Tag Archives: Wellington

Getting ready to visit Napoleon

Updated on April 16, 2015 by susanna

My family and I are continuing to get ready for our four-week European trip, which will include attending some of the bicentennial events for the Battle of Waterloo. We’ll be spending the two weeks in the middle of the trip in France, and Mr Fraser and I have been trying to teach ourselves a little French using Duolingo. I’m not going to become an expert–for that, I’d need to go back in time and start studying several years ago, possibly at the expense of writing any books or otherwise having a life during that time–but I’m hoping to know enough phrases and words to greet people, make simple purchases in stores and markets, etc. The program has me practicing food and color words a lot, to the point where I found myself in the grocery store last night, staring sadly at an assortment of less-than-ripe strawberries. “J’aime les fraises rouges,” I murmured. (I like the red strawberries.) “But these fraises aren’t very rouges.”

While I’m in Paris, I naturally plan to visit Les Invalides, which houses the Musée de l’Armée (army museum) along with Napoleon’s burial site.

When Napoleon died in 1821, he was buried on Saint Helena. He didn’t receive his French state funeral until 1840. (And if you have time for a long read, the Wikipedia article on that event is fascinating.)

While I’m no great admirer of Napoleon’s, I expect I’ll find visiting his sarcophagus moving nonetheless. The world without him would’ve been an unimaginably different place, after all.

I also hope to visit Malmaison, Josephine’s chateau just outside of Paris.

And on a lighter note, while we’re in London I plan to visit Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington’s London home, where I’ll get to see this:

It will never not amuse me that Napoleon commissioned a giant nude statue of himself as Mars the Peacemaker, nor that the statue in question now guards the Duke of Wellington’s staircase. I don’t suppose they’ll let me take a selfie next to it…

Posted in Regency, Research | Tagged Napoleon, Susanna Fraser, travel, Wellington | 8 Replies

Historical TMI

Updated on March 19, 2015 by susanna

This post was originally posted on the now-defunct Romancing the Past blog back in 2011, but on re-reading it I decided it was timely enough (for Risky Regencies values of timeliness) to bear recycling!

It has occurred to me that, should I happen to meet certain historical figures in the afterlife, our conversations might prove a bit awkward.

It’s the TMI factor, you see. What do you say to a man when you’ve seen the love letters he sent to his wife in the early days of their marriage? Letters which contain such revealing passages as:

“Come soon; I warn you, if you delay, you will find me ill. Fatigue and your absence are too much. You are coming, aren’t you? You are going to be here beside me, in my arms, on my breast, on my mouth? Take wing and come, come! A kiss on your heart, and one much lower down, much lower!”

Well, all right, then. Good to know this guy–we’ll call him General X–could be so generous and amorous when his passions were engaged.

And then there’s General Y. A more circumspect soul, he left us no correspondence allowing us to deduce just what he planned to do to his woman of the moment next time he got her into bed. And when one of his brothers was being a bit too scandalous in his womanizing, General Y complained in a letter to another brother that he wished their errant sibling was “castrated, or that he would like other people attend to his business & perform too. It is lamentable to see Talents & character & advantages such as he possesses thrown away upon Whoring.”

Though don’t let that fool you into thinking General Y was any kind of model of chastity. Among other things, he had at least two mistresses in common with General X, one of whom was generous enough to the salacious curiosity of posterity to publicly state that Y was better in bed.

And who are our amorous generals? X is Napoleon and Y is Wellington–and speaking as someone who’s read stacks of biographies of both, it’s amazing how much of their personalities and voices come through in those two brief quotes above.

Wellington

Do you know any good historical TMI? And would you prefer Napoleon or Wellington as a lover? (I’m on Team Wellington all the way–he’s much better-looking by my tastes, I like cool-headed, reserved, snarky personalities like his, and on the whole I prefer my Secret Historical Boyfriends to NOT try to take over the world. Though, really, if I were going to have my pick of ANY military man of the era, I’d have to consider Michel Ney and Eugene de Beauharnais too.)

Posted in Frivolity, History, Regency | Tagged historical TMI, Napoleon, Susanna Fraser, Wellington | 10 Replies

Peninsular War road trip

Updated on February 19, 2015 by susanna

As I think I’ve mentioned here on several occasions, this summer Mr Fraser, our daughter (who turns 11 in two months), and I will be going to Europe this summer, among other things to attend the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo.

We’re going to be there for nearly four weeks, so there will be far more to our trip than just Waterloo. While some of the trip has nothing to do with my Regency research interests–e.g. the five nights we’ll be spending in a cottage in the Dordogne River valley near Sarlat–we’re planning a week in Spain that’s turning into The Frasers’ Excellent Roman Ruins and Peninsular War Battlefield Road Trip Adventure.

I’m still researching the details, but at this point it looks like I’ll get to feed my Wellington obsession at the following sites:

Vitoria, where in June 1813 Wellington trounced Jourdan and the British army captured the French baggage train, laden with treasure Joseph Bonaparte and his courtiers had seized from Madrid–the incident that opens my 2013 novella, A Dream Defiant.

Salamanca, where Wellington, who is primarily regarded as a brilliant defensive general, proved himself pretty damn capable on the attack as well. As Maximilien Foy, one of the French generals there, put it:

“This battle is the most cleverly fought, the largest in scale, the most important in results, of any that the English have won in recent times. It brings up Lord Wellington’s reputation almost to the level of that of Marlborough. Up to this day we knew his prudence, his eye for choosing good positions, and the skill with which he used them. But at Salamanca he has shown himself a great and able master of manoeuvring. He kept his dispositions hidden nearly the whole day: he allowed us to develop our movement before he pronounced his own: he played a close game: he utilized the oblique order in the style of Frederick the Great.”

Badajoz, site of a bloody siege and storming followed by brutal and shameful pillaging in April 1812–and another battled that’s shown up in my writing, in my 2010 debut, The Sergeant’s Lady.

Talavera, the 1809 victory that first raised Wellington to the nobility as a viscount.

And last but very far from least, we’ll end up in Madrid, where we’ll visit the Prado and I’ll be able to see many of Goya’s works, including ones like the above illustrating the horror and brutality of war–something I try my best never to forget even as I write adventurous romances with soldier heroes.

I’m more thrilled than I can say that this trip I’ve been planning and dreaming of for a decade is now just a few short months away, and I can hardly wait to come back with pictures and stories to fill months of blog posts!

Posted in History | Tagged Peninsular War, Spain, Susanna Fraser, travel, Waterloo, Wellington | 7 Replies

Book Wish List

Updated on November 4, 2013 by Diane Gaston

Carolyn’s blog about Amazon’s Matchbook program led me to poke around at Amazon and to ultimately look at my Amazon Book Wish List. On Amazon you can make as many wish lists as you like, an easy way to record a “gift registry” for yourself or family members. I use the wish list function to keep track of books that interested me, but that I was not certain I wanted to buy immediately. Or, more accurately, books I was afraid I’d forget.

Here are a few of them.

My newest addition to the list was recommended to me by Kristine Hughes (The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life in Regency and Victorian England from 1811 – 1901 and Number One London blog)–The Profligate Son: Or, A True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice, and Financial Ruin in Regency Britain. by Nicola Phillips.
Booklist says:

“The dangers of a profligate son is a persistent theme in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, and it was also a very real fear among the upper echelon of British families…an absorbing case study…Phillips eloquently fills out the bare bones of the known facts of the story.”

How can any of us resist that story?

Next on my wish list are two books with the same title but different authors–Wellington: The Iron Duke, first by Phillip J. Haythornwaite; second by Richard Holmes. I’m hoping to go on Kristine and Vicky Hinshaw’s Wellington tour next year and it has been years since I read a Wellington biography.

There are several books on my list that I own in hardback or paperback, but that I’d love to have on my Kindle for convenience. I can’t quite justify spending the money to buy books I already own, but I’m hoping someone in the family will see them and buy them for me as a gift. One of my favorites is Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, again by Richard Holmes. This book gives so much information about the British army in the Napoleonic War, it is a treasure. Other books I already own are: Wellington’s Rifles by Mark Urban, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist-the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England by Daniel Pool, Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson 1793-1815 by John B. Hattendorf and Dean King.

Two more books on the list: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and sounds fascinating. As does A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby by Mary S. Lovell. In 1828 Jane Digby left her aristocratic husband and young son for an Austrian diplomat. A sensational divorce resulted and Digby left England for the continent, marrying two more times, but leaving those husbands and more children, as well, until she ultimately found happiness marrying a sheik twenty years younger than she. If her story were fiction, it would be too far-fetched.

Do you own any of these books? Are they on your wish list? What books are on your wish list?

Posted in Reading, Regency, Research | Tagged books, Jane Digby, Wellington | 4 Replies

A Wellington Poor Excuse For A Blog Redux plus the Olympics

Updated on January 17, 2013 by Diane Gaston

Today I’m swamped with a writing deadline and a minor family delay and to top it off, I’m also a guest at USA Today’s Happy Ever After blog (Stop by and say hi–please!!!).

So I’m going to cheat a little here at Risky Regencies and give you a redux of a blog I wrote in 2009.

But I can’t start the week without saying a “WAY TO GO” to London and the UK for a fabulously done Olympics! I didn’t get to watch as much as I would have liked, but I kept up with the highlights and am proud of our USA team (especially the women) and of the British team, coming in THIRD in medal count. That is amazing. Something to add to that British pride so greatly showcased throughout the whole Olympics.

Back to my old blog….When in doubt (or on deadline) who can you turn to but Wellington? I mean, he saved the day from Napoleon, didn’t he?

Here’s the text of the 2009 blog:

As a certified Wellington Groupie (Kristine Hughes is the founding member) and in continuing honor of the Waterloo Anniversary, I thought I would simply share some of my Wellington-related photos and thoughts.

When I first fell in raptures about Wellington (or dear Artie, as Kristine calls him), it was at Stratfield Saye, Wellington’s country house. Of all the houses we saw on that 2003 trip to England, Stratfield Saye seemed the most like it was a home. It was a home. The present duke’s son and his family live there, but you could still feel the first Duke in every room. An outer building housed the funeral carriage that carried the Duke’s body through London. A recording played of all his honors, as had been read out during his funeral. I realized that this had been a truly great man.

On that trip we also got to go up to the top of the Wellington Arch in London, and of course we toured Apsley House, also known as Number One London. Apsley House felt more like a museum than a house and well it should. It was filled with wonderful art and artifacts.

Also in London we visited Lock and Co, a Hatters shop that has been in Mayfair since 1676. On display there are Wellington’s and Nelson’s hats, instantly recognizable.

I don’t claim to be an expert on Wellington. I’ve just read one biography (and can’t remember which one it was), but I think of him as a man with great integrity, courage and honor. As a boy he didn’t show much promise, but his mother sent him to a military academy in Europe (near Waterloo, I think) and he found his strength. As a military man he understood how to use his resources, he was clever, and he was brave. He rode the battlefield during Waterloo, was everywhere he could be and ignored the danger to himself. He cared about his men. One of my favorite Wellington quotes is: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”

He was not a good husband, although he felt honor-bound to marry his wife, because she thought they were betrothed and had waited for him while he served in India. He had many dalliances throughout their marriage and one has to wonder how his wife felt as this man grew in greatness and increasingly left her behind. His sons could not match his success. Who could? I like this quote from his son after the Duke’s death, “Imagine what it will be when the Duke of Wellington is announced, and only I walk in the room.”

The Duke was a man who was very sure of himself and his opinions. I suspect he had a big ego, but he also had a sense of humor. In the display at Lock and Co. was a little caricature of Wellington, making fun of the term Wellington boot for the style of boot he favored. At Stratfield Saye there was a room papered with hundreds of caricatures of the Duke, which I thought was akin to a writer papering a bathroom with rejection letters. The boot one was was there, too.