News from a Country Town in 1815

I have just acquired a copy of the Norwich Mercury and Yarmouth, Lynn and Ipswich Herald for Saturday December 9th 1815. I love old newspapers and I particularly enjoy regional ones where the preoccupations of the readers are not always those of London folk.

 

These two advertisments caught my eye first. The top one is for a new stagecoach "The Day"  running out of the Rampant Horse inn in Norwich. Rampant Horse Street is still there, although the inn is long gone, and you often hear visitors commenting on the strange name. The proprietors promise the journey can be done in fourteen hours - and assure us there are only four "insides" or inside passengers  for added comfort. The owners include Richard Gurney - doubtless a relative of the Gurney banking family and Ann Nelson & Son - a good Norfolk name and an interesting example of the involvement of women in the stagecoach business.

Below it is a charming ilustration of a "Thieves' Alarm" - advertised as being more humane than man traps and spring guns. The inventor has patented something that looks like a cross between a trip wire and a shop door bell - yours for a mere 30 shillings.

There are two adverts for schools in the paper. Here is the one for young ladies -

 

 

Miss Ditchell does not give any information about the numbers of young ladies at her establishment, although the range of ages suggests a reasonable size, nor does she tell us what is taught. For 30 guineas (£31 and ten shillings) I would expect a varied curriculum!

 

1815 was Waterloo year and there are two items of relevance, plus part of a series on the Life of Wellington. The mayor and town council had obviously got up a collection to buy presentation swords for leading figures in the final campaign against Napoleon and - no doubt quivering with pride - His Worship was able to report back to the council that the Duke of Wellington had written to him -

 

 

 

The court pages, as well as reporting on the health of King George III - still suffering from "madness" - has a brief message from St Helena where Napoleon had just been exiled.

 

 

 

The remark that members of Napoleon's entourage were "heartily sick" of their new abode is not surprising: St Helena was considerd to be a thoroughly unpleasant place.

 

And finally, given recent concern about the quality of food in hospitals, I was interested in the advert inviting tenders to supply the General Hospital at Yarmouth. Virtually everything required, from meat to bread to port wine, must be of the "best". Salt and water must be used for the bread - not sea water; soap must be well-dried before delivery; beer should be of the quality "sold by the brewers to private families at six-pence per gallon"; sago, well sifted and free from dust and the tea must be "good Souchong". It is fascinating to read between the lines and to see to what extent food was adulterated  - milk, for example, must be "neat as it comes from the cow"!

 How much of these admirable provisions actually reached the patients is another matter, of course.

 

 

 

I am now going to settle down with a magnifying glass to read every detail of the scandalous crim.con. ("criminal conversation") case between Sir William Abdy and Lord William Cavendish Bentinck who was accused of seducing Sir William's wife, the natural daughter of Wellington's elder brother the Marquiss of Wellesley.

As this is a family blog I will spare you the details, other than to report that Lord William, after stalking Lady Abdy from London to Paris to Worthing, "rendered the unfortunate object of his illicit passion the most unhappy of women."

 

Louise Allen



 

 

 



 



 

 

 

The Bellerophon: Napoleon's Last Stage

Last Saturday I attended the regional chapter meeting of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in which I was fortunate enough to hear an informative talk by my fellow UK Historical blogger, Nicola Cornick. The topic was the legend of the hero, and one of the aspects she discussed was the way real-life heroes contribute to creating their own legend.

The talk reminded me of a scene in my novel, The Darcy Cousins,
in which Georgiana and her cousin Clarissa take a trip to Plymouth Sound to catch a glimpse of Napoleon on board The Bellerophon, where he was held after surrendering to Captain Maitland.

When they arrive in Plymouth, it’s almost impossible for them to procure a boat, since the sea around The Bellerophon is packed with other spectators eager to catch a glimpse of the defeated emperor. Georgiana and her party consider it a stroke of good fortune when they are finally able to make use of a fisherman’s boat, even though it reeks of fish.

Captain Maitland describes the crowd on one particular day, the 30th of July 1815, as “a crush” – with over one thousand boats surrounding the ship, and each boat containing at least eight people. At least eight thousand people surrounding the boat! But those weren’t the only spectators. The shore was crammed with people using opera glasses or telescopes to try and spot “Boney.”

Napoleon played to the crowd by establishing a time for his appearance: 6:30 in the evening. The crew played along by holding up boards containing periodic “updates” that described Napoleon’s actions. The whole affair was in fact a huge media event – whether it was a letter by Napoleon protesting his treatment that was “leaked” to the press, or Sir Charles Lock Eastlake’s painting of Napoleon on board the ship, which was immediately exhibited to enormous success. In an age when there was no photography and no television, the painting served to provide the public with that “eyewitness” account for those who were not there to see Napoleon themselves.

It was Napoleon’s last chance to play in front of an audience. A few days later, he was transferred to The Northumberland, and taken to St Helena where his only audience were a few hundred people and a desolate rock.

Monica Fairview

A trilogy in four parts!

I have just finished writing the third story in my Regency trilogy, The Aikenhead Honours so I can now give you provisional publication dates.

In the USA and Canada, the three stories are to be published in consecutive months. Dominic’s story — His Cavalry Lady — should be published in March 2009; Leo’s story — His Reluctant Mistress — should be published in April 2009; Jack’s story, the third (but not final!) part of the trilogy — His Forbidden Liaison — should be out in May 2009.

In the UK, His Cavalry Lady was published last month (September 2009). The hardbacks of books two and three will be out in the same months as the North American editions. The paperbacks will be in the shops two months later: that’s His Reluctant Mistress in June 2009 and His Forbidden Liaison in July 2009, though they will probably be available earlier on the Mills & Boon website.

I’m afraid I have no information yet about dates in other markets such as Australia/NZ but I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything. And I’m sorry that those UK readers who have already read Dominic’s story will have to wait so long for the next one. I admit it’s my fault; I just couldn’t write them any faster.

As I said, this is to be a trilogy in four parts! Yes, I do know that’s a contradiction in terms. It happened like this. There are actually four heroes in these books: the three Aikenhead brothers (Dominic, Leo and Jack) and Ben, Jack’s best friend. Together, the four of them make up the Aikenhead Honours spying ring. I hadn’t intended to give Ben his own story, but my editor suggested I might like to write it as a novella, for Harlequin’s new historical e-book line, Undone. So that’s what I’m planning to do. And that’s why this trilogy will, in the end, have four parts.

I hope that you enjoy them all. There is already an extract of Dominic’s book on my website. My next task is to put up extracts of Leo’s book and Jack’s. As for Ben’s story… Well, I have to write that one first! I’m hoping that the e-book will be published at the same time as Jack’s story, in May 2009, on the Harlequin website, so that you don’t have to wait to find out what happens. After all, it's potentially a matter of life and death, since he has a bullet in him...

Joanna
www.joannamaitland.com

TAKING THE RIGHT ROAD

I spent a fascinating day in the Maps room at the British Library recently. I needed to know what Marseilles and Lyons looked like in 1815 for the third book in the Aikenhead Honours Trilogy.

Jack’s story, His Forbidden Liaison, starts in Marseilles where Jack and his fellow-spy Ben have been sent by the Duke of Wellington to try to suss out the extent of support for Napoleon. Suddenly, their careful plans are thrown up in the air. It’s not a question of whether there might be support for Napoleon in the future. He’s actually landed, only a few miles along the coast!

The story takes them from Marseilles, to Lyons, and then to Paris. All the while, Napoleon is making the same progess from Mediterranean coast to capital, gathering enthusiastic support along the way. It’s an exciting, and dangerous story, for my hero and his friend. But they do have help along the way, from Marguerite, a remarkable Lyons silk-weaver, with some interesting uses for a brass candlestick.

Lyons seems to have had a complete make-over after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. In 1813, on the south end of the peninsula between the rivers Rhone and Saone, there was a huge oval place des victoires, a grand tree-lined cours impérial leading up to a semi-circular monument, and a projected imperial palace with huge formal gardens. A year or so after Waterloo, there was almost nothing on the map but fields. All traces of imperial grandeur had gone.

My most urgent research task was to identify the roads around the old port in Marseilles. I had spent a year in the city as a student, but that was no help at all. The Marseilles where I lived was, and is, huge and sprawling. I needed to know how much of it was there in 1815.

What I found was fascinating. There was a maze of twisting medieval streets on the north side of the port, while on the south side, a much more modern and spacious layout had been adopted, with a canal running round what looked to be warehouses. The famous broad street running up into the city from the old port, La Canebière, was there, but wasn’t tree-lined as it is now.

And the names had changed, of course. The city end of the old port was called the quai impérial in 1814, but had become the quai de Monsieur by 1820. (It’s now the quai des Belges.) The place impériale of 1814 had become, predictably, the place royale by 1820. One which hadn’t changed by 1820 was the tiny place du cul de boeuf, which has a rather rude translation, I’m afraid. It amused me so much that I’ve used it in my story.

My favourite, though, was further out beyond the gate in the city walls, on the road north to Aix-en-Provence. There I found the place pentagone. Of course, with that name, it was not square at all, but a huge non-symmetrical space. However, its previous name had been place des 13 escaliers, the square of 13 staircases. Doesn’t that conjure up a wonderful image?

Joanna

Napoleon Gets Everywhere!

I am currently working on the third book of the Aikenhead Honours Trilogy. It’s the story of the youngest of the Aikenhead brothers, Lord Jack Aikenhead, and it’s set in France during the Hundred Days between Napoleon’s return from Elba and the Battle of Waterloo. The story is called His Forbidden Liaison and will be published next year.

Napoleon certainly got around Europe. There are reminders of him all over the place. I’ve blogged before about his impact on Venice, where the French conquest ended the Venetian Republic in 1797.

Recently I was on the Danube, researching the Congress of Vienna and the various locations for the second book of my trilogy, His Reluctant Mistress. Vienna is a wonderful city and I’d like to go again, to spend a lot more time in the places we had to race through, like the Spanish Riding School and the Belvedere.

While we were on the Danube, we also spent half a day in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. In the days of Napoleon, it was called Pressburg, and was part of the Austrian Empire. It’s a delightful city, very small, but well worth a visit. The old part is like a smaller version of Prague with the same types of buildings and the same sweetie colours to them.




My surprise in Bratislava was in the main square, outside the French embassy, where I encountered this:



And from the front he looks like this, calmly gazing across the square. What I don’t understand, though, is why one foot is bare, and the other is booted. Anyone got any suggestions?



The locals don’t seem to object to his presence the way the Venetians did. Maybe it’s their sense of humour that accounts for the bare foot? That humour is certainly everywhere. Here’s my favourite example of Bratislava sculpture. I came round a corner, and there it was, on the edge of the pavement, coming out of a manhole. It made everyone smile.



Joanna
http://www.joannamaitland.com

TRAVELLING IN REGENCY TIMES

I’ve just finished His Reluctant Mistress, the second book of The Aikenhead Honours Trilogy. Much of the story takes place during the Congress of Vienna but it involves quite a lot of travelling. How did people get from A to B, and how long did it take, especially when the weather was bad?

We tend to assume that travel in those days was very slow. It didn’t have to be. When the Duke of Wellington was sent to take command of the allied forces in Flanders, he left Vienna on 29th March 1815, arriving in Brussels on 4th April. His mode of travel was not easy, though. He travelled by carriage with two companions, Colonel Fremantle and fourteen-year-old Lennox. Their meals were cold, though splendid: foie gras and fine claret are mentioned. They were allowed exactly 4 hours of sleep a night. Wellington remained as well turned out as ever. No wonder he was called the Beau. But the other two slept by the fire in their clothes and probably looked thoroughly disreputable by the time they reached their destination.

Even ladies could travel at an astonishing pace when it suited them. The Duchess of Courland, ex-mistress of King Louis XVIII’s foreign minister, Prince Talleyrand, was in Paris on 19th March 1815 when the King fled the city for exile in Flanders. Napoleon was reported to be approaching Paris. (The reports were right. The following day, Napoleon was carried shoulder-high into the Tuileries palace.) The Duchess fled for Vienna to seek refuge with her daughter and Prince Talleyrand. She reached there late on Friday 24th March, having covered the distance in just 5 days. Her daughter was less than pleased to discover that, in her panic to escape, the Duchess had left her two small grandsons behind!


Joanna

The Dangerous Mr Ryder

The Dangerous Mr Ryder, the first of my new series Those Scandalous Ravenhursts, is out this month, published by Mills & Boon (July in the US).

Imagine a tiny Grand Duchy clinging to the mountains near the SE French frontier. Imagine it is 1815 and Napoleon has just landed from Elba and is marching on Paris. Imagine a castle towering over a vertiginous drop to the river below.
It is night and a rope dangles from the battements into the void…

No-one had told him that she was beautiful. Jack Ryder crouched precariously in a stone window embrasure two hundred feet above the ravine river bed and stared into the candlelit room. Inside, the woman he had been sent to find paced to and fro like an angry cat.
He kept his eyes fixed on the image beyond the glass as he wedged himself more securely into his slippery niche. Below, the void beneath the castle was shrouded in merciful darkness, the faint sound of the river floating upwards. Although his whole body was aware of it, he ignored the cold fingers of fear playing up and down his spine, knowing full well that if he let his imagination have full rein he would never be able to move at all. His studded boots ground on the stone, and he froze for a moment, but the sound did not seem to reach her.
Jack gave himself a mental shake and began to work on the knot that secured the end of the long coil of rope around his waist. As it came free he gave it a jerk, flicking it outwards, and the whole length detached itself from the battlement high above and fell out of sight into the void.
Now his only way down was through that window. Despite his perilous position Jack had no intention of going through it until he had a chance to size up the woman inside. The woman he had been sent to bring back to England by whatever means he found necessary, including force.
It was for her own good, as well as in the interests of both countries, they had explained at Whitehall. The officials had spoken with the air of men who were glad it was not they who had to attempt to convince the lady of this. They had told him a number of things about Her Serene Highness the Dowager Grand Duchess Eva de Maubourg. Intelligent, stubborn, anti-Napoleonic, haughty, independent, difficult and demanding was how she had been summed up by the various men who had gathered to deliver the hasty briefing, fifteen days before. Half French, they had added gloomily, as though that summed up the problem.
She had not left the Duchy since her marriage and was likely to be near impossible to move now, the officials added. That was all right; he was used to being asked to do the near impossible.
But there had been no mention of darkly vivid looks, of a curvaceous figure or the lithe grace of a caged panther. And Jack was having trouble believing she could possibly be the mother of a nine year old son. It had to be the thick glass in the window panes.
She was alone in the room; he had waited long enough to be convinced of that. Jack shifted his position, focusing his mind on opening the window and not on what would happen if he lost his balance. The flat of a slim blade slid easily enough between the casement and the frame. Thankfully the window opened inwards, for its height above the floor would make it impossible to use otherwise. He eased it ajar by inches, waiting long minutes between each adjustment so there would be no sudden drop of temperature or gust of wind to alarm her. If she screamed this would likely end in bloodshed - he did not intend that it would be his.
Grand Duchess Eva ceased to pace and sank down in front of a writing desk, her back to the window, her head in her hands. Jack wondered if she was crying, then started, with potentially lethal result, when she banged her fist down on the leather desk top and swore colourfully in English. He could only admire her vocabulary: he was tempted to echo it.
It was definitely time to get off this widow ledge. He grasped the frame, put his feet through and swung himself down into the room. There was no way he could land silently, not dropping eight foot onto a stone flagged floor in nailed boots. She spun round on her chair, gripping the back of it, her face reflecting the gamut of emotions from shock, puzzlement, fear and finally, he was impressed to see, imperious anger masking all else. They had not told him about her courage.
‘Who the devil are you?’ she demanded in unaccented English, getting to her feet with perfect deportment, as though rising from a throne. Her right hand, Jack noted, was behind her: he searched his memory for his survey of the room. Ah yes, the paper knife. A resourceful lady.
‘You speak English excellently,’ he commented. He knew from his briefing that she was half English, so it was only to be expected, but it was a more tactful beginning to their conversation than Put down that knife before I make you! might be. ‘But how did you know I would understand you?’
She looked down her nose at him. Jack registered dark eyes, thinly elegant eyebrows arched in distain, a red mouth with a fullness which betrayed more passion than she was perhaps comfortable with and one deep brown curl, disturbed from her coiffure and lying tantalisingly against her white shoulder. He focused on those eyes and banished the fleeting speculation about just how the skin under that curl would feel.
‘You will address me as Your Serene Highness,’ she said coolly. ‘I was thinking in English,’ she added, almost as an afterthought.
‘Your Serene Highness,’ he swept her a bow, conscious of his clothing as he did so. He was dressed for the purpose of shinning down castle walls, not making court bows, but he managed it with a grace that had one of those dark brows lifting in surprise. ‘My name is Jack Ryder.’ He had wrestled with whether or not to tell her his real name and decided against it. His nom de guerre would be safer in the event they were captured.
‘Then you are English Mr Ryder?’
‘Yes ma’am.’
‘So you have not come to kill me?’


The Outrageous Lady Felsham, the second Ravenhurst title will be out in May.

Louise Allen

http://www.louiseallenregency.co.uk/

Pan Tadeusz

How do you fancy watching a sweeping Regency epic, full of dashing officers, handsome counts and ladies dressed in the height of Empire fashion? Set against a backdrop of castles, country houses and glorious, rolling countryside?


The film of the epic story in verse, Pan Tadeusz (trans: Sir Thaddeus), written by Adam Mickiewicz and first published in 1834, is set among the Polish nobility in 1811-12. It is one of the most widely-read pieces of Polish literature, studied in schools and Mickiewicz is regarded as one of European literature's greatest poets, as we might regard Shakespeare. The 1999 film by noted director Andrej Wadja, is available on DVD with English subtitles.

Ah, sometimes research can be hard work, but watching the film of Pan Tadeusz was a delight and I'd recommend it to any fans of the period. Wadja paints a sweeping canvas, and in fact the film won awards for its cinematography. In 1811, many in the Polish nobility are waiting in hope that Napoleon is on his way to liberate them (Poland was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at this time) on his way to Russia.


In the meantime, this does not prevent them squabbling among themselves, as two families revive an old feud over land. The story combines tragedy and comedy. And there is love on the horizon in the form of a budding romance between the dashing Pan Tadeusz and Zosia, daughter of the other noble family. Will love heal the feud between the families?

Kate Allan