Wellington's Aides-de-Camp

This Friday, 15 June, is the 197th anniversary of the Duchess of Richmond's ball at which the Duke of Wellington learned that Napoleon was attacking not from the west as Wellington had expected but on the Allied Army's eastern flank, trying to separate them from their Prussian allies. Pouring over a map of Belgium in the Duke of Richmond's study, Wellington is said to have declared, "Napoleon has humbugged me." A number of officers joined their regiments straight from the ball and fought the next day at Quatre Bras in their ball dress. Monday, 18 June, is the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo itself.

Both the ball and the battle figure prominently in my latest release, Imperial Scandal. My hero, Malcolm Rannoch, is a diplomat and intelligence agent, but Wellington presses him into servicein the battle delivering messages. I knew early on in the plotting process that I wanted to have Malcolm delivering messages during the battle, and I was very pleased to discover in my research that Wellington is actually said to have pressed civilians into service because so many of his aides-de-camp were wounded. Several of those aides-de-camp are characters in Imperial Scandal and in other fictional accounts of Waterloo, notably Georgette Heyer's brilliant An Infamous Army. One of the challenges of writing Imperial Scandal was bringing them to life as characters who were at once unique to my story and true to the actual people. Here, in honor of the anniversary of Waterloo, are some brief notes about a few of them.

Lieutenant- Colonel Sir Alexander Gordon K.C.B. - younger brother of the diplomat Lord Aberdeen (later foreign secretary and prime minister). He was shot while remonstrating with Wellington to remove himself from fire. Gordon had his leg amputated and later died of his wounds in Wellington's bedchamber at the inn in the village of Waterloo that Wellington had made his Headquarters. Dr. Hume reports that when he informed Wellington of Gordon's death, Wellington said, "Well, thank God, I don't know what it is to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to win one with the loss of so many of one's friends."

Lord Fitzroy Somerset - youngest son of the 5th Duke of Beaufort. He joined Wellington's staff in 1807 and became his military secretary in 1811. In August 1814 he married Emily Harriet Wellesley-Pole, Wellington's niece. She was in Brussels with him and gave birth to a baby daughter just weeks before the battle. Fitzroy was shot in the arm during the battle when he and Wellington were just a hands breadth apart. Fiztroy's right arm had to be amputated. Before they carried it off, he insisted on removing a ring his wife had given him. He quickly learned to write with his left hand and resumed his duties as Wellington's secretary. He was created Baron Raglan in 1852 and given command of the British troops sent to the Crimea in 1854. He died there in 1855 from complications brought on by an attack of dysentery.

Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Fox Canning - Third son of Stratford Canning. Died of a gunshot wound to the stomach in the arms of his friend Lord March late in the battle, a tragic scene which Heyer beautifully dramatizes in An Infamous Army and which I also attempted to recreate in Imperial Scandal.

Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March - eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of Richmond. He was an aide-de-camp to Wellington in the Peninsula and took a musket ball in the chest at Orthez which was never removed. During the Waterloo campaignl he was assigned to the Prince of Orange's staff. He was present at his mother's famous ball. After the news about the French, his sister Georgiana slipped off with him to help pack his things. At Waterloo, his friend Curzon died in his arms and then Colonel Canning later in the battle. Shortly after March carried the wounded Prince of Orange from the field. In 1817 he married Lady Caroline Paget, daughter of the Marquess of Anglesey (formerly the Earl of Uxbridge) who commanded the cavalry at Waterloo. March succeeded his father as Duke of Richmond and was active in Tory politics.

Have cameos by real historical figures in historical novels inspired you to research the real people? Writers, what particular challenges have you faced writing about historical figures who have also appeared in other historical novels?

Blind Spots Revisited

Last week, I blithely blathered on about historical blind spots and the odd anomaly of my writing a book set in 1920s Kenya when my interest has always tended towards earlier time periods.  (The Ashford Affair!  Coming to a bookstore near you on April 2, 2013!)  But as I was reading through the comments on that post, something struck me.  My 1920s book wasn’t an anomaly after all.  Every single major project I’ve undertaken has been a blind spot. 

I spent years declaring loudly that I was a court intrigue kind of girl and the one part of the Tudor/Stuart continuum that didn’t interest me was the Civil War and Interregnum—and then I went and spent years working on a dissertation about Royalist conspiracies in the latter half of the English Civil War.  I declared my allegiance to the eighteenth century and turned up my nose at the eighteenth—and then went and wrote a series of books set in 1803/1804.  The book of which I’m proudest, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, is set in another of those blind spots: Hyderabad, in 1804. 

I could argue that these were all flukes, but I think there’s something else going on here.  Blind spots provide a challenge.  There’s a numbing feeling of familiarity to those areas we already know well, or believe we know well.  I may adore the intricacies of Scottish politics in the mid-sixteenth century, but I’ve never been able to successfully set a story there.  Trust me, I tried.

My theory—and you can contest this—is that it has to do with the joy of discovery.  When we learn about a period specifically for a story, it’s all new and fresh and exciting.  The details stand out to us in a way the details of more familiar areas don’t.  That very freshness enables us to convey the scene with more clarity to readers.  I believe that sense of excitement that comes with discovery comes through, too, a key ingredient for a successful story.

I don’t just do this as a writer; I wallow in my blind spots as a reader, too.  Some of my favorite novels are set in places about which I knew relatively little until I read them.  One of the prime examples of this is M.M. Kaye’s Trade Wind.  I knew nothing of Zanzibar until I opened those pages and read of Hero Hollis’s fascination with Zanzibar… “fair is this land”….  Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency holds that same kind of fascination, as does Michelle Moran's The Heretic Queen and Gillian Bradshaw’s Horses of Heaven, which is set in Afghanistan in the 2nd century BC, an era and a place that was a complete blank to me before opening that book.  The pleasure in reading those books was heightened by the excitement of discovering new worlds, represented in vivid, sensory detail.

So I say, revel in your blind spots!  Today’s blind spot may be tomorrow’s great discovery.

Which are your favorite blind spot books?

Brigands calling themselves workers

I had a post all planned about the Stronsay Beast (the corpse of a mysterious sea monster that washed ashore in Orkney in 1808), but yesterday I was wandering through the Fremont market where I work and came across this:

The text reads "Barrière de la Conférence Incendiée, le 12 Juillet 1789." (The Conference Gate Burned, July 12 1789). Here's a less blurry one that doesn't show the frame, if you click on it, you can see it up close.

In the right-hand corner it says "No. 10," and small text along the bottom edge reads "Prieur inv. & del." and "Berthault sculp." Prieur inventeur et delineateur (creater and artist), and Berthault sculpteur (engraver), I assume? 

The engraving was originally published in Collection complete des Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française.

The engravings were based on drawings created through the Revolution by Prieur and other artists, first published in 1798 (or, as it said itself, "Year 7") and reprinted several times. Pierre-Gabriel Berthault engraved over 100 of the 144 images (he later directed Napoleon's Description of Egypt). Jean-Louis Prieur, who did many of the drawings, had already been guillotined back in 1795, but Berthault lived to the ripe old age of 94! (He retired in 1816, already nearly 70, and two years later wrote to the Minister of the Interior asking for a complimentary copy of his last book, signing himself "Uncle Berthault." He didn't get it.)

To see a nice high-res version of the engraving in black and white, go here, and to see more engravings in the series, go here. I have no idea how old my copy of the engraving is or if it was made from the original plates, but it does look hand-colored! If I'm right, that suggests to me that it's fairly old. 

July 12, 1789 is widely considered the first day of the French Revolution. Among other things, citizens sacked and burned 40 of the 55 hated new Customs Houses built into the wall around Paris (a 1785 pamphlet called them "a monument of slavery and despotism"). While the engraving, to me, seems pretty celebratory of the riot, the commentary by Chamfort which accompanied the engraving in Tableaux was extremely critical, calling the crowd "brigands calling themselves workers" and including a lengthy diatribe on the loss of the Customs House:

We have chosen [...]the Barrière de la Conférence; it was the one whose destruction left the most regrets, when public terror was calmed, and when calm had led to reflection. Art lovers still regret the colossal figures[...]which particularly decorated this barrier: they were allegorical figures of Brittany and Normandy, who seemed to point out the route which led from the capital to these two provinces. The fire barely altered them, but the rage of the arsonists, determined to destroy all, led them to use iron, which cruelly supplemented the impotence of the fire, and erased the form when the substance could not be consumed.

(Go here for the full commentary in the original French.)

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Odd Regency corsets

Common Regency Corset c. 1810-1820

I thought I’d feature a few of the more unusual extant Regency era corsets here today. The most common corsets of the day were long (going from over the bust to near the hip bones) and had a hard busk of wood, ivory, silver, or steal, in the front. They were also either corded to add stiffness, or lightly boned (personally, I’ve found that cording doesn’t do much to keep the corset stiff, and corded corsets tend to creep up uncomfortably). This first pic to the right is the classic, common corset of the day. This is what the ladies of the ton would have been wearing.



Wrapping Regency Corset c. 1800-1810



We know from the records of workhouses that corsets were considered so basic and so important that they were among the items that were provided for the women who’d had to fall back on charity (and the workhouses didn’t provide anything that they didn’t deem an absolute necessity). But what might the corsets of the poor looked like? Or those of the maids, the farm laborers, and the other women who worked and might have done well with a bit more freedom? Well, there are actually a few, clearly homemade, versions out there in various collections.

Front-lacimg Regency Corset c. 1800-1820

This first example is not boned in any way. It laces at the very top in back, but the bits that wrap around the waist (and would have pinned shut) provide most of the constraint and support. This is an example that a working woman could have got herself in and out of without assistance if she needed to do so.

This is another odd one. It’s solid in the back, laces over the stomach, and would have pinned shut across the breasts. With this one, I wonder if it was meant as a nursing corset?

So yes, while I do harp on the fact that all heroines SHOULD be wearing corsets, and that they need assistance to get in and out of them, it’s possible that if you’re writing a lower-class woman, she might we wearing the Regency equivalent of 18^th century jumps (soft, light, meant for lounging about and working in).