While Jane Ambrose is fictional, Princess Charlotte did have a piano instructor named Jane Mary Guest, who had a minor reputation as a composer. A pupil of Johann Christian Bach and Thomas Linley, Guest also taught Charlotte’s youngest aunt, the Princess Amelia. The Regent fired her along with the rest of Charlotte’s staff in the summer of 1814.
The limitations placed on the fictional Jane Ambrose as a female musician were real. Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny and Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna, were both acknowledged as being at least as talented as their famous brothers. Like the fictional Jane, they were allowed to perform with their brothers while young but forced to retire from the public eye when they reached marriageable age. Maria Anna Mozart did compose music, but it is not known if her brother published any of it as his own; Felix Mendelssohn did publish some of his sister Fanny’s works, but since that occurred after the date of this story, neither Hero nor Miss Kinsworth is able to reference it.
Thomas Linley was a famous tenor, music teacher, and composer whose numerous musical children were legendary. The family seems to have had a fatal weakness for tuberculosis, or consumption as it was then called, and most died quite young. One of his daughters, Elisabeth, was the first wife of playwright Richard Sheridan. A noted soprano, she had to give up performing at the time of her marriage.
Princess Charlotte’s governess in January of 1814 was the Duchess of Leeds, who was much as I have described her here. The young Lady Arabella is modeled on the Duchess’s daughter, Lady Catherine Osborne, who was introduced into Charlotte’s household to spy on the Princess. Lady Catherine actually did learn German when Charlotte and Miss Knight began speaking that language to keep her from eavesdropping on their conversations. When the Princess and her subgoverness switched to Italian, Lady Catherine then began taking Italian lessons from Charlotte’s harp instructor. And yes, at one point Princess Charlotte did lock the annoying duke’s daughter in a water closet (toilet) for fifteen minutes.
William Godwin was a real historical figure, famous at the time as a political philosopher but better known today as the widower of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. He was also the father of Mary Godwin Shelley, author of Frankenstein and wife of the poet Shelley. Godwin did live in Clerkenwell, on Skinner Street, and in later life he did write, publish, and sell children’s books.
Publishers, printers, and bookstores worked differently in the early nineteenth century than they do today. Printers typically sold their books in plain paper wrappers with temporary sewing; the books were permanently bound by either bookstores or their purchasers, who would have them bound to match their libraries. Many printers had their own bookstores and binderies.
The character of Liam Maxwell is a composite of several radical journalists including Leigh and John Hunt, William Cobbett, Thomas Jonathan Wooler, Richard Carlile, and others. It was not uncommon for journalists to be imprisoned for publishing unflattering truths about the Prince of Wales or simply criticizing practices such as the pillory or impressment.
The large size of the Royal Navy combined with the brutal discipline, hideous living conditions, and low pay for which it was infamous meant Britain’s warships could be kept crewed only by the use of impressment. Armed press gangs roamed ports and nearby villages to carry off able-bodied boys and men; men were also seized off merchant ships, both British and foreign, and from foreign naval ships (the latter played a major role in the United States’ declaration of the War of 1812). It is said that at the time of Trafalgar more than half the Royal Navy’s 120,000 sailors were pressed men. These men’s wives and families were often left destitute.
While I have altered her name and some details, a seventeen-year-old wife of an impressed sailor was hanged at Newgate for theft after walking up to London from Cornwall in search of her husband; her newborn baby was taken from her arms on the scaffold. The description of Amy Hatcher’s hanging is an amalgamation of several contemporary accounts of hangings from the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Murderers were typically (but not always) hanged on a Monday morning; prisoners guilty of any of the period’s two hundred other capital crimes could be hanged any day of the week. Hangings were usually multiple; the record is believed to be twenty at one time.
Napoléon really did set up a “ville des smoglers.” One of the best sources for this strange chapter in history and the role played by Rothschild is Gavin Daly’s 2007 article in The Historical Journal, “Napoleon and the ‘City of Smugglers,’ 1810–1814.” The claim that Rothschild’s January 1814 gold shipments to Paris were then sent on to Wellington is disputed by some; attempts by certain later apologists to further claim that all of Rothschild’s well-documented gold smuggling ventures had for years been going to Wellington are patently ridiculous. As Hero notes, the Royal Navy had control of the Channel and had no need for such costly and dangerous subterfuge.
Rothschild was only one of many London financiers engaged in activities that aided France. Apart from arranging the loan that enabled the United States to buy Louisiana from Napoléon, London bankers also gave Napoléon the five million pounds he needed to raise an army after he escaped from Elba. Napoléon was what some have called a “bullionist”; he really did distrust paper money and hated bankers and credit. Despite his constant wars, he is said to have left France a credit balance in 1814. (Of course, looting Switzerland and the Vatican helped make that possible.)
Lord
