Bells on Bob Tails

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

John Cordrey's 1806 A Gentleman with his Pair of Bays Harnessed to a Curricle shows regency carriage horses with stylishly docked tails.

It's the time of year for decorations and presents and carols--including the first carol every child learns, "Jingle Bells." I was thinking just today about this line from the song:

Bells on bob tails ring
Making spirits rise.

So what is a bob tail?

A bob tail is a horse that's had its tail docked, or cut short. Nowadays,

Sailor, the winner of the 1820 Derby, is one example of a "bob tail nag" used in racing.

one doesn't often see a "bob tail nag" (as the song Camptown Races puts it), but during the regency bobbed tails were practically de rigeur on quality horseflesh, especially carriage horses. At first, docking was done for practical reasons, to prevent a horse from entangling its tail in its harness. The practice was even thought to benefit the horse's health--removing the caudal (tail) vertebrae was thought to make a horse's back stronger. Eventually, the reasons for docking evolved from simple practicality into a matter of taste and fashion. Not just carriage horses but also riding horses, hunters and racehorses routinely had their tails bobbed.

In this image of foxhunting, Full Cry, every one of the hunters has a bob tail.

(It wasn't just horses that had their tails docked, either. It was formerly common to dock the tails of all working dogs. The practice was meant to prevent injury to dogs when hunting [as when spaniels charged into deep brush after a bird] and fighting [for example, when bulldogs were still engaged in "baiting" bulls for sport]. Though the practice of docking is now illegal in the UK, until 1796 working dogs were actually taxed if their tails weren't docked. Docking the tails of certain breeds is still common in the US, where in many rural areas dogs are used in field sports like hunting.)

As "Jingle Bells" suggests, horses' harnesses were often decorated in the winter with sleigh bells--the "bells on bob tails" that ring in the song. And could there be any more charming sound that sleigh bells at Christmas time?

Alyssa Everett's newest regency romance is A Tryst With Trouble, the story of an arrogant man's man and an outspoken spinster who must join forces to solve a deadly mystery. It joins her first two regencies, Lord of Secrets and Ruined by Rumor. Alyssa hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you.

Regency Millinery: Blood, Sweat, and Possibly Tears

Earlier this month, I headed off to Perrysburg, Ohio, for a weekend educational opportunity I'd been anticipating for months: a regency bonnet-making workshop taught by historical milliner extraordinaire Lydia Fast.

I'd always wanted to try my hand at making a regency bonnet, and I thought it would be good research for those times when my fictional characters discuss millinery matters. Making a bonnet from scratch is a time-consuming process, and I'd already learned that workshop attendees frequently don't finish their bonnets during the workshop. Lydia also warned me that the class was an advanced workshop, while I'd never tried a millinery project before. But as long as Lydia was willing to allow me to attend, I was eager to learn.

Lydia isn't just a skilled craftswoman, she's a real artist. Her bonnets are gorgeous, and each has an average of 30 hours of work invested in it. (That's 30 of Lydia's hours--for a novice like me, you can pretty much double the time required to finish a bonnet.) Here are a few of her creations:

Aren't the fabrics and trims Lydia uses gorgeous? Sorry the photo doesn't show the bonnet linings, because they're equally lovely. (Edited to add: Lydia tells me the brown bonnet at upper left was actually made at last year's workshop by Tonya, one of the other attendees. I think I knew this at one point, but neglected to make a note of it. My apologies, Tonya, and your work is equally beautiful!)

Here's Lydia herself, modeling a bonnet she made during the workshop:

Lydia tends to gravitate toward fall colors, which isn't surprising since they definitely suit her.

I decided to make an 1809-1817 style poke bonnet. Each workshop participant received a kit that included buckram (mesh permeated with glue to stiffen it), pellon (a heavy interfacing used to cover the rough buckram), wire for shaping, crinoline tape, and mull (batting used to soften the lines of the buckram form). A well made bonnet has up to nine layers of construction: buckram, pellon, wire, crinoline tape, mull, fashion covering, lining, and trim--not to mention the muslin drawstring liner sewn inside the crown. Bonnet construction also involves a variety of hand stitches: running stitches, whip stitches, buttonhole stitches, overlapping backstitches, and the ladder stitch that makes the finishing invisible. When it comes to quality workmanship, Lydia's method doesn't cut any corners, but Lydia and the other attendees were patient with my newbie cluelessness.

After tracing a paper pattern for later use when cutting our fashion covering fabric, we sandwiched the buckram pieces between layers of pellon, wired them, encased the wires with crinoline tape, then assembled and sewed the pieces together. I ended up with a form that looked like this:

My buckram bonnet form. From this point on, the sewing is mostly by hand rather than by machine.

The next steps involve covering the buckram form with mull, and then covering that with fashion fabric, including the silk lining for the brim. I'd bought ivory silk for my brim lining, and wisely chose to cover the outside of my bonnet in velvet--I say wisely because velvet is a pretty forgiving fabric, and the texture helped disguise my overly tight hand stitching. Due to my inexperience (and boneheaded attempts to wind a machine bobbin with thread made for hand quilting), I was several steps behind the other attendees, who were all re-enactors skilled in costuming. But I did reach my goal for the weekend, which was to get far enough along in my bonnet construction that I could finish the project at home. I left the workshop with the top of the crown and the bonnet brim covered in velvet, and when I got home I pinned and pleated the brim lining, like this:

You can see I've covered the top and outer brim of the bonnet in red velvet before stitching in the brim lining. My bonnet looks slightly squashed on one side, because I was a bit too forceful with it. Fortunately, I was able to reshape the buckram later with a steam iron.

The next step in bonnet construction is to cover the sides of the crown, which on a typical regency bonnet has that distinctive stovepipe shape. Here's Lydia, demonstrating how:

Action shot! Lydia gives the newcomers instruction in sewing a bonnet covering with invisible "magic fairy stitches."

I had a great time at Lydia's workshop. The other attendees were all members of the Jane Austen Society, and it was a joy to be around ladies who knew so much about history, and fashion history in particular. Fun fact: Lydia has seen a number of extant regency bonnets, and she reports that the workmanship in them was frequently poor. I learned a lot, including that it's almost impossible to make a regency bonnet without bleeding on it. (I stuck myself several times with pins, and poked myself more than once trying to pull my needle through the stiff buckram).

So how did my regency poke bonnet turn out? In the end, I was pretty happy with the actual construction, though not quite so happy with the job I did trimming it.

I went with a primary color scheme, including blue piping along the crown and brim, but I don't think the ribbon is wide enough to suit the regency proportions.

Part of our workshop included a field trip to a shop that sells vintage ribbon, and I bought some lovely and rather expensive ribbon there, but when I got home that ribbon just seemed too dark against the red velvet. Instead, I ended up using some inexpensive plaid ribbon from my local fabric store, and though I like the brighter color, the new ribbon doesn't have the right visual impact. I wanted to have a finished bonnet photo for this blog post, but I can always re-trim my bonnet later--something any regency heroine worth her salt would have known how to do.

Because millinery work is so time consuming, it's not for everyone. But I found it relaxing to sit and sew, and the best part about making a bonnet is that it's a small-scale project with boundless opportunities for creative expression. I'm already planning to tackle another bonnet once the holiday rush is over. Maybe something in blue...

Alyssa Everett's newest regency romance is A Tryst With Trouble, the story of an arrogant man's man and an outspoken spinster who must join forces to solve a deadly mystery. It joins her first two regencies, Lord of Secrets and Ruined by Rumor. Alyssa hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you.

Angels and Geese for Michaelmas

Last year, I blogged about the feast of Harvest Home, a celebration of the end of the agricultural season. It tended to fall close to another celebration, this one of both ecclesiastical and bureaucratic significance: Michaelmas.

Guido Reni's 1635 "The Archangel Michael Defeating Satan" shows the angel expelling the rebellious Lucifer from Heaven.

Though Harvest Home was a movable feast, coinciding with the full moon, Michaelmas (pronounced MICK-el-mas) always falls on September 29. In the Anglican calendar, it's the feast day of St. Michael the Archangel.

Michael, the patron saint of soldiers and the sick and suffering, is the most powerful of all the angels, one of only two archangels (along with Gabriel) in Anglican theology. Michael is a warrior-angel, the leader of God's army; in painting and sculpture, he's nearly always depicted wearing armor and carrying a sword, and sometimes bearing a shield with the Latin inscription Quis ut Deus--Latin for Who is like God?, the Hebrew meaning of his name. He often stands with either a dragon or Satan beneath his foot. This is because in Revelation, "Michael and his angels" are said to have "cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him" (Revelation 12:7-9).

But historically, the significance of St. Michael's day in British life has more to do with practical matters than sacred ones. In addition to lending its name to the autumn academic term at Cambridge and Oxford, Michaelmas was also one of the four quarter-days, dates on which accounts were settled--rents paid, servants hired or let go, leases renewed, allowances handed out and debts collected. (The other three quarter days also fall near the end of the calendar seasons: Lady Day on March 25, Midsummer Day on June 24, and Christmas on December 25.)

Servants were often hired on Michaelmas, and many villages held "Mop Fairs," hiring fairs in which those looking for work would present themselves with the tools of their trade. Michaelmas was also a day when local officials such as council members and reeves were elected. The righteous influence of St. Michael was thought to make it an auspicious day to fill such positions.

In "Michaelmas" by Victorian painter Philip Richard Morris, a goose girl drives a gaggle of stubble geese before her.

As with most holidays, certain foods were associated with the day. It was traditional to serve a "stubble goose" on Michaelmas, since geese were in prime condition after having fed among the stubble of the harvested fields. Typically, the goose was a gift from the tenant to his landlord, presented along with his rent payment as a means of currying favor. Dining on goose was thought to ensure prosperity in the coming year. A poem of 1709 includes these lines:

Yet my wife would persuade me (as I am a sinner)
To have a fat goose on St. Michael for dinner:
And then all the year round, I pray you would mind it,
I shall not want money--oh, grant I may find it!

While visiting their brother Edward, Jane Austen even wrote to her sister Cassandra, "I dined upon goose yesterday--which I hope will secure a good sale of my second edition."

It was the last day of the year on which to eat blackberries, owing to the legend that when Satan fell from Heaven, he landed on a blackberry bramble and spit on it, turning the berries bad. Bannock, a type of flat bread, was also traditional in parts of Great Britain, particularly Ireland.

So remember Michaelmas on September 29, and eat goose for good luck. I may just try to roast one myself.

Alyssa Everett's newest regency romance, A Tryst With Trouble, will be released on September 23. It's the story of an arrogant man's man and an outspoken spinster who must join forces to solve a deadly mystery. It will join her current release, Lord of Secrets, and her debut regency, Ruined by Rumor. Alyssa hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you.

A Beauty or Not?

Beauty is, as the saying goes, in the eye of the beholder. Personal preferences guarantee that no matter how gorgeous a woman may be, she's bound to have her detractors. But whether beholders agree or not, both admirers and detractors should be able to recognize the same woman in a portrait and perhaps describe her in similar terms to a police sketch artist. That's why Fanny Crewe (later Lady Crewe) leaves me scratching my head. Was she a beauty or not?

She certainly had the reputation of a beauty. Born in 1748 to the diplomat Fulke Greville and his poetess wife, also named Frances, she married John Crewe, the son of a Cheshire landowner and MP, when she was 18. Crewe had been elected to Parliament the year before (with Fanny's help, he would go on to earn a barony in 1806, making her Lady Crewe), and Fanny quickly became the toast of Whig society. Quite literally the toast--after the politician Charles James Fox won the hotly contested Westminster election of 1784, a race in which Fanny had daringly canvassed for him, the Prince of Wales attended the victory party and raised his glass with the words, "True blue and Mrs. Crewe."

A popular hostess and enthusiastic campaigner, Fanny was the subject of three portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan dedicated his most famous work, The School for Scandal, to Fanny. Sheridan had a beautiful wife of his own (painted more than once by Gainsborough), but that didn't stop him from having an affair with Mrs. Crewe. Sheridan wrote in his dedication:

Vain Muse! couldst thou the humblest sketch create
Of her, or slightest charm couldst imitate--
Could thy blest strain in kindred colours trace
The faintest wonder of her form and face--
Poets would study the immortal line,
And Reynolds own his art subdued by thine...

Here's one of Reynolds's paintings of Fanny before her marriage, in which (as Miss Greville) she's portraying Hebe to her young brother's Cupid:

If my math is correct, Joshua Reynolds painted Fanny as Hebe when she was only thirteen.

She looks quite pretty, and capable of growing into the woman her friend Fanny Burney praised by saying she "uglified everything near her." She looks even lovelier in the painting Reynolds did some twelve or thirteen years later, when Fanny was a married woman in her mid-twenties (here reproduced in an etching):

Lady Crewe was the model for St. Genevieve in this painting by Reynolds.

On the other hand, author Amanda Foreman writes in The Duchess, a biography of Fanny's contemporary Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, that Lady Douglas described Fanny as "very fat with a considerable quantity of down about her mouth." She does look a bit plump, albeit pleasingly so, in this caricature of 1784, in which she's shown canvassing for Charles James Fox:

"The Devonshire, or the Most Approved Method of Securing Votes" by Thomas Rowlandson. Lady Crewe is on the left, saying "Huzza - Fox for ever"; the woman on the right is Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

Then there's this portrait by Thomas Lawrence. It may just be the lighting, but she does seem to have a faint mustache:

Thomas Lawrence painted Lady Crewe circa 1810.

The painting that really makes me wonder, however, is this portrait by Gainsborough:

Does this even look the least bit like the same woman from the Rowlandson caricature?

There's no sign of either fat or down in the painting, but I wouldn't call the subject a great beauty, either.

Which brings me to the point: I'm convinced Fanny Crewe's beauty was the kind best appreciated in person, because in addition to being an energetic hostess, she was also an intelligent and lively conversationalist. Her admirers included not just Fox, Sheridan, Burney and Reynolds, but also the philosopher Edmund Burke. Charles Arbuthnot called her "amazingly well-informed."

At a time when women held no direct political power, Frances, Lady Crewe was friend and counselor to the great. And I suspect it's due to that intelligence and energy, and not just due to her changeable looks, that she was so ardently admired.

Alyssa Everett's upcoming regency romance, A Tryst With Trouble, will be released on September 23. It will join her current release, Lord of Secrets, and her debut regency, Ruined by Rumor. Alyssa hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you.

A Georgian Marriage Gone Bad

One of the reasons I like setting love stories in the past is that the stakes were so high. When couples married two hundred years ago, it was for life. I was recently reading about the Georgian/regency novelist, Matthew "Monk" Lewis (a brief mention of Lewis and his most famous work, the lurid and bestselling The Monk, can be found in this earlier post on gothic horrors). The story of his parents' disastrous marriage is almost as colorful as Lewis's fiction.

Matthew Lewis (not the actor who played Neville Longbottom, but the father of the author of the same name) married Frances "Fanny" Maria Sewell in 1773, when both were twenty-three. Lewis had already earned a master's degree from Oxford and was the Chief Clerk in the War Office; in just two years, he would be the Deputy-Secretary at War. His family was wealthy, as was hers. Both owned neighboring estates in England as well as substantial property in Jamaica. The couple had four children together, of which the novelist, Matthew Gregory Lewis, was the eldest and heir. The senior Matthew Lewis seems to have been dedicated and hard-working; Maria, on the other hand, was admired, artistic, and injudicious.

The lurid plot of Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk manages to outdo the drama of his family life. ("A Monk with a Beguine," 1591, by Dutch painter Cornelis van Haarlem.)

By 1781, when little Matthew was only six, his parents' marriage wasn't going well, owing to their mismatched temperaments--and to his mother's interest in a music master named Samuel Harrison. After sleeping apart for some time, the couple decided to separate, with Lewis agreeing to generous terms that gave his wife the use of one of his houses, full custody of the children (legally, they were his to take away), and six hundred pounds a year. Before the separation was finalized, however, Lewis returned from a visit to the Duke of Dorset to discover Fanny had been flagrantly carrying on in his house with Harrison the music master, sending him into a "phrenzy."

Fanny Lewis fled. She began changing addresses and using a false name, Mrs. Langley, to avoid her husband. He was able to track her down, however, and came to confront her on July 3, 1782--which, inconveniently for Fanny, happened to be the same day she was giving birth to an illegitimate child by the music master.

Lewis sought a separation--not a private one, but a judicial separation of the sort obtained as a precursor to divorce. On February 27, 1783, Lewis was awarded his separation on the grounds of adultery. Divorces, however, were as complicated and expensive to obtain as they were rare. Lewis petitioned Parliament, and his counsel presented the facts of Fanny's adultery, but the House of Lords refused to grant the divorce.

And here's the part that's most surprising to me as a citizen of the twenty-first century: Lewis supported Fanny until his death in 1812. Why did he agree to such generous terms? Probably because it was the thing to do. A husband was expected to "keep" his wife, which meant everything from seeing that she didn't go hungry to paying her gambling debts. It was one of the fundamental expectations underlying marriage--just as wives had a duty to have sex with their husbands whether they liked it or not, husbands had a duty to support their wives financially whether they liked it or not. And since marriage was a sacrament, adultery and even separation couldn't completely erase that expectation.

Though it's slightly off-topic, I'll close with an anecdote from James Boswell's 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson that provides a little more insight into the Georgian view of marriage as immutable and permanent, no matter how messy: 

I repeated to him an argument of a lady of my acquaintance, who maintained, that her husband's having been guilty of numberless infidelities, released her from conjugal obligations, because they were reciprocal. Johnson: "This is miserable stuff, Sir. To the contract of marriage, besides the man and wife, there is a third party -- Society; and, if it be considered as a vow -- GOD: and, therefore, it cannot be dissolved by their consent alone.

Samuel Johnson was no fan of divorce. (Painting by Joshua Reynolds.)

Laws are not made for particular cases, but for men in general. A woman may be unhappy with her husband; but she cannot be freed from him without the approbation of the civil and ecclesiastical power. A man may be unhappy, because he is not so rich as another; but he is not to seize upon another's property with his own hand." Boswell: "But, Sir, this lady does not want that the contract should be dissolved; she only argues that she may indulge herself in gallantries with equal freedom as her husband does, provided she takes care not to introduce a spurious issue into his family. You know, Sir, what Macrobius has told us of Julia."*  Johnson: "This lady of yours, Sir, I think, is very fit for a brothel."

*Boswell's reference to "what Macrobius has told us of Julia" concerns a report that Augustus Caesar's daughter supposedly indulged in adultery only if she was pregnant with her husband's child: "To certain persons who knew of her infidelities and were expressing surprise at her children’s likeness to her husband Agrippa, since she was so free with her favors, she said: "Passengers are never allowed on board until the hold is full."

Alyssa Everett's upcoming regency romance, A Tryst With Trouble, will be released on September 23. It will join her current release, Lord of Secrets, and her debut regency, Ruined by Rumor. Alyssa hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you.

A Traitor's Fate

Until 1870, if you were a man (not a woman) convicted of high treason in Great Britain, the judge would pronounce sentence upon you as follows:

That you the prisoner, now at the bar, be conveyed hence to the place from whence you came, and that you be conveyed thence on a hurdle to the place of execution; where you are to be hanged by the neck; that you be cut down alive, that your privy members be cut off, your bowels taken out and burnt in your view; that your head be severed from your body; that your body be divided into four quarters; which are to be disposed of at the king's pleasure; and God of his infinite mercy have mercy upon your soul.

The penalty was called drawing and quartering, and it was pretty strong stuff. Perhaps that was why, at the urging of regency reformer Sir Samuel Romilly, the emasculation and disembowelment sections of the law were repealed in the Treason Act of 1814.

Thomas Harrison, one of the regicides who condemned King Charles I to death, and under Charles II received the full pre-1814 punishment for high treason. The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote of the 1660 execution, "I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition."

The 1814 law also left it to the king's discretion whether those convicted of high treason had to be drawn to the place of execution on a hurdle, and also whether "such person shall not be hanged by the Neck, but that instead thereof the Head shall be there severed from the Body of such person whilst alive." The law still specified, however, that whether the person was hanged to death or beheaded, the traitor should ultimately end up with his head cut off and his body divided into four quarters. High treason was the most serious crime a man could commit in Great Britain, and it was punished accordingly.

The last persons actually condemned to be drawn and quartered in England were the Cato Street conspirators, a group of regency radicals. They were followers of the late Thomas Spence, who had espoused the notion that "if all the land in Britain was shared out equally, there would be enough to give every man, woman and child seven acres each." With unrest in the country growing, radical "levellers" like the Spenceans worried the government so much that the Home Office planted spies in the group.

In February of 1820 one such spy, George Edwards, informed a leader of the group, Arthur Thistlewood, that government ministers would be holding a cabinet dinner at the Grosvenor Square home of Lord Harrowby. Thistlewood hatched a plan to storm Harrowby's house, kill the ministers, and then display the heads of Lord Castlereagh and Lord Sidmouth (the leader of the House of Commons and the Home Secretary respectively) on poles. The heads would be paraded through the poorer sections of London, and public buildings would be set on fire in the hopes of inciting the total overthrow of the government. To that end, Thistlewood and his followers rented a vacant stable and hayloft not far from Grosvenor Square, on a street off Edgeware Road called Cato Street.

An artist's rendering of the Cato Street raid, with Smithers the Bow Street Runner being run through.

On February 23, conspirators gathered in the Cato Street command post with guns, swords, knives, and a hand grenade. Across the street in a public house, a magistrate from Bow Street, Richard Birnie, assembled with a dozen Bow Street Runners and a government spy named George Ruthven. They stormed the stable to arrest the conspirators. Ruthven shouted, "We are peace officers. Lay down your arms." But when a Bow Street Runner named Smithers moved in, Thistlewood stabbed him with a sword. Smithers died soon after.

Several of the conspirators surrendered, several had to be overpowered, and several escaped. Unfortunately for the escapees, George Edwards had provided the government with the names of all the Cato Street participants. Eleven men were eventually brought to trial.

The government had learned from a previous trial against Spencean radicals--Thistlewood included--that their own spies made poor witnesses, since the counsel for the defense was able to portray them as agents provocateurs, agitators who incited citizens to commit crimes they otherwise might not have committed. In this case, Edwards had brought the cabinet dinner at Lord Harrowby's house to Thistlewood's attention. Prosecutors were able to persuade three of the conspirators to give evidence against the eleven defendents in return for dropping the charges against them. During the trial, James Ings testified that Edwards had drawn him unwittingly into the conspiracy, and, bursting into tears, said, "I am like a bullock drove into Smithfield to be sold...I hope, before you give your verdict, that you will see this man brought forward, or else, I consider myself a murdered man."

On April 28, 1820, all of the Cato Street defendents were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death. Thistlewood complained at his sentencing that the court had refused to allow him to "prove the infamy of Adams, of Heiden, and of Dwyer," the three chief witnesses against him, and George Edwards was never put on the stand at all.

Though the Cato Street conspirators were the last traitors in Great Britain sentenced to drawing and quartering, the sentence was afterward commuted to hanging and posthumous beheading, and six of the prisoners who had changed their plea from "not guilty" to "guilty" had their death sentences commuted to transportation.

Government figures dance around the severed heads of the Cato Street conspirators in a reference to their May Day executions, while in the background, spy George Edwards fiddles and says, "Dance away my friends, I have been the cause of all this fun by your help and money, 'Edwards the Instigator!'"

Executions were carried out swiftly in the early 19th century. On May 1, 1820, Thistlewood, John Brunt, William Davidson, James Ings and Richard Tidd were brought out before a crowd at Newgate. Ings began shouting the song "Death or Liberty," prompting Richard Tidd to tell him more than once to stop making noise. The men were then hanged--Ings and Brunt struggled for quite a while--and left on the gallows for half an hour before their bodies were lowered one at a time. A masked man cut the head from each body with a surgeon's knife. He passed the head in turn to the assistant executioner, Thomas Cheshire, who held it up for the crowd to see and proclaimed from each side of the scaffold, "This is the head of (name), the traitor!" The head and body were then placed together in a coffin.

It was all quite gruesome, even without the privy member removal and the burning bowels.

Alyssa Everett's upcoming regency romance, A Tryst With Trouble, includes a brief mention of the Cato Street conspirators and their fate. When it's released on September 23, it will join her current release, Lord of Secrets, and her debut regency, Ruined by Rumor. Alyssa hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you relentlessly.

Introducing A Dream Defiant!

I'll be taking a few months off from my series on titles and forms of address for the British aristocracy to celebrate my July 29 novella release, A Dream Defiant. Isn't the cover beautiful?

While this book is set in 1813 in the aftermath of the Battle of Vittoria, a cursory glance at the cover will tell you this isn't your typical Regency romance. Like most of my heroes, Elijah Cameron is a British soldier, one who's been in the army since his early youth and knows its ways well. But rather than leaving a village in England or Scotland as a lad, he grew up with his regiment. His parents, born in Virginia as slaves, ran away to the British lines during the American Revolution and spent the next twenty-five years as servants--free and fairly paid--of a senior officer in the regiment.

Growing up as he did, it's hardly surprising that Elijah became first a drummer boy and then a soldier. When his story opens he's content with his life, only to have it turned upside down when a dying comrade in arms entrusts him with a treasure to give to his soon-to-be-widow--a beautiful and quietly brave women Elijah has admired from afar for years.

So, what compelled me to write the story of a black redcoat in the Napoleonic Wars? Well, it started a few years ago, when I was reading about black Union soldiers in the Civil War on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog. (See one such post HERE.)

I briefly considered writing my own Civil War story--it's an era I know almost as well as the Napoleonic Wars, after all. But I just couldn't get over the feeling that it was presumptuous of me to write a black Union soldier as a hero, given that I'm not only a white woman, I'm a white woman born and raised in Alabama and the great-great-granddaughter of a Confederate soldier from that same state. Put simply, I felt like I had no right to cloak myself in the mantle of the right side of a war where my ancestors were unequivocally on the wrong side.

(It's not that I feel guilty about my ancestry--I hardly chose it myself, after all--nor do I think my great-great-grandfather was a bad person. I don't know much about him, really, beyond that he was extremely fertile, fathering seventeen children with three wives in succession. He didn't own slaves--my family were poor Appalachian farmers right up through the Depression. He wasn't a moral giant enough to have challenged the values of his state and his culture, but how many of us are? Still, none of that changes the fact that the Civil War was one of those few conflicts with a clear right and wrong side, and my ancestor fought for the latter.)

So I decided to write about a black soldier in my era. I knew such soldiers existed, in both the French and British armies. They're mentioned in Swords Around a Throne, John Elting's encyclopedic book on Napoleon's army, and I'd run across occasional references in my research on the British army. While a black man in the British army was more likely to be in a West Indian regiment or to be part of a regimental band (that stereotype already existed, evidently), I never found any evidence that someone like my Elijah wouldn't have been permitted to enlist in a regular redcoat infantry regiment, so I gave my muse free rein. As for how well it turned out, in a little less than two months you can be the judge of that!

A Dream Defiant is already available for preorder at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, and the iTunes store, and will be available on the Carina site and other e-tailers as the release date draws closer.

Boys in Dresses

Don't let the pink dress and frilly collar distract you from the important detail here: this child is wielding a whip.

Take a look at the picture on the right. It's a lovely painting of a child in a dress. A pink dress. And it's a painting of a boy.

How do we know it's a boy? Well, first of all, pink wasn't always considered a "feminine" color. Until the twentieth century, it was considered appropriate for boy babies to wear pink and girls to wear blue, though the convention was far from a hard and fast rule. But more than that, we can tell the child in the painting is a boy because he's holding that most masculine and authoritative of props, a whip.

Buy why paint him in a dress at all?

Until the custom died out in the 1920s, it was common to clothe all young children, both male and female, in dresses--though in the case of boys, the frocks were euphemistically referred to as "shortcoats." They were called shortcoats because newborns started out wearing very long dresses that extended past their feet. (Even today, traditional christening gowns often retain the style.) Once a baby was old enough to begin crawling and learning to walk, the extra-long gowns were shortened to a more manageable length. Putting babies in dresses made it easier to change them, especially at a time before snaps and velcro were in use. Dresses were also easier to sew and easier to alter as a child grew.

Despite the impressive balloon sleeves and white pantalettes, this is a boy, as his hobbyhorse and whip reveal.

Both boys and girls were dressed alike until the boys were old enough to be "breeched"--that is, graduated from shortcoats into actual breeches. It was an important rite of passage, reflected in historical phrases like "since before I was breeched" and "since I was in shortcoats" to mean a very early point in the speaker's life. It was up to a boy's mother to decide when he was breeched, and most did it when their sons grew out of the toddler stage, at around 3 to 5 years of age. Some mothers found it difficult to let go of their boys' babyhood, however, and it wasn't unheard of for boys to remain in dresses until age 7 or 8. (I suspect those boys would have had a difficult time on the playground.)

But even though boy babies and girl babies wore similar dresses, portraits are usually careful to provide hints as to the sitter's gender.

The doll this child is holding tells us she's a girl.

The whip in the portrait at top right is a good example. Perhaps because the boy in the painting above left is wearing a more elaborate dress with romantic sleeves, his painter has even given him a hobbyhorse to go with his whip. Other props considered masculine included ships, toy guns, and toy swords.

Sometimes young girls were painted with longer hair, but that's by no means a reliable clue, since boys often wore long curls, and very young girls might have their hair cropped short for easier maintenance. Once again, props came to the portrait painter's rescue. We know the child in the portrait above right is a girl because she's holding a toy meant to nurture her domesticity and maternal instincts, namely a doll. 

The Basket of Cherries by E. W. Gill (1828) Skeleton suits were an alternative to shortcoats for boys. Hats are also a good indicator of a child's gender--the boy on the left has what looks like a top hat behind him, while the girl with the cherries has a straw bonnet.

There was one exception to the boys-in-dresses custom, and that was the skeleton suit. During the regency period--or more accurately, from about 1790 to 1830--it was common to dress young boys in a tight-fitting suit that consisted of a jacket buttoned to high-waisted trousers. In the painting to the left, it's easy to tell which children are boys and which is the girl. The boys are not only wearing skeleton suits, but have matching action-oriented toys, a hoop and stick for trundling. The boy in back even has a very masculine-looking hat upturned behind him. The child with the cherries is a girl. We know that not just because she isn't wearing a matching skeleton suit--she could be in shortcoats, after all--but because she has a lovely bonnet lying beside her, one that matches her sash and necklace. No wonder she's smiling.

Alyssa Everett's newest regency romance, Lord of Secrets,was released March 25 and is available now. If you like angst and "tortured" heroes, you should give it a look. It joins her debut regency, Ruined by Rumor, while her third, A Tryst With Trouble, will be released in September. She hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you relentlessly.

University Classes, Regency Style

I spent this past weekend traveling with my daughter, a high school senior, to visit one of the oldest colleges in the U.S. It got me thinking about university life during the regency.

A university education was one of the major advantages that set the regency gentleman apart from his social inferiors, and, like everything else in Britain in the early 1800s, the road to a degree was marked by sharp class distinctions. At Oxford, one of England’s two major universities during the regency,

This Nobleman Commoner wears a silk robe trimmed in gold, and the mortarboard he holds bears a golden tassel.

the first major distinction was between dependent members (those at the university who were "on the foundation," meaning they received money for studying and/or working there) and independent members (those who paid their own way).

Independent members came from the country’s prosperous families, the nobility and gentry, and could be divided into four tiers. At the top were Noblemen Commoners, a group made up of peers and sons of peers. Noblemen Commoners were allowed to wear a gold tassel or “tuft” on their cap, giving rise to the term “tufthunter” to describe a social climber. The amateur poet and artist Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (BA 1802, MA 1806) satirized one such Oxonian:

A gay golden tuft on his cap he displays,
Which dazzles all eyes with its ravishing rays—
True badge of nobility, awful and grand,
Confin’d to the essence and cream of the land.

The wealthy Gentleman Commoner could be distinguished by his silk gown trimmed lavishly in rows of black pompoms.

The second tier of independent members consisted of Gentlemen Commoners. They weren’t noble, but they came from wealth, and paid higher fees accordingly. Both Noblemen Commoners and Gentlemen Commoners received special privileges, for example being allowed to sit at the high table for meals. The third tier of independent members, by far the largest group, consisted of Commoners. Commoners likewise paid their own way, but they came from genteel families of more typical circumstances and were charged standard fees. Below them came the batlers, sometimes spelled battelers or battlers, also called semi-commoners. The batler had a buttery account, as opposed to eating with those who received the “commons” from the kitchen (the buttery was more or less a storeroom that supplied bread, butter, cheese, milk, sugar, and ale; the kitchen served soups, meats, fish, pies, preserves and sweets). In other words, he was on a budget plan. Batlers could afford to attend Oxford at their expense, but just barely, and so they occupied the lowest rank of independent members, existing in a sort of quasi-gentlemanly limbo.

The majority of undergraduates were Commoners, like this young man, recognizable from his sleeveless gown of black stuff. ("Stuff" was essentially anything that wasn't silk, usually wool.)

In contrast to the independent members, dependent members gained admittance through sheer brains and hard work. Though by mid-century such scholars would be viewed with respect for their academic merit, during the more class-conscious regency they were still seen as social inferiors—"charity boys"—rather than real gentlemen. Dependent members consisted of three tiers. At the top were Foundationers, those on scholarships from the university foundation itself. They were usually referred to as Scholars, though Magdelene College called them Demies and at Merton they were known as Postmasters. The second tier of dependent members was made up of Exhibitioners. They had less prestigious scholarships, provided by one of the individual colleges or by outside entities like preparatory schools or private organizations. At the bottom of the pecking order, far below the Scholars and Exhibitioners, came Servitors—even their name sounds lowly—who hailed from humble families and did not have grants.

The lowly servitor worked his way through university, performing servants' duties such as waiting at table. (And notice how the humbler the undergraduate is, the less likely he is to stare out of his portrait.)

Servitors received free lodging and some free meals, and were excused from paying fees for lectures. In return, they were required to perform menial duties for the Fellows, essentially working their way through university as servants. (At Cambridge, those of equivalent rank were called sizars or subsizars.) One famous Servitor was Dr. Johnson of Dictionary fame, who said, “the difference between us Servitors and Gentlemen commoners, is this, that we are men of wit and no fortune and they are men of fortune and no wit.”

Anyone at Oxford could tell at a glance exactly who was of high rank and who wasn’t, since caps and gowns were required (and still are, in many instances). In addition to the gold tuft on his cap, the Nobleman Commoner wore a gown of colored silk—the color was up to him—decorated on the sleeves, yoke and hem with gold lace. The Gentleman Commoner was not quite such a peacock but looked almost as grand, bearing a black tuft on his cap and a silk gown decorated with rows of black pompoms on the sleeves and hem. The Commoners wore a sleeveless gown made of black stuff, with streamers decorated in braid dangling from the yoke in back. Servitors wore a similar sleeveless gown, but without the braided streamers. Until 1770, instead of wearing the familiar mortarboard cap the Servitor had to wear a round hat, sometimes referred to as a cow-pat, but eventually this mark of shame was eliminated and he was allowed to wear a square cap without a tassel.

Over the first half of the 1800s, the term servitor fell out of favor, as did the requirement that such students act as servants for the Fellows. Instead they were first called clerks (sometimes bible-clerks, since they were paid a stipend for saying grace, keeping track of chapel attendance and reading the bible lessons aloud), and then absorbed into the Exhibitioners. The terms Nobleman Commoner and Gentleman Commoner likewise fell by the wayside. Acts like the Christ Church Ordinances Bill of 1867 eliminated such distinctions, ensuring that any undergraduates who were not on the foundation became known simply as Commoners.

Alyssa Everett's newest regency romance, Lord of Secrets,was released March 25 and is available now. If you like angst and "tortured" heroes, you should give it a look. It joins her debut regency, Ruined by Rumor, while her third, A Tryst With Trouble, will be released in September. She hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you relentlessly.

"A Rotten Orange"

It’s sometimes hard, as a twenty-first century reader and writer, to put myself in the heads of early nineteenth century characters. We think quite differently today about matters like duty, social equality, gender roles, and sexual morality. Views on that last issue, especially, have changed dramatically with the emergence of reliable birth control, women’s rights and even DNA testing.

"Past and Present I" by Victorian artist Augustus Leopold Egg illustrates a scene in the life of a fallen woman: a stricken husband discovers his wife’s infidelity through a letter from her lover, and the errant wife throws herself at his feet in unbearable shame and guilt.

At a time when women had little protection against pregnancy and men had no definitive way to prove or disprove the paternity of a child, female chastity was valued and stressed in a way that’s often difficult to understand today.

The prevailing nineteenth-century attitude—and keep in mind that this was a view that women as well as men bought into—was that any woman willing to sleep with a man before marriage was also likely to sleep with pretty much any man after marriage. Here’s how Lord Byron put it in 1820:

Where is honour,
Innate and precept-strengthen'd, 'tis the rock
Of faith connubial: where it is not - where
Light thoughts are lurking, or the vanities
Of worldly pleasure rankle in the heart,
Or sensual throbs convulse it, well I know
'Twere hopeless for humanity to dream
Of honesty in such infected blood,
Although 'twere wed to him it covets most...

In other words, a woman was either “honest” (virginal until marriage and therefore virtuous) or “dishonest” (willing to cast sexual morality to the winds), no matter what the circumstances:

The once fall'n woman must forever fall;
For vice must have variety, while virtue
Stands like the sun and all which rolls around
Drinks life, and light, and glory from her aspect.

Though Victorians were especially fond of this view, it was already old by the time Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing, in which Claudio refuses his bride-to-be at the altar because he believes she is no

Oh, the horror! Marcus Stone’s "Claudio, Deceived by Don John, Accuses Hero" (1861) shows a pivotal scene from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, in which poor Hero faints dead away at the altar upon being accused of no longer being a virgin.

longer a virgin, calling her a “rotten orange” and vowing “Not to knit my soul to an approved wanton.”

Social inequality and male insecurities about paternity meant the expectation was very much a double standard; though young women were expected to remain virginal until marriage, young men were expected, if not encouraged, to sow their wild oats. In other words, while there was a great deal of judgment aimed at the fallen woman, no one much cared about fallen men.

Alyssa Everett's debut regency romance, Ruined by Rumor, is currently available from Carina Press.  Her second regency, Lord of Secrets, will be out March 25 and is available now for pre-order, while her third, A Tryst With Trouble, will be released in September. She hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you relentlessly.

The Undertaker's Mute

A reader recently asked me what a character means in my first regency, Ruined by Rumor, when he accuses the heroine's new husband of having "all the address of an undertaker's mute."

As the name suggests, an undertaker's mute worked for an undertaker, though few if any were actually unable to speak.  Prior to World War I, and especially during Victorian times, mourning was big business, with the bereaved generally vying with one another to demonstrate the depth of their grief (and the loftiness of their social position) through lavish funeral arrangements. The mute was an expected part of this memorial pomp.

The role of the undertaker's mute began practically enough, as described by Bertram Puckle in his 1926 Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development:

From the moment that the undertaker "undertakes" the funeral arrangements, he assumes an implied professional responsibility for the safe keeping of the body. This is the origin of the now obsolete practice of posting one or more of his miserable minions on the front doorstep of the house of mourning.

As time went on, the mute's position became less practical and more ceremonial. With his doleful demeanor and somber costume, he was expected to set the proper tone of funerary gloom.

This undertaker's mute is swathed in white, appropriate for a child's funeral. (Image courtesy of artist Roxana Fernandez.)

He bore a staff covered in crepe--white for the death of a child, black for an adult--and was himself similarly draped, wearing a sash and a top hat with a trailing silk hat band. I looked long and hard to find an historical image, but unfortunately the best period illustration I could find, here, is under copyright. Still, I hope you'll click on the link, since the painting you'll find is a wonderfully evocative example of a pale and woeful mute.

In reality, however, mutes weren't always appropriately sober. One of the mute's principal responsibilities was to walk in the funeral procession, and it was traditional to supply him with gin in order to fortify him against the outdoor cold. Working as a mute was occasional rather than regular work, and many mutes made the most of the occasion, resulting in drunkenness. A writer to the London Quarterly Review complained of the expense of having to supply "kid gloves and gin for the mutes" and expressed a growing anti-mute sentiment when he decried "the lowest of all hypocrites, the hired mourner."

Charles Dickens was always alert to social hypocrisy, the more ridiculous the better, and in Oliver Twist he highlighted such absurdities of the funeral industry. The hen-pecked undertaker Mr. Sowerberry calls Oliver to his wife's attention:

'There's an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear,' resumed Mr. Sowerberry, 'which is very interesting. He would make a delightful mute, my love....I don't mean a regular mute to attend grown-up people, my dear, but only for children's practice. It would be very new to have a mute in proportion, my dear. You may depend upon it, it would have a superb effect.' 

Mrs. Sowerberry, who had a good deal of taste in the undertaking way, was much struck by the novelty of this idea; but, as it would have been compromising her dignity to have said so, under existing circumstances, she merely inquired, with much sharpness, why such an obvious suggestion had not presented itself to her husband's mind before?

Thanks both to the gin-drinking and to ribbing from critics like Dickens, the mute gradually fell into disfavor, ultimately becoming a figure of ridicule. By the turn of the twentieth century, such professional mourners had disappeared from the English funeral scene altogether, with only the faintest echo of his demeanor discernible in today's pallbearers.

Alyssa Everett's debut regency romance, Ruined by Rumor, is currently available from Carina Press.  Her second regency, Lord of Secrets, will be out March 25 and is available now for pre-order, while her third, A Tryst With Trouble, will be released in September. She hopes you'll visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Facebook, where she promises not to spam you relentlessly.