Georgian era research

by

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.

by

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.

by

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.

by

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.

by

Franking a letter: a Parliamentary privilege

Someone asked me the other day what it meant in Regency times when someone asked their host or the male head of their household to frank a letter for them.

A frank is just a mark or label applied to a letter that qualifies it to travel through the post and be delivered. When the postal service started, any money it made belonged to the Crown, so post related to Crown business went through the post for free. When, in 1764, the Crown gave the postal revenues to Parliament (or, rather, traded it for a favour), Parliament authorised free franking for Parliamentary business. Any member of parliament and a number of officials could mark (that is, frank) a letter to travel free.

So, strictly speaking, if you were a girl staying at a country estate and you wanted to write to your sister to tell her about the pretty ribbons you bought at the village market, your host should refuse to frank your letters. But nearly everyone abused the privilege. After 1784, the franks needed to have the franking lord’s signature, plus the place and date of franking written at the top, and Parliament set limits on the number of letters that could be franked, but the local postmaster was unlikely to count, and even more unlikely to growl at the local duke.

In 1795, Parliament passed an act that gave a cheap postage rate to the lower ranks of the army and the navy. They could send a letter that weighed less than a quarter ounce for one penny. Again, there were abuses, with officers giving their personal letters to a private soldier or ordinary sailor to post. Parliament was not amused. Even so, they kept it on. The penny rate made a huge difference to the men.

When the penny post came in, in 1840, Parliament stopped the practice of members of Parliament being able to frank letters to send them for free. They looked at the active servicemen rate, and decided to keep it. One officer, reporting to the enquiry, said how important cheap letters were to the men.

“I have observed that they take very great advantage of it and they appear to derive great gratification from it, and it benefits them in a variety of ways…” he said, and also “I believe that many of them learnt to write expressly for the purpose of writing their own letters.”

 

 

 

 

by

Calculating sea journeys

I was trying to work out the length of a sea journey from the borderlands with Scotland on the east coast to near Bristol in the west, and I came across a modern sailing distance calculator, which was just the thing. It allows you to plot your course, and then tells you the nautical miles. From there, it’s a simple (hah!) matter of working out the likely speed of your craft, taking into account the season (and therefore the weather and the prevailing winds and currents), the likelihood of pirates and storms, and any time in port along the way. And there you have it.

You’re welcome.

https://plainsailing.com/sailing-distance-calculator

See also my other posts on this perennial topic:
Average travelling times in the Regency
Travel times from port to port in the Mediterranean in the Regency

 

by

Heavy drinkers in the Regency

Beyond a doubt, many people used to drink a lot of alcohol in the Regency era, often to the point of being falling down drunk. But it turns out that it took a larger number of bottles and glasses than you might think.

We read of a gentleman consuming two bottles of brandy in an evening, or having seven or eight glasses of wine at a meal, and still standing upright at the end of it. When the bride in one book rapidly drank four glasses of wine, and then passed out before the startled eyes of the groom, I didn’t question how strong a head she had for her liquor. I should have.

Both bottles and glasses have grown in size since the Regency. The alcohol content of wine and other drinks might also have increased.

At that time, a bottle was the size of the breath that could be expelled by a single glassblower. Even when produced in large glass blowing manufacturies by skilled craftsmen working with specified quantities, no two bottles were exactly the same, but that would make it between 350 and 500 ml — or perhaps as large as 700 ml, or just under one and a half pints.

Glasses, too, were much smaller. They had started to grow from around 70 ml (under 2 and a half ounces) that had been the standard to the mid-18th century, but not with any speed. The bride in question had consumed a little under two modern standard glasses.

And then there’s the alcohol content. It varied, of course, according to the fermentation time and process. But there’s good evidence that it was less than today, with wine at about 5% (average today, 11%) , fortified wines such as port and sherry at about 15% (average today 18%), and perhaps 25% for brandy (average today, 50%).

So in terms of alcohol, assuming a 500 ml bottle, our gentleman had the modern equivalent of half a 1 litre bottle in an evening. Quite a bit, but spread out over a long evening by an large man who is an accustomed drinker, he’ll be drunk, but probably able to walk home without any difficulty. And the soused bride? She passed out after the equivalent of less than one modern glass of champagne. Someone must have spiked it!

by

Touring historic England during lockdown

My personal romantic hero and I are being careful during this current outbreak of the global pandemic. We’re sticking close to home, and not going out into large groups. But we are touring the world. Every evening, another dinnertime cruise. Every day, a city or a building or both. And this is one of the series that is helping us to enjoy virtual travel. George Clarek’s National Trust Unlocked. The English architect visited National Trust sites throughout Britain during the UK lockdown, and the results are amazing. Read more here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/our-places-on-screen-with-george-clarkes-national-trust-unlocked

by

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.