that the same should be paid Abroad. So help me GOD.

A secret part of the Post Office opened, read, and copied mail, especially mail from foreign governments. And both amateur and professional informers reported on their neighbours.

Systematic spying

Napoleon employed a network of spies, under the Minister of Police, Joseph Fouche, who had survived the two previous regimes and would survive the Empire to serve the restored monarchy.

The English system was much more ad hoc. Spies, yes, and many of them, but probably no central co-ordination, though William Savage makes a good argument for the central role of The Alien Office.

Overseas, diplomats and military commanders took the fore. We know the names of some of the diplomatic spymasters who plotted against Napoleon: William Wickham in Switzerland, Francis Drake in Munich and later Italy.

Noble spies

Colquhoun Grant was one of the Duke of Wellington’s most famous exploring officers.

Wellington had ‘exploring officers’, who would have challenged you to a duel had you dared to call them spies. They were officers and gentlemen, and if they did creep behind enemy lines to collect information, they wore their uniforms to do so. Wearing a disguise or other forms of deception would be beneath their code of civilised behaviour.

But Wellington (and other military leaders) also had other intelligence gatherers who were less particular. Did some of them include members of the great aristocratic families of England? If so, we would not expect to find out from the records. Such a secret would reflect badly on those families, and would never be disclosed.

Spies of romance

So we are free to imagine that the romantic heroes and heroines of our modern stories might represent some, at least, of the spies whose reports on Napoleon’s troops, movements, and intentions saved England from invasion. Or who uncovered plots at home.

I’ve written a spy or two, both for and against England. Prudence Virtue is one. She first appeared in The Prisoner of Wyvern Castle, then in Revealed in Mist, and currently in my latest work in progress, To Claim the Long-Lost Lover as the wife and business partner of David Wakefield, Aldridge’s half brother. Watch out for her adventures.

References:

Ioffe, Alexander: Espionage During the Napoleonic Wars. On The Dear Surprise: http://www.thedearsurprise.com/espionage-during-the-napoleonic-wars/

Rice, Patricia: Spies in Regency England. On Word Wenches http://wordwenches.typepad.com/word_wenches/2010/03/spies-in-regency-england.html

Savage, William: The C18th British Secret Service under Pitt. on Pen and Pension: https://penandpension.com/2015/02/24/the-c18th-british-secret-service-under-pitt-1/

Secrets and Spies, National Archives Exhibition: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/spies/spies/default.htm

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Mad as a hatter

The fur trade goes back into the mists of time. Animal skins were a useful source of warm and durable clothing, and back before the human population swelled and fur animals were hunted to the scarcity and even extinction, the supply must have seemed inexhaustible. Even so, by the 17th Century most European populations were severely diminished, and the eyes of European traders turned to the United States. In particular, traders wanted beaver pelts, not for the pelt or even the leather, but for the fur. Beaver fur provided the highest quality felt for hat making. It is tight yet supple, and holds its shape.

Hats, like other forms of dress,  played a large role in reflecting one’s social  identity.  The shape and style of one’s hat indicated to a passerby one’s profession, wealth, and social rank and position.  Color, shape, and material all carried specific meaning.  In Ecclesiastical heraldry, for example, a red, wide-brimmed hat clearly  indicated that its wearer was a cardinal, and  interactions required a specific social protocol.  In  seventeenth century England, the shape and style of one’s hat reflected political and religious affiliation.  Due  to the expense of a beaver hat, being able to purchase one made a visual statement about one’s wealth and social status. [A brief history of the beaver trade: https://humwp.ucsc.edu/cwh/feinstein/]

Felt is made by applying heat and pressure to a collection of fibres, and beaver fur is particularly suited for felting because of the way the strands of fur stick together. The following video shows the way the process has worked for the past 100 years. It was much harder before the fancy machines.

Back then, the guard hairs were plucked from the pelt by hand, then mercury was brushed over the pelt to roughen the fibre and help each hair to stick to the next. The pelt was dried and then shaved.

The resulting fluff was mixed and then carded. Carding is a process of raking to get all the fibres running in the same direction. Next, the hatter weighed out the quantity of fluff he needed for a particular style of hat.

The fluff then went through a process called bowing to begin the process of sticking all the fibres together. The object was to create two large oval sheets about 4 feet long, 3 feet wide and 6 to 12 inches high, called batts. Now the hatter used heat, pressure (from his hands), and moisture to compress this batt. The process released mercury, which the hatter absorbed. Over time, hatters developed mercury poisoning, which is where we get the phrase, mad as a hatter. By the time this part of the process ends, the two batts have been put back together into a large cone, as you saw in the video.

Then comes planking–dipping the cone into a very hot solution of diluted sulfuric acid, beer-grounds and wine sediments, then working it by hand on planks around the kettle and doing it all over again until the felt was half its size.

After that came blocking, dying, stiffening, brushing, and lining, till at last the hat was ready for the market. The shape of hats changed according to fashion (some of which are explored in the following video). The process remains much the same, except without the mercury poisoning.