July 6, 1189: Richard I is crowned King of England.
July 7, 1911: The United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Russia sign the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911 banning open-water seal hunting, the first international treaty to address wildlife preservation issues.
July 8, 1808: Joseph Bonaparte approves the Bayonne Statute, a royal charter intended as the basis for his rule as king of Spain.
July 9, 1810: Napoleon annexes the Kingdom of Holland as part of the First French Empire.
July 10, 1806: The Vellore Mutiny is the first instance of a mutiny by Indian sepoys against the British East India Company.
July 11, 1796: The United States takes possession of Detroit from Great Britain under terms of the Jay Treaty.
July 12, 1804: Former United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton dies a day after being shot in a duel.
Sabrage is the art of opening bottles of champagne with a sabre.
That’s right, an actual sword.
The story goes that this technique was developed by Napoleon’s Hussars (light cavalry), who were given bottles of champagne as they traveled through the region of Champagne after a victory. Since they were on horseback, removing the cork from the bottle conventionally proved troublesome. Popping off the top of the bottle with a cavalry sabre was much easier.
Want to see how it’s done? In this video, Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan uses a knife-like instrument.
And in this video, Captain Rupert Campbell-Jones uses a ceremonial sword.
This is one of those activities that definitely falls in the don’t-try-this-at-home category, but you can hire professionals for you next party or gathering 🙂
We’ve all stayed in hotels. Was it different during the Regency, or do some things really never change? Laurie Benson describes a stay at the Pulteney Hotel in London 200 years ago.
I’m trying to squeeze in one last trip before summer vacation is over, and I’m challenged with finding a charming place to stay. Today, going online to search for a hotel is relatively easy, and I am a bit obsessive about reading guest reviews to help me find the perfect place for us to rest after a busy day seeing the sights. All this research had me thinking about travel during the early nineteenth century. Where did the fashionable people stay if they were planning on spending a brief amount of time in London?
During 1814, London was full of foreign dignitaries who had come to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon at the Prince Regent’s Grand Jubilee celebration. When Napoleon sailed for Elba, France’s King Louis XVIII left Buckinghamshire for London and took rooms at Grillon’s Hotel on Albemarle Street. Another popular hotel among foreign royals staying in London was…
Officially titled The Year 1812 Festival Overture in E-flat major, Op. 49, the 1812 Overture was composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1880. Tsar Aleksander I had commissioned a church to be built commemorating Russia’s victory over Napoleon in 1812, and the church was nearing completion. Big festivities were planned, but derailed when Tsar Aleksander II was assassinated in March 1882. (The piece was eventually performed, but indoors with a conventional orchestra.)
Written for outdoor performance with pealing bells and live cannon fire, the Overture is a musical war betweenla Marseillaise (representing Napoleon’s French army) and God Save the Tsar (representing the Russian Empire). The French national anthem is strong in the beginning, but is beaten back as the piece moves, drown out by the cathedral bells, cannon, and the Russian national anthem. (Interestingly enough, neither anthem was in use at the time of the actual battle.)
Have a listen and see if you can pick them out:
Here’s the entire Overture for the musically adventurous among you:
Here in the US, we use the 1812 Overture to celebrate our own Independence Day, which seems strange given the original purpose of the music. This article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette posits a theory as to why.
No, that’s not a typo. This article is not about Napoleon’s victories on the battle fields of Europe. It’s about his victory in the farmers’ fields in France.
Sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) are white, conical roots, with a rosette of leaves above ground. The leaves absorb sunlight and produce sugar by photosynthesis (remember your high school biology?). The sugar is then stored in the root—the part we dig up and process. Sugar beets are grown in temperate climates like Germany, France, the UK, and the northern US, rather than the tropical locales sugar cane prefers.
But what do they have to do with the self-proclaimed Emperor of France?
In 1806 Napoleon attempted to destroy British trade lines and weaken the country by banning the import of British goods into Europe (including those from Britain’s colonies). George III and his Parliament responded by ordering a blockade of all French ports. So the only goods Napoleon and his people were getting (legally) were those they could grow or make themselves. Since all of the sugar in use at the time came from plantations in the West Indies, that meant no sugar for France.
Yikes!
Sugar beets were already known at this time—in the mid-1700’s, a German chemist named Andreas Margraff discovered that the sucrose contained in the beet’s root was indistinguishable from the sucrose in sugar cane. One of Margraff’s students, Franz Karl Achard, later experimented with ways to extract the sugar from beets, and was successful (he’s now considered the father of the sugar beet industry).
So when France found herself sugarless in the first decade of the 1800’s, a starting point already existed for her scientists. In 1809, a commission repeated Achard’s experiments, producing two loaves of beet sugar. One of them was eventually passed on to Napoleon himself, who realized he held the answer to his problem (one of them, anyway). He ordered 32,000 hectares of sugar beets to be sown, and more than 40 small factories were built to process them. In January 1811, the order was upped to 100,000 hectares and licenses were given to build 334 factories throughout the French empire.
In 1813, however, the tide of the war turned. Napoleon was on the run, and the blockade was lifted. Cane sugar once again became readily available, and beet sugar was no longer competitively priced. All of the beet processing factories that had been built in Germany and Austria (part of Napoleon’s territory) were closed down. The following spring the Sixth Coalition defeated the French empire, and Napoleon—champion of the sugar beet—was exiled to the island of Elba.
Napoleon’s Farewell to the Imperial Guard by Antoine Alphonse Montfort
Then why do we eat beet sugar today?
France never quite gave up on sugar beet refinement. Between 1820 and 1839, the number of factories began to slowly climb again in response to a duty imposed on imported cane sugar. Once again, beet sugar was a cheaper alternative. The production of cane sugar also had an ugly stigma attached—it was only possible on large plantations using slave labor. Sugar beets could be grown and processed right at home, in factories that employed paid workers.
The process of refining sugar beets later became popular in Germany, the UK, Russia, and even spread across the Atlantic to the US. My home state of Michigan is one of eleven states that continue to produce beet sugar today, though the European Union is the world’s largest producer with about 50% of the total. Overall, beet sugar accounts for about 35% of the world’s production.
Beet sugar: just one example of the silver lining on a very dark cloud.
Another silver lining of the Napoleonic Wars? Wounded warrior romance heroes! To celebrate the Summer Banquet Blog Hop, I’m giving away one of my very favorites: a signed, print copy of Grace Burrowes’ The Solider, direct from the author herself!
Leave a comment below to enter: tell me what you learned today, what you really think of Napoleon, who your favorite historical soldier/sailor is, what draws you to this period of history, your obsession with sweets (or wounded warriors!), or whatever else you’d like.
Comments must be left by midnight EDT on June 7, 2013 to be eligible to win. Open worldwide.
Don’t forget to check out the posts and giveaways of all the Hop participants:
“In this distinguished Service, you will carry a Rifle no heavier than a Fowling-Piece. You will knock down your Enemy at Five Hundred Yards, instead of missing him at Fifty.
On Service, your Post is always the Post of Honour, and your Quarters the best in the Army; for you have the first of everything; and at Home you are sure of Respect—because a BRITISH RIFLEMAN always makes himself Respectable.
Who says you can’t learn things from fiction? I was first introduced to the 95th Rifles in Mary Jo Putney’s book The Bargain, where the hero was a wounded officer from that regiment. (Bernard Cornwell also uses them in his Richard Sharpe series.) I wouldn’t have thought anything else about it except that she included an author’s note and explained why she picked the 95th. I’m one of those strange souls who think history is a whole lot of fun, so I went right from the book to the computer and starting poking around the Napoleonic Wars and the 95th Rifle Regiment. It turns out they were quite different from the rest of their infantry brethren.
The first thing I noticed was that the men and officers of the Rifles wore green uniforms rather than the familiar red—not a huge revelation if one is familiar with the British Army, but a small surprise for me. Their belts and trim were black instead of the white of the other regiments. Recruitment advertisements touted these darker uniforms as more comfortable and easier to care for. In practice, they drew the ridicule of other units (at least in the beginning—once the Rifle Brigade had proved its value, the taunting slowed considerably).
Also, while most officers of the time were still purchasing their commissions and promotions, the majority of officers of the 95th were commissioned or promoted based on merit or seniority. “Soldiers of fortune” they called themselves, neither nobility nor gentry for the most part. Perhaps because of this, the Rifles were known as a more egalitarian outfit than their musket-bearing counterparts.
The biggest difference between the Rifles and the rest of the infantry, of course, was their weapon. While everyone else carried muskets, the 95th carried the Baker rifle which had grooves inside the barrel to spin the bullet as it was fired (you CSI fans and gun enthusiasts will recognize this as the “rifling”). The spinning increased accuracy immensely—like spiraling a football—allowing these soldiers to fight differently. Riflemen did not stand shoulder to shoulder and fire into a block of the enemy. Instead, they could fire individually and from standing, sitting, and kneeling positions, or even laying down, and were trained accordingly. They were, in fact, founded to emulate the sharpshooters of Continental Army and militias during the American Revolution. (There’s irony for you!)
The 95th Rifles went on to become wildly famous for their actions during the Peninsular War, being awarded regimental battle honors for Ciudad Rodrigo, Salamanca, Vittoria, The Pyrenees, Toulouse, and Waterloo, among others. Curiously, though, they were rarely awarded individual medals and recognition, though other soldiers in other units were regularly honored.
Because I had to rein myself in last week replying to Barbara’s comment, and because I can use one of my favorite characters as an example (see if you can guess which one it is), this week’s blog post is about legitimacy (or the lack thereof).
In order to be considered a legitimate child during the Regency, your parents had to be married at the time of your birth. It didn’t matter what their status was at your conception, as long as they made it to the altar—together—before you made an appearance in the world. If you came before the nuptial ceremony, you were illegitimate, forever, even if your parents married later*.
If your mother was married to another man at the time of your birth, you were legitimate, but legally the child of her husband. There are all kinds of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) jokes and references in Regency and Georgian novels about ladies letting a “cookoo” in the nest—passing off the child of an affair as one belonging to her husband. It’s even a major plot point in Julia Quinn’s It’s In His Kiss: the hero and his “father” both know he’s the product of his mother’s affair, but he’s still the legal heir to his “father’s” title and fortune.
Illegitimate offspring could not inherit titles or entailed property (property that, by law, passed to the next legitimate male heir). Ever. They could inherit unentailed property (property that could be disposed of in any manner), money, or goods by will—as could anybody else.
A great example of this is Mary Balogh’s A Secret Affair. The hero, Constantine Huxtable, was born two days before his parent’s wedding, thus rendering him ineligible to inherit his father’s earldom (this is actually the basis for the series, as a cousin inherits instead). But wait, you say. Grace Burrowes has a hero who’s illegitimate, and he’s an earl! In The Soldier, Devlin St. Just is the bastard son of a duke, and he does gain an earldom, but not through inheritance. St. Just’s title was granted for service to the Crown during the Napoleonic Wars, and it was the monarch’s prerogative to confer the honor. (Where do you think all those nobles came from in the first place?)
Bastardy was also a bar to society, for the most part. According to Allison Lane, an illegitimate daughter was not accepted or welcome at all socially, while a son could be admitted to the fringes of society with the help and sponsorship of his father. The heroine of Julia Quinn’s An Offer from a Gentleman is a good illustration: she was the bastard daughter of an earl, but never acknowledged as anything other than the earl’s ward, nor did she move in society (except once, but I won’t spoil it for you).
There were exceptions to this rule (there always are, right?), and a big one was William, Duke of Clarence (later William IV) had ten (yes, ten!) illegitimate children with an actress known as Mrs. Jordan. Being the bastard get of a royal duke was clearly a better lot than that of other illegitimate children (and many legitimate ones, too). Since their father was the son and brother of a king (then later a king himself), the FitzClarences, as they were called, did well socially. They were given the precedence of the children of a marquess, the eldest son was granted an earldom, and the rest married nobles or the children of nobles.
*For those of you that are familiar with the medieval period, you’re probably jumping up and down right now, yelling “John of Gaunt!” or “Beaufort!” (or maybe you’re yelling something else at me!). Yes, John of Gaunt (son of Edward III) had four children with his mistress Katherine Swynford and given the surname Beaufort (after one of John’s properties). And yes, they were eventually legitimized by the pope and their cousin Richard II when John scandalized everyone and married Katherine (their children were adults by then). But this was under the medieval Catholic Church, where rules could be bent for the right price, and John was a very powerful man. And this legitimacy was questioned a couple of generations later when Henry Tudor, great-great-grandson of John through his eldest Beaufort son, claimed the English throne. The Regency was several hundred years after the Reformation, andBritain’s aristocracy was (for the most part) steadfastly Protestant. Different time, different church, different rules.
When I first started working on my novel, I was intelligent enough to ask a good friend of mine (who is an excellent writer in her own right and a British subject to boot) if she would please, please, please be my beta reader. I let her know that the story was set during the Regency era, and asked how much she knew about that period of time. She replied that she knew there was a Regency era in British history, but that was all.
That, of course, is not a slight on her intelligence (because I secretly think she’s smarter than me), but it occurred to me that a lot of people might not know much about the period beyond the shirtless man on the cover of the historical romance they saw at the bookstore. It also occurred to me that an introduction to the period would make a good introduction to this blog, but there are a lot of great articles already out there. So rather than rehash what’s already been said, I’ve included links to some of the best articles I’ve found so far to get you started.
The teacher in me is yelling “No, no! It’s not a credible source!” but Wikipedia has a good article on the British Regency, complete with a timeline, lists of important people, places, and publications. There are also some nice images for the visual learners among us—the Frost Fair picture reminds me of a pack of ice fishing shanties.
Greenwood’s 1827 map of London has been a big asset to me, both as a read and a writer. Click on any part of it to zoom in, then click again to zoom in further.
Here’s a beautiful website dedicated to the 95th Rifles, formed in 1803 as the first regiment to use rifles instead of the less accurate muskets. They saw a lot of action during the Peninsular/Napoleonic Wars.
Regency Romance novelist Candice Hern has compiled a wonderful timeline running from 1788 through 1820 that gives more detail than the one listed in the Wikipedia article. Political events, literary milestones, musical accomplishments, theater history, and social developments of the extended Regency can be found here in chronological order, color coded by category.
This is a nice article by Michelle Jean Hoppe that talks about the London Season. I like it because it’s not too long, but it’s well written and gives you enough detail to be worth reading.
These are just a few of the websites I’ve frequented. What other good websites are out there for the Regency period? What are your favorites?
And Then She Kissed Him 