Georgette Heyer's Regency World

  A conservatory was the perfect place for a marriage proposal.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2010, 2005 by Jennifer Kloester

  Cover and internal design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Dawn Pope/Sourcebooks

  Cover photo © Bridgeman Art Library, IStockphoto.com/ggodby

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Illustrations by Graeme Tavendale, including adaptations from: I.R. & G. Cruikshank, T. Rowlandson, A.C. Pugin, W.H. Pyne, J. Nash, Ackermann’s Repository, J. Pollard, E. Landseer, A. Ramsay, C. d’Oyley, Hayter, R. Cosway, W. Felton, R. Dighton, Wild, C. Henderson, C. Austen, E. Burney, F. Bartolozzi, T. Phillips, E. Bird, R. Westall, R. Horne, J. Werner, W. Fry, H. Thomson and H. Railton.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by William Heinemann

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kloester, Jennifer.

  Georgette Heyer’s Regency world / Jennifer Kloester ; illustrated by Graeme Tavendale.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: London : William Heinemann, 2005.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Heyer, Georgette, 1902-1974—Settings. 2. Heyer, Georgette, 1902-1974—Knowledge—England. 3. Regency in literature. 4. Regency—England. 5. England—In literature. 6. England—Social life and customs—19th century. I. Tavendale, Graeme. II. Title.

  PR6015.E795Z84 2010

  823’.912—dc22

  2010017246

  To J. Roy Hay

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Appendix 1

  Appendix 2

  Appendix 3

  Appendix 4

  Appendix 5

  Appendix 6

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Introduction

  The entries selected for this book are drawn from the history in Georgette Heyer’s twenty-six Regency novels. For many years these books have beguiled my leisure hours, affording me enormous pleasure, but also giving me a great deal of useful information about the English Regency period. I hadn’t known just how much accurate and factual information there was in the novels until I came to research and write this book, and, although I’d always been under the impression that Heyer was meticulous in her communication of the period, I hadn’t appreciated the scope of her research, nor the degree to which she immersed herself in the Regency era.

  The aim of Georgette Heyer’s Regency World is to expand on Heyer’s history and to provide for the modern reader an explanation of the people, places and events that made her Regency world so unforgettable. The book is designed as a ready reference for the Heyer fan, the general reader, or for anyone interested in the history of the period. Everything in the book is inspired by a reference in at least one of Heyer’s twenty-six Regency novels and, if there is an unashamed bias towards the upper class, this is a deliberate reflection of the characters, plots and action of the books.

  Georgette Heyer’s novels are stylish constructions with exemplary syntax and faultless punctuation as well as a rhythm and cadence of language that has the power to carry the reader away into the world of the English Regency. Today her dialogue, witty romantic plots and many memorable characters remain the benchmark for the modern writer of the Regency historical novel. Georgette Heyer continues to stand alone, however, not only as the creator of the Regency genre of historical romance, but also as its finest exponent. It is my fervent hope that this book will add to the pleasure of reading hers.

  Jennifer Kloester

  March 2005

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to many people for their support while writing this book but especially to:

  Paul L. Nicholls for his enthusiastic interest in and support for the book, as well as for his careful reading, incisive comments and wise counsel throughout the writing process. Also for sharing with me his appreciation of Georgette Heyer’s stylish prose and ironic wit.

  Roy and Frances Hay for wonderful friendship, good advice and many congenial lunches. Also for reading the draft chapters, making helpful suggestions, lending me many useful texts and patiently responding to my calls on a miscellany of research questions.

  Barry Kloester for his inspiring integrity, love, kindness and support. For sharing so many wonderful adventures with me, for believing I could do it and helping me to get there. To Ben, Christopher and Elanor who endured the writing process, made me laugh, and who give me so much joy. To Lladro, my faithful companion and prince among dogs.

  Dianne Tobias and Fiona Skinner for their loyalty, integrity, enduring friendship and for always listening; Dolly MacKinnon for her brilliant insight, inspiration, friendship and advice; Yve Cruickshank for her generosity and kindness in reading the drafts; and Joanna and Andrew Cruickshank for their support. Ro Marriott for her generosity in sharing Georgette Heyer with me, Jean Strathdee-Cook of the London Library for her kind support and for going above and beyond the call of duty to find elusive original Regency sources. Vija, Kay and the staff at the Baillieu Library, the University of Melbourne, as well as the staff at Deakin University Library, the State Library of Victoria, the London Library, the British Library and Peter Downie and the staff at Barwon Books. Rory Lalwan at the Westminster City Archives; Anne Lewis, David Philips, David Goodman, Ron Ridley and the History Department, the Melbourne Scholarship Office and the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Melbourne; Phillip Warne and Jeff Oxley for fixing my shoulder at the crucial moment; and Dr Claire Darby and Dr Sandor Monostori for their professional advice on gout and other medical questions. Thanks also to Mercedes, Hayley and Nicola at Kwik Kopy, as well as Judith McGinness.

  I also owe special thanks to: Frank and Wendy Brennan for past kindness, encouragement and advice. Richard and Judy Rougier, Jane Aiken Hodge, Susanna Rougier, Jeremy and Judith Rougier, and Hale and Eunice Crosse for their hospitality, generosity and support during my research trips to England. Sally Houghton for her wonderful Georgette Heyer website and generous support, Kirsten Elliott for the inspiring tour of Bath, Jennifer Nason and Alex Lipe for their friendship and hospitality, Pauline Parker, Valerie Tarrant and Susan, Peter and Marjorie Johnston, Frank Ford and Günter Gerlach for being there, Hilary McPhee for her continuing encouragement of aspiring writers and her dedication to the pursuit of excellence. Also my agents Bruce Hunter and Jenny Darling and her assistant Donica Bettanin for their tremendous support, interest and enthusiasm, and my editor Nikola Scott for her superb and incisive editing, encouragement and advice. Finally to Graeme Tavendale, illustrator extraordinaire, for bringing my vision to life. Thank you.

  1

  Up and Down the Social Ladder

  REGENCY SOCIETY
>
  The true Regency lasted only nine years. It began on 5 February 1811 when George, Prince of Wales, was officially sworn in as Regent and ended on 31 January 1820 when he was proclaimed King George IV. Yet the term ‘Regency’ is frequently used to describe the period of English history between the years 1780 and 1830, because the society and culture during these years were undeniably marked by the influence of the man who would become George IV. With the final years of the Napoleonic Wars and the enormous impact of industrialisation the Regency was an era of change and unrest as well as one of glittering social occasions, celebrations and extraordinary achievement in art and literature. Artists such as Thomas Lawrence, John Constable and Joseph Turner created iconic paintings which today constitute a tangible record of some of the people and places of the period, while many of England’s greatest writers produced some of their most enduring works during the Regency. The writings of Jane Austen, Walter Scott, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley continue to stand as a testament to the romance, colour and vitality of the times. In many ways the Regency period was also a reflection of the character and personality of the Prince Regent himself who was one of the most flamboyant and cultured of all English monarchs. His passion for art, architecture, music, literature and hedonistic living set the tone for the era and caused his Regency to be for ever linked with the high-living, mayfly class that was the ton.

  Known for his flamboyance and high living, the Prince Regent, or ‘Prinny’,

  gave his title to one of the most colourful eras in England’s history.

  The Regency world was highly structured and the conventions attached to Regency life were so numerous and intricate that usually only those born and bred into upper-class circles knew and understood them. Above all, it was intensely class-conscious: the ton (from the French phrase le bon ton, meaning ‘in the fashionable mode’ and also known as Polite Society or the Upper Ten Thousand) lived a privileged, self-indulgent life; birth and family were vital to social acceptance, and social behaviour was determined by a complex set of rules of varying flexibility, with different codes of behaviour for men and women. It was an era of manners, fashion and propriety, and yet, for the upper class, it was also a time of extraordinary excess, extravagance and indulgence. By contrast the middle class was more interested in morality than manners and often found it difficult to follow the distinctive behaviour of the upper class.

  THE SOCIAL LADDER

  During the Regency the social ladder had a fixed, inflexible hierarchy within the nobility and an almost equally rigid class structure within the rest of the population:

  Monarch

  Royalty

  Aristocracy

  Gentry

  Middle Classes

  Artisans and Tradespeople

  Servants

  Labouring Poor

  Paupers

  Class was defined primarily by birth, title, wealth, property and occupation, and there were many distinctions—some subtle, others obvious—within each level of society. While visiting his country seat of Stanyon in The Quiet Gentleman, Gervase Frant, seventh Earl of St Erth, met his near neighbour, Sir Thomas Bolderwood, and was at first unsure of this jovial gentleman’s exact social standing. Although Sir Thomas’s countenance, wealth, title, home and family all indicated good breeding, his manners lacked polish and there was a certain rough quality in his speech, the result—as he informed the Earl—of having spent most of his life in India. Discerning one’s own place on the broader social scale was not all that difficult but knowing the exact position in relation to someone else of the same class was not always easy; although Mrs Bagshot in Friday’s Child was in no doubt about the sudden (and infuriating) elevation in her young cousin Hero’s social status after Hero’s unexpected marriage to a peer. Ancestry was key, as were property and money (most obviously shown by the number of servants and carriages one had), although wealth became a less reliable guide to a person’s breeding after industrialisation and the expansion of the Empire. Acceptance into the ton was often a question of degree, as discovered by the villainous Sir Montagu Revesby in Friday’s Child when his elegant air and address were enough to see him admitted into some fashionable circles but he was still excluded by many of those at the heart of the ton who considered him ‘a commoner’. During the Regency, the advent of the new rich—those industrialists, financiers, merchants, manufacturers, bankers, nabobs and even admirals of the fleet who had garnered enough wealth to buy their way into the upper echelons of society—created a new complication for the class-conscious aristocrat. An heiress was always an attractive prize but marriage between a member of the peerage and a female whose parents ‘smelled of shop’ had to be very carefully considered before any commitment was made. A scion of a noble house might find himself cut off from his inheritance if he persisted in marrying into a much lower social class, as Lord Darracott’s son, Hugh, discovered after he married a weaver’s daughter in The Unknown Ajax.

  Members of the aristocracy and the gentry might be different in birth and title but between them they were the ruling class. A well-bred country squire of ancient lineage but with no more than a baronetcy or a knighthood to his name, if that, might meet a duke or an earl on equal terms (particularly if he was a neighbour) and show him deference only on formal occasions. In Sylvester, Squire Orde met the Duke of Salford on his home ground and, while being perfectly polite, did not hesitate to speak his mind or censure the Duke’s actions. During the Regency the nobility was made up of members of the royal family, peers above the rank of baronet and their families, statesmen and the prelates of the Church of England such as the more powerful bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury (who took precedence over all ranks after the royal family). The gentry included baronets, knights, country landowners (often incredibly wealthy) and gentlemen of property and good birth but no title. Robert Beaumaris of Arabella was plain Mister but his family’s ancient lineage (his cousin was a duke and his grandmother the Dowager Duchess), his fortune, breeding and address amply compensated for his lack of title and made him one of the most eligible bachelors in England. Apart from manners and breeding, one of the main distinguishing factors between the upper class and the upper levels of the middle class was the need for the latter to actually earn their living.

  The middle class was growing fast in Regency England as increasing numbers of financiers, merchants and industrialists were added to the wealthy doctors, lawyers, engineers, higher clergy and farmers who, among others, comprised the upper ranks of the class. To be in the middle ranks of society usually meant ownership of some kind of property—land, livestock or tools—and the ability to earn a regular and reliable income. The number of servants employed in a house and the type of carriage(s) and number of horses one owned were also useful class indicators, although some among the new middle class, such as the affluent merchant Jonathan Chawleigh in A Civil Contract, tended to mistake opulence for elegance and an excess of food or finery as a sign of wealth and status. But the middle class was a very large and diverse group and it also included shopkeepers, teachers, builders, the lesser clergy, members of the government administration, clerks, innkeepers and even some of the servant class. Property was really the main factor that separated the lowest level of the middle class from the better-off among the labouring poor.

  ROYALTY

  George III’s intermittent bouts of madness eventually saw his son made Regent.

  The English monarchy was an ancient institution based on the principles of heredity and primogeniture, which meant that the eldest male child inherited the throne on the death of the monarch. Where the son predeceased the monarch the right to inherit the throne passed to the son’s eldest male child or, if he had no sons, to his daughter. If the heir to the throne had no children, the next eldest brother became the heir and his children moved into the direct line of succession ahead of their father’s siblings. In the event of there being no male to wear the crown, the
eldest daughter would inherit the throne and become queen. As heir to the throne the Regent’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, was a great favourite with the general populace and many people, including the young and beautiful Fanny, Lady Spenborough, of Bath Tangle, took great interest in keeping up to date with the Princess’s love life and reading accounts of the Princess’s engagement, first to Prince William of Orange and then to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg.

  The succession became a topic of great fascination during the years of the Regency and George IV’s reign. For nearly a century the passage of kings had been fairly straightforward, for the rise of the House of Hanover had seen in 1811 George I ascend the throne in 1714, followed by his son George II in 1727 and his grandson, ‘Farmer’ George III, in 1760. Then the unexpected appearance of George III’s intermittent bouts of madness began to disrupt the sequence. In 1810 his condition deteriorated and George, Prince of Wales, was appointed Regent to rule in his father’s place until the King’s death, when he would himself become king. When the Regent’s heir, his daughter and only child Princess Charlotte, suddenly died in childbirth in 1817 there was a rapid scramble (what Captain Belper in The Foundling called ‘the Heir-to-the-throne Stakes’) among the royal dukes—the Regent’s six brothers—to marry and produce a legitimate heir to the throne.

  THE ARISTOCRACY

  The creation of new peers was usually at the discretion of the sovereign but at different times it could be politically advantageous to win the loyalty of powerful men by the conferring of titles. For much of the Georgian period the peerage had remained largely unchanged but between 1780 and 1832 George III and George IV added one hundred and sixty-six new members to the peerage between them. By 1820 there were three hundred peers in England: eighteen dukes, seventeen marquises, one hundred earls, twenty-two viscounts, one hundred and thirty-four barons and nine peeresses. In addition to this there were many baronets and knights who stood at the head of the gentry class and could count themselves among the aristocracy.