Hopefully this works. There are five possible answers to select for each question!
Hopefully this works. There are five possible answers to select for each question!
Duke of Wellington
For a while now, dukes have been running rampant through the Regency fiction genres, especially in Historicals, but even in Trads. Do you love this? Hate this? Don’t care? The trend seems as strong as ever. The publishers, and apparently the readers, love them. And hey, we’re writing stories that are fantasies based on a romantic view of our time period, so why not? It’s not as if all of these fictional dukes exist in the same version of Regency England –each author’s Regency World is unique to that author (except perhaps in a connected set or special project). Right? But did you ever wonder how many dukes there really were in Great Britain during the Regency?
Douglas Hamilton, 8th Duke of Hamilton & 5th Duke of Brandon
You might say dukes are the equivalent historical heart-throbs to the super-billionaires that are the go-to heroes in current contemporary romance. As The Daily Mail has explained it: “Dukes are just one rung down from royalty in the social pecking order and enjoy a special status way above the rank and file of the aristocracy. As peerages go, it’s the jackpot.”
Who wouldn’t want their hero to be that special? Except the way I see it, this status cuts both ways. The very rarified “special-ness” of such high rank begins to suffer when book after book after book has young, handsome, wealthy dukes just ripe for marriage. It just rubs against my personal vision of what I think the Regency was like, or makes the rank of duke seem a little common. Dukes were rare, and most often old…weren’t they? And I’m not even touching the question of the way dukes fit into the political structure, but you can note below how many of the dukedoms are named for the counties of Britain….
Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond
I’ve nothing against my fellow authors whose heroes are dukes, or the readers who love them. I get it. But I can’t do it. Every time I consider creating a hero who is so highly ranked –well, I feel like I stubbed my toe. The closest I’ve come to it was dealing with a duke’s family in An Unlikely Hero, and that story’s hero was a viscount, a “lowly” friend of the duke’s son. Am I losing readers?
I don’t seem to have the same problem with creating heroes in the lower peerage ranks. There were so many more of them! Earls, for instance. I am fond of them. They could be wealthier than some dukes were! But I have this idea that there were a lot more earls floating around in the real Regency England, so it seems less of a violation to add in a few fictional ones. And barons –they date very far back in time, and there were lots of them, too. Has the demand for dukes devalued the other four peerage ranks (marquess, earl, viscount, and baron) in our fiction?
I decided to put my prejudice to the test and check the numbers. (I’m not including Royal Princes’ dukedoms). After all the dukedoms that have been created, recreated, forfeited, merged (through marriage or elevation to higher rank), or simply gone extinct (no heirs), today there are only 24 still extant. But how many in our favorite time period?
63 English (non-royal) dukedoms starting as early as 1351 went extinct, were forfeited to the crown, or merged prior to 1707. Eleven (including two forfeited and restored several times) were extant at least through the Regency:
1 Norfolk, 1483 (forfeited three times up to 1660)
Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset
2 Somerset, 1547 (forfeited 1552-1660)
Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond
3 Richmond, 1675
4 Grafton, 1675
5 Beaufort, 1682
6 St Albans, 1684
7 Leeds, 1694 (extinct in 1964)
8 Bedford, 1694
9 Devonshire, 1694
Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill’s ancestor
10 Marlborough, 1702
11 Rutland, 1703
Between 1707-1801, about ten more were created and went extinct, merged, or were forfeit. Eight dukedoms of Great Britain created during these years were still extant into the Regency:
12 Brandon, 1711
13 Ancaster & Kesteven, 1715 (extinct-1809)
14 Portland, 1716 (extinct 1990)
15 Manchester, 1719
16 Dorset, 1720
17 Bridgewater, 1720 (extinct 1803)
18 Newcastle-under-Lynne, 1756 (extinct 1988)
19 Northumberland, 1766
Created between 1801-1822, only two:
20 Wellington, 1814
21 Buckingham and Chandos, 1822 (extinct 1889)
22 Duke of Leinster, 1691, was the only Irish dukedom extant during the Regency
It appears there were nine Scottish Dukes during the Regency, titles dating from 1707 or earlier. (18 other Scottish dukedoms went extinct, were forfeited to the crown, or merged between 1351-1707 ) The nine:
1) Hamilton 1643 (and later Brandon, 1711)
2) Buccleough, 1663 (and Queensbury, 1810)
G. D. Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll
3) Lennox 1665
4) Gordon
5) Queensbury, 1684
6) Arguyll, 1701
7) Atholl, 1703
8) Montrose, 1707
9) Roxburghe, 1707
By my count, that’s 31 dukes during the Regency, in all of England, Scotland, and Ireland. If I had time, I would now look them all up to find out how old each one was in, say, 1816!!
For comparison, I give you:
1) number of earldoms (English, Scottish, Irish, G.B or U.K.), established before or during the Regency (1398-1822) still extant today: 142. (Because the sheer number of earldoms has long surpassed the number of territorial counties, the names of many earldoms are associated with smaller units (estates, villages, families, etc.).
2) number of baronies (English, Scottish, Irish, G.B or U.K.), established before or during the Regency (1264-1822) still extant today: 124 (and 317 more were created since 1822!)
I am sure there were more of both these peerages during the Regency that disappeared later –sorry I don’t have time to analyze these long lists! You get my point. Slipping in a bunch of fictional earls or barons doesn’t rattle my universe of imagined history nearly as much as all those dukes!
1st Marquess of Montrose
Viscounts and marquesses, the other two peerage titles, were less common, at least as independent titles. Copied from the French, they came into use later, and tended to become subsidiary titles as the holders were promoted. Much more commonly found as the courtesy titles used by heirs-apparent. Today there are only 25 marquesses who do not hold higher titles, and 37 such viscounts. I learned that stand-alone viscountcies were more common in Ireland than the other parts of the UK –24 of those 37 viscounts are Irish titles. Things I’ll keep in mind for future stories!!
I came across two tidbits that I can’t resist sharing. One is this: The Daily Mail reported in 2009 that Tatler Magazine invited the 24 then-current non-royal dukes to lunch. Some were too frail to attend, and some live abroad, but ten of them came. Those ten represented the largest gathering of dukes since Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953! Their ages ranged from 41 to 94. For a photo of them, details and the interesting story, see “Ten Dukes a-Dining”.
And this last bit is at least for Amanda, and also shows that it’s not always good to be a duke:
“When Elizabeth I came to power the only [remaining] living duke was Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. Elizabeth did not create any dukes, and she beheaded Thomas Howard at the age of 36 for plotting to wed Mary, Queen of Scots and overthrow her. By 1572, this class of peerage was extinct – there were no Dukes in the last 30 years of her reign.” (from Wikipedia) No wonder Shakespeare could so liberally sprinkle both historical and fictional dukes throughout his plays without worrying about direct repercussions! (besides putting them in Italy, of course) No one in England held that rank for most of his lifetime –from the time he was eight until seven years after his death in 1616. The later extant Dukedoms in the Peerage of England were created (or restored, in two cases) in the Stuart period and after.
How do you feel about dukes? In our Regency fantasies, does it matter whether the titles of our characters reflect the nature of the peerage at the time? I’d love to hear what you think!
Susanna here, and so swamped under my current writing deadline for my 2015 historical romance, My Lady Defiant, that I don’t have time for any deep thoughts on the state of the romance genre or erudite discussion of my latest research discoveries. So instead I thought I’d share with you some of the inspiration that’s helping me see and hear my hero…
Everyone, say hello to Tom Hiddleston.
I could listen to him recite Shakespeare while selling cars all day:
And if that’s not enough for you, here he’s being Shakespearean on a horse:
And here he is teaching Cookie Monster about delayed gratification:
Frankly, this is the most I’ve ever focused on the actor I’d want to cast in the film adaptation of my book. I usually come up with an actor, an athlete or two who has the look I have in mind–I’m not that visual a thinker, so having an actual person to model a character upon helps me describe him or her better. Plus, when I’m filling out my cover art information sheet, I always like to include an image or two. If I describe Henry, my current hero, an elegantly handsome, leanly athletic, archetypically English blue-eyed dark blond, also linking to a nice Tom Hiddleston image shows my cover artist what all those adjectives and adverbs mean to me.
Yet this is the first time I’ve made a habit of watching an actor’s videos to help get me in the mood to write. Part of that is because the man in question is pretty yummy. Also, he has the right accent for the job, which couldn’t be said of Nathan Fillion (Will in The Sergeant’s Lady looks a lot like Firefly-era Fillion) or Cam Newton (my model for Elijah in A Dream Defiant’s brand of tall, dark, and athletic).
But I recently realized the main reason watching videos has helped me write Henry is that more than any other hero I’ve written, he spends his life playing a part. He was born with fairly severe dyslexia into a high-achieving, academically gifted family. So his life up until his book starts has been defined by his shame over what he considers his failure and stupidity, and he’s made an art form of avoiding any situation in which he might reasonably be expected to read aloud, write, or keep accounts. And then over the course of the book, he has to improvise even more than normal as he and the heroine spend most of the story running for their lives, pretending to be various people they aren’t to throw their pursuers off the scent. So imagining how a good actor might play my character helps me visualize how he plays himself, since he so rarely lets anyone see his whole truth.
What about you? Do you ever visualize actors or actresses playing the characters when you write or read?
Like other Riskies, I’m recently returned from the RWA conference. I stayed a few days extra for a family reunion, so I haven’t had much time yet to digest what I learned. The second leg of the trip turned unexpectedly adventurous, too–on Sunday while on the way to the Six Flags amusement park with some of the family, including my 9-year-old daughter and 10-year-old grand-niece, we had an abrupt flat tire in our rental car. While on I-20. Fortunately we were able to make it over to the shoulder safely, and we had enough fuel in the car to keep the AC running while we waited for AAA to come to the rescue. And that rescue was worth every penny of AAA membership fees we’ve paid for the last DECADE, as far as I’m concerned.
Once we finally got to Six Flags, we only had two hours or so to enjoy the rides before this happened:
We knew it was going to storm, just not quite so…vehemently. That trash can with what looks like waves breaking against it had already drifted five or six feet from its original spot, and within a minute floated out of sight entirely. Once the rain let up even a tiny bit, we sloshed back to our car and drove to my nephew’s house through an hour of rain that alternated between driving and merely heavy. Not the best amusement park excursion ever, but at least the barbecue we stopped for during a heavy rain phase was delicious.
Then when we finally got back to Seattle on Tuesday and started up my car, which we’d left parked at the airport, to our dismay its low tire pressure indicator came on! Since we could see one of the front tires was visibly flatter than its mate, rather than risk a repeat of Sunday’s experience, only on I-5 during rush hour, we located the nearest tire center, five minutes’ drive from the airport, and went straight there. Which was smart, as it turned out. There was a tack in the tire, and a good chance it would’ve gone entirely flat before we could’ve made it home and taken it to the dealership for a check the next day. So, props to Les Schwab Tire Center for patching the tire for free and to Google Maps for finding the closest one. I love my 21st century technology!
But I also love writing about the lower-tech world of 200 years ago. My latest release, A Dream Defiant, hits virtual shelves this coming Monday.
It’s a risky book on several levels. It’s my first-ever novella, so the shorter length was a learning curve for me–less than 30,000 words while my previous books have averaged around 90,000. So I had to ruthlessly cut the plot down to cover a shorter time range and resist the urge to go haring off chasing subplots or elaborating upon backstory. And I ended up enjoying it. While I don’t plan to give up full-length novels by any means, I have at least one more novella in the pipeline, a holiday romance whose title and release date remain TBD, but will be coming from Carina in late 2014.
But the biggest risk I took was writing a black hero. I was inspired by everything from a brief reference to Sudanese soldiers in Napoleon’s army in John Elting’s encyclopedic history Swords Around a Throne to the black soldier visible in the 1822 painting Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog posts about black soldiers in the Civil War.
Still, I hesitated for a long time before starting this story. Who did I think I was to create such a hero, when I’m not just a white woman but one with Southern roots and a Confederate soldier for a great-great-grandfather? And maybe I took too great a risk–though now it’s in the hands of you, the readers, to judge. But I ended up deciding it was an important, little-known aspect of history that was well worth exploring–and also that who my great-great-grandfather was shouldn’t determine what I can and can’t write about 150 years later.
I’m giving away a copy of A Dream Defiant in the electronic format of your choice to one randomly selected commenter between now and Sunday at 9 PM Pacific Time. So tell me about your own travel adventures, wonderful or otherwise, or let me know what risks you think Regency authors should and shouldn’t take.
Overall, I enjoyed this recent article in the Atlantic: Beyond Bodice Rippers: How Romance Novels Came to Embrace Feminism. But is this really news?
The article quotes Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels: “Bodice-rippers are typically set in the past, and the hero is a great deal older, more brutal, and more rapetastic than the heroine.”
I never did read any books like this when they were coming out in the 70s and early 80s, but I’ve read some recent reviews of such. Here’s one that had my eyes rolling back in my head. Feel free to indulge your morbid curiosity if you wish: Purity’s Passion by Janette Seymour, a Review by Redheaded Girl.
As a child, I read my mother’s Regency romance novels. I only started reading longer, sexier historical romances when I followed authors like Mary Jo Putney, Jo Beverley and Loretta Chase as they moved to writing longer books. Except for being set in the past, there’s no resemblance between their historical romances and the description above. The romances I like have heroes and heroines who worked through their conflicts emerging as equals, despite a historical backdrop where gender roles were more rigidly defined.
So maybe I missed something but it seems to me that the romance genre has been moving away from the abusive hero/submissive heroine setup for decades and it isn’t a “new generation” of writers who are inventing this.
I’m woefully ill-read—life has done that to me—so I haven’t read most of the books mentioned. Did I miss another shift? The article implies that the new feminist romances subvert the stereotype. Does this mean heroines can now be as selfish and abusive as the heroes used to be? Actually, I doubt it, knowing some of these authors.
So help me out. Is something really changing in the genre or is it a continuation of the shift to strong heroines and more equal relationships that began decades ago? And did you ever read of those Bad Old Bodice Rippers? If so, what did you think?
Elena
