Regency Snippets - Princess Amelia

Princess Amelia's sufferings shocked the Prince of Wales. He described so accurately the pain caused by the affected knee that it is possible to hazard a diagnosis of acute arthritis. The smallest touch in any part of her sofa conveys on occasions the most dreadful agonies. Apart from the local disease she had little appetite, could eat nothing without vomiting and had a 'most dreadful cough.' Laudanum had been relied on in an attempt to control the pain and cough, and as a tonic she had been given porter to drink which upset her. But soon after the Prince sent his report to the Queen she was electrified.

Regency Snippets - Hunting Season

"June, when spring finally begins to gleam into summer. This year it was slow in coming, as winter decided to remind us that it was always here, lurking in the bakgrond. Now, as I write, the sun is shining happily again, the insects and birds are busy and so, unfortunately, are the cats. However, out aristocratic forebears would be leaving London for the country at this time, the season fading to its close. Most years there was no definite end to the season, just a fading away. Sometimes a great ball would be designated the last of the season, and afterwards, the ton felt free to return to the place where most of them felt more comfortable - the great country estates they and their forebears had carved out of the english countryside. Houseparties, necessary estate business, maybe some scheming would take place, and the huntsmen would wait impatiently fo August 12th and the shooting season."

I collected the snippets I'm posting regularly for my own reference, and, sometimes, did not note the source. I cannot remember where the above quote came from.

Regency Snippets - London Hotels

April 20th 1814 Louis XVIIII  stayed for three nights at Grillon's Hotel in Albermarle Street.

The Tsar stayed in Pultney's Hotel in Piccadilly.

21st February(year?) Prince Leopold arrived in London and put up at the Clarendon Hotel in Bond Street.

The Life and Times of George IV
Alan Palmer

Regency Snippets - Gigs

A gig is an elegant 2-wheeled cart used by the well-to-do (originally it actually was considered a cheap carriage, but by the 19th century,the design and manufacture had improved so much it was the vehicle of the wealthy gentleman who wanted a convenient way to transport himself and one other person). It was usually built quite high off the ground and with curving shafts. It is pulled by a flashy horse. There are quite a few different styles of gigs, all named after their amnufacturers, and as society became more mannered, certain styles got associated with male or female drivers. The Stanhope gig and Dennett were driven by men. Women could drive the Tilbury.

As the gig tended to be heavy and pulled by a flashy animal, who was often a handful, it tended to be more of a gentleman's vehicle. Ladies would drive govenerness carts or dog carts, which were easier to hop in and out of in an emergency.

Regency Snippets - Gloves for Driving

Unike riding reins which are the same colour as the bridle (i.e., brown or black) carriage driving reins are always brown, even when the harness is black. Sometimes the reins will be black part way down, from the bit about halfway down, but then the last part will always be brown. I believe this is so the blacking used on some harness doesn't rub of on the driver's clothing. anyway, one of the principles of handling horses is that your hands should be unobtrusive. So drivers, correctly, should be wearing brown not black gloves.

Regency Snippets - Royal Furnishing

1. Large glass basins of goldfish on carved and gilded stands.

2. Toiletries and Bathroom. William Wyatt ftted at least one Bath Tub, and the royal dressing rooms held Windsor and Naples soap, tooth sponges, almond powder, eau de luce, lavender water and tortoiseshell combs.

3. 1812 - 1813. Mrs Warren Hastings had given Queen Charlotte a carved ivory sofa with a canopy of white satin which stood in the India Room among ivory armchairs fantastically gilded and carved with tigers' heads.

4. The Regent had taken Lower Lodge at Windsor as his occasional residence and it reflected his elegent taste in Chinese chintz.

Queen Charlotte by Olwen Hedlery

Pre-Regency Snippet - Royalty Menus & Sandwiches

"The King preferred the old-fashioned early dinner, and a homely menu such as roast mutton, souercrout, brawn, two cowsheels and Ribbon Pudding, the Queen began, about 1806, to take luncheon. Chicken broth, lamb cutlets, two pullets and sandwiches were a typical choice. Mutton sandwiches had appeared in the lord steward's ledgers as early as 1784 and on the 5th January, 1792 the eight-year-old Princess Amelia, after dining off roast beef and plum pudding, ate chicken sandwiches with oysters for supper. In the early years of the 19th century sandwiches became a staple article of diet in the Queen's informal meals, which seem to have varied according to the King's wish. Sometimes she dined with him, sometimes she took luncheon and then a separate 'late' dinner at four, or on special occasions at six o' the clock."

Queen Charlotte by Olwen Hedley

Regency Snippets - Forced off the Land

"Enclosures, game laws, contributions to the Poor Relief, forced many husbandmen off their land and into stinking factories. After Waterloo falling price for corn, Corn laws and taxes added to poor people's hardships.

Taken from my notes on Arthur Bryant's history books.

Regency Snippets - Costume The Beau Monde 1807

January, 1807 a description of the clothing from "The Beau Monde" magazine 1807. 

"The return of the rigid season brings with it once more to every loyal bosom the happy occasion of doing honour to the birth-day of our gracious and aimiable Queen. Fancy and taste have been long busy in making preparations, and the condescension of a noble lady has enabled us to aniticpate some of the characteristics that are likely to distinguish the habilments of the day. The design which she has given us the honour to communicte brings the whole into a central point of consideration, and we have therefore only to describe it.

Illustration - Ladies - The hair dressed in natural curls round the face, with a coronet, bandeau or other ornament in gold - feathers of every kind. The body, sleeves and petticoat, of rich, full coloured satin or velvet the draperies of gauze or tiffany spotted with gold embroidery, the trimmings and false sleeves of the same, edged with rich lace, and the cords and tassels that festoon the draperies of gold. The bracelets round the sleeves, the zone and the binding of the petticoat to be of plate gold, we suppose in commemoration of the lately achieved conquest of South America.The petticoat is decorated with artificial wreaths of white thorn made in relief.

Illustration - 2 - Gentlemen - Dark green or other dark colour coat and small-cloaths of silk, velvet or fine cloth, covered with a small spot somewhat lighter of the same kind of colour, edged with silver lace, and embroidered with any kind of wild flower of acknowledged British growth:waistcoat of white satin, embroidered in a very light pattern of gold thread. Silk stockings perfecly white.

Regency Snippets - The Last London Frost Fair - 1814

It was and exceptional winter that caused 'Old Father Thames' to freeze solidly enough for people to walk across - rather than pay a boatman or the toll on the bridge - but the holding of fairs on such occasions had a long history. There were fairs in 1564, 1608, 1634, 1715, 1739 and 1789.


In 1811 the river froze hard leaving only a narrow channel so that people could walk on it from Battersea Bridge to Hungerford Stairs. But only three years later it froze hard again at the beginning of January after a week-long fog. The streets were piled high with snow, the ice on the river dirty and 'lumpy' but firm enough on the 30th for 70 people to walk across from Queenhithe to the opposite bank. More people soon ventured onto the ice and by Monday, February 1st the river was so solid from Blackfriars Bridge to some way below the Crane Stairs that thousands were tempted onto it.


By Tuesday the whole area was a fair. The 'main road' was named City Road and went straight down the middle of the Thames rather than across it. It was lined on both sides with about 30 stalls decorated with streamers, flags and 'signs', set up for the sale of porter, spirits, and other drinks (unlicensed) as well as for skittles, dancing, and a variety of games. The next day, Wednesday, was the same. In addition 8 or 10 printing presses had been erected, the typographers setting up their type for the printing or cards and broadsides to commenmorate the great frost...

On Thursday, to most people the ice seemed to be a solid rock. The fair continued to grow and attract more visitors. There were swimgs, bookstalls, skittles, dancing-booths, merry-go-rounds,sliding barges, just like Greenwich and Bartlemy Fairs. Friday the 4th brought even more, and scores of pedlars...

The Thames watermen far from being ruined made a huge profit by charging a toll of twopence or threepence to enter 'Frost Fair' - and demanding a tip on leaving. Some were rumoured to have made £6 a day...

In 1823 London Bridge was rebuilt upstream and the old one demolished in 1831. The new arches re-directed the flow of the river so that it was too swift to freeze.

Regency Snippets - 1814 The Last Frost Fair on The Thames

It was an exceptional winter that caused 'Old Father Thames' to freeze solidly enough for people to walk across - rather than pay a boatman or the toll on the bridge - but the holding of fairs on such occasions had a long history. There were fairs in 1564, 1608, 1634, 1715, 1739 and 1789.

In 1811 the river froze hard leaving only a narrow channel so that people could walk on it from Battersea Bridge to Hungerford Stairs. But only three years later it froze hard again at the beginning of January after a week-long fog. The streets were piled high with snow, the ice on the river dirty and 'lumpy' but firm enough on the 30th for 70 people to walk across from Queenhithe to the opposite bank. More people soon ventured onto the ice and by Monday, February 1st the river was so solid from Blackfriars Bridge to some way below the Crane Stairs that thousands were tempted onto it.

By Tuesday the whole area was a fair. The 'main road' was named City Road and went straight down the middle of the Thames rather than across it. It was lined on both sides with about 30 stalls decorated with streamers, flags and 'signs', set up for the sale of porter, spirits, and other drinks (unlicensed) as well as for skittles, dancing, and a variety of games. The next day, Wednesday, was the same. In addition 8 or 10 printing presses had been erected, the typographers setting up their type for the printing or cards and broadsides to commenmorate the great frost...

On Thursday, to most people the ice seemed to be a solid rock. The fair continued to grow and attract more visitors. There were swimgs, bookstalls, skittles, dancing-booths, merry-go-rounds,sliding barges, just like Greenwich and Bartlemy Fairs. Friday the 4th brought even more, and scores of pedlars...

The Thames watermen far from being ruined made a huge profit by charging a toll of twopence or threepence to enter 'Frost Fair' - and demanding a tip on leaving. Some were rumoured to have made £6 a day...

In 1823 London Bridge was rebuilt upstream and the old one demolished in 1831. The new arches re-directed the flow of the river so that it was too swift to freeze.

Regency Snippets - Waltz

"At Almack's, as elsewherein London, the day had passed when in the ball-room the minuet and other stately movements were fashionable;and during the early years of the Regency the dances in vogue were the English country dances,Scotch jigs and Highland reels, the last, introduced into London, it is said, by Jane, Duchess Gordon, and performed by her to the accompaniment of an orchestra from Edinburgh conducted by Niel Gow, the composer of  "Bonnie Prince Charlie". It was the introduction of a new dance that shook, not only Almacks, but all England to its foundations. In 1815 Lady Jersey and Count Aldegonde, Lady Harriet Butler and Mr Montgomery, Lady Susan Ryde and Mr Montagu, and Miss Montgomery and Mr Charles Standish (or some authorities say MrHaytey) danced the first set of quadrilles, which presented by such sponsors, at once became fashionable. The quadrilles evoked much interest, but this was nothing compared with the sensation that had been caused two years earlier by the introduction from abroad of the waltz.

Some such dance it appears, had been known in England nearly a score of years before, for in The Times of February 19, 1796, we read: "The balls at Southampton are exceedingly lively and well-attended. The young ladies are particularly favourable to a German dance, called the Volse: for squeezing, hugging, etc., it is excellent, and more than one Lady has actually fainted in the middle of it. The "Volse", however,had not penetrated to the metropolis, or at least to the fashionable circles thereof; and when in 1813 it was danced at Almack's for the first time - it was then in a slow movement in trow temps - by Madame de Lieven and "Cupid" Palmerston, and Princess Esterhazy and Baron de Neumann, it divided society into two camps:those who welcomed it with open arms, and those who resented the introduction of what appeared to them as a most indecorous proceeding. Lmpoon after lampoon was provoked by the new dance, and more than one of these has come down to posterity."

Lewis Saul Benjamin (1908)  The Beaux of the Regency

Regency Snipets - Princess Charlotte Heir to the Throne

Princess Charlotte Augusta born 9.45 a.m. 7th January, 1796

5th February, 1813. Princess Charlotte allowed to attend a proper grown-up function. A ball at Carlton House ostensibly given in her honour and to which some members of the Oppostion were invited. Dressed in white and silver and for the first time wearing in her hair the ostrich-feather plumes of full Court dress, Charlotte appeared handsome and self posessed and, rather ot her own surprise, really enjoyed herself, althhough she was disappointed not to see the young Duke of Devonshire, whom she had expected as her partner, and nettled by the way her Aunt Mary pushed in to claim the privilege of opening the dancing - 'always the couple above me, as jealous and ill-natured the whole night as she could be.'

Alison Plowden. Caroline and Charlotte.

I am enjoying revisiting all the snippets in my files, and some of them will be useful for my new Regency novel.

Regncy Snippets - Christmas

Around Christmas 1814  a large family party was gathered at Blehheim* among whom were Lord Blandford, his wife and three of their children. Their days were passed in te traditional country way, with riding and wild duck shooting, and a good deal of eating and drinking.

The Profligate Duke by Mary Soames.

In the Iberian Peninsula.

"In every interval between our active services, we indulged in all manner of trick and amusement...We lived, united as men always are who are about to face death in the face on the same side, and, who, caring little about it to each new day added their lives as one more to rejoice in...We invited them every evening to a dance at our quarters...alternately...We used to dance the bolero, fandango and waltz and we wound up early in the evening with a dish of roast chestnuts."

Sir John Kincaid of the 95th Rifles which was in the light Division.

"Here for the first time in the Peninsula we kept Christmas. Every man contributed money, meat or wine. A sheep or two were bought and killed. Plum puddings were baked, etc., Plates, knives and forks, were not pelentiful. We managed to diminish the stock of eatables in quick time. For desert we had apples; and for a finish, two or three of the bandsmen played merry tunes, the men warmed their toes by dancing jigs and reels."

John Cooper of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, 1813.

Regency snippets - Population - London and other towns.

The Regency snippets which I have been uploading are taken from a file of notes that I compiled.

"Of England's own 10,000,000 a tenth lived in the capital. Apart from its suburbs of new villas it was really five towns, the mercantile City, the royal West End, the riverside port, the Borough of Southwark, and the slums.These last croweded out of sight though not always out of smell of the rich, behind the grander houses and spread ever futher eastwards into the Essex and Kentish meadows, leaving a string of low, dingy towns on either side of the Thames. They were still what they had been in the Middle Ages, fever-ridden haunts of vice and wretchedness:a maze of alleys and lanes fading into the unwholdesome vapour that always overhung them, of dirty, tumbledown houses with windows patched with rags and blackened paper, and airless courts crowded with squabbling women and half-naked children wallowing in pools and kennels (channels which carried refuse away.)

"Apart from London there were only two towns in England, Manchester and Liverpool with 100,000 inhabitants and five others - Bristol, Glasgow, Birmingham, leeds and Sheffield with over 50,000."

The Age of Elegance.
Chapter Five - Triumphant Island.
Arthur Bryant. 

Regency Snippets - Charity

."..visitors saw something too, of the great charities - the offspring of private benevolence - which the islanders had endowed their capital (London). They visited the Charterhouse, the Foundling Hospital in the northern fields, the palaces built for naval and military pensioners at Greenwich and Chelsea , and dined in the hills of the Goldsmiths and Merchant Taylors - reresentatives of corporations, which spent between them as much on relieving the poor as a Continental sovereign maintaining his Court. The British capital had 20 voluntarily supported hospitals, a hundred and twenty almhouses, fifty free dispensaries, forty-five endowed free schools and two hundred and fifty parochial schools, educating, clothing and feeding nearly 20,000 children. Though the palace of St James was the smallest and least imposing in Europe, her real palaces were hospitals. Wren's Greenwich and Chelsea, Gibb's St Bartholomews with its Hogarth staircase, St Thomas with its four great quadrangles treating and discharging 11,000 patients a year; the new "Bethlem" and "St Luke's" for the insame with their enormous classical facades were buildings that a king might have been proud to inhabit. In no other country was there so much voluntary corporate goodness towards the hungry and diseased and weak. When, on Holy Thursday 6,000 London charity children marched in procession to St Pauls the Prussian General Yorck delcared nothing had ever moved him so deeply."


Arthur Bryant.
The Age of Elegance.
Chapter Five. The Triumphant Island.

Regency Snippets - Charity

."..visitors saw something too,  of the great charities - the offspring of private benevolence - which the islanders had endowed their capital (London). They visited the Charterhouse, the Foundling Hospital in the northern fields, the palaces built for naval and military pensioners at Greenwich and Chelsea , and dined in the hills of the Goldsmiths and Merchant Taylors - reresentatives of corporations, which spent between them as much on relieving the poor as a Continental sovereign maintaining his Court. The British capital had 20 voluntarily supported hospitals, a hundred and twenty almhouses, fifty free dispensaries, forty-five endowed free schools and two hundred and fifty parochial schools, educating, clothing and feeding nearly 20,000 children. Though the palace of St James was the smallest and least imposing in Europe, her real palaces were hospitals. Wren's Greenwich and Chelsea, Gibb's St Bartholomews with its Hogarth staircase, St Thomas with its four great quadrangles treating and discharging 11,000 patients a year; the new "Bethlem" and "St Luke's" for the insame with their enormous classical facades were buildings that a king might have been proud to inhabit. In no other country was there so much voluntary corporate goodness towards the hungry and diseased and weak. When, on Holy Thursday 6,000 London charity children marched in procession to St Pauls the Prussian General Yorck delcared nothing had ever moved him so deeply."

Arthur Bryant.
The Age of Elegance.
Chapter Five. The Triumphant Island.

Regency Snippet - Buckingham Palace

This snippet is pre-Regency but I think it deserves a mention.

In May 1762 King George III and Queen Charlotte moved into Buckingham House, which was called Queen's House.

In 1800 Wyatt built a new grand staircase with a central and two branching flights....Although the palace was being gradually adapated for ceremonial use, Queen Charlotte continued to find nostalgic pleasures around her. The royal 'Bookbinders Shop' was there and in the Queen's Garden she had carnation stages, and evergreens as in earlier years. Her elephant and zebra were gone, but the King's flocks and herds remained, and the patoral scene, enlivened in due season by haymaking and harbvesting of crops from plantations of fruit trees, preserved unchallenged the tradition of the Duke of Bucking ham...

Queen Charlotte by Olwen Hedley.

Writing and Gardening

I have been busy with many writerly matters but had set myself a deadline to begin a new novel today - Monday's Child - the sequel to my Regency Novel, Sunday's Child - and kept to it. I've spent so much time thinking about it that the first few pages flowed well.

I didn't have time to write for as long as usual because the gardener who works for me once a fortnight arrived and I needed to give him some instructions etc. We removed my peach tree from a large container and planted it in the the garden. He then laid wee suppressent over an 5 foot by 8 foot vegetable patch bordered by fir trees. The trees drain the soil and nothing flourished in the patch so we put two four by four foot raised beds over the weed suppressant which will filter the water.

After the gardener left I finished cleaning the greenhouse and repotted more of my orchids in a special growing medium.

All in all, a very satisfying morning.

Gardening

At long last, some decent weather her in S.E.England. Yesterday, I cleaned my greenhouse and potted up pumpkins, winter squash and courgettes which were growing indoors in a heated propagator. I also potted up my orchids. I removed all the old compost, trimmed the roots, repotted the plants in orchid compost and fed them with a special liquid feed. Hopefully, they will thrive and flower for months.

Yesterday, I sowed sweetcorn,sweetpeas,basil and other seeds in seed-tray. Today, I transplated four clumps of rhubarb to a well-manured sunny spot, planted a dessert gooseberry and nearly finished tidying up my  greenhouse.