June 18th 2015 will be 200 years since the Battle of Waterloo

Skip to the bold lettering if you’ve already read the introduction 🙂

On the 18^th June 2015 it will be 200 years since the battle of Waterloo took place, which was fought near Brussels in Belgium. This is the setting for scenes in my novel The Lost Love of a Soldier so I want to take this chance to share some of the things which I learned while researching the story of the 52nd (Oxfordshire) Regiment of foot which my fictional character, Paul, had a place within, to commemorate the anniversary of the battle.

I picked the name of a real regiment randomly when I began writing Paul’s and Ellen’s fictional story, in The Illicit Love of a Courtesan, and chose the 52^nd (Oxfordshire) Regiment of foot. So when I decided to place the characters in a prequel, which would incorporate the battle of Waterloo, I had to research the background of the 52^ndand develop an understanding of what happened to them before they reached the battle. Looking up where they’d come from before the battle? How they had lived? How would they have felt during the lead up to Waterloo?

This is the true story I am sharing on my blog in the lead up to the bicentenary commemoration of the battle. Read part one

Part Two

When they arrived in Belgium, people travelled from the city of Ostend, where the ships crossing the channel and the North Sea came into port, to Ghent, by barge. Personal memoirs of the time speak about the barges being like pleasure boats, with one man travelling back and forth just for fun. Then the journey from Ghent to Brussels which was made by road must have been full of hundreds of men marching, while the elite who’d come to watch travelled in carriages waving, excitedly.

The details of Ellen’s and Paul’s journey, and the accommodation they used, are drawn from a number of different written accounts of events in the build-up to Waterloo, and I know many romance writers use the view of the tourists who were there to set their scenes within picnics in the woods, and parties in Brussels. Life continued for the tourists as though they were not heading towards war. But knowing the impact war has on soldiers as we do now, I instead made Paul a much more sober man who is constantly aware that the battle is only a distance away. He is forever aware of the fear of leaving Ellen alone in Brussels and losing her and yet his not afraid of the battle only for his wife.

The truth of the time is, while the elite held their balls and entertainments in Brussels, in the fields and villages beyond it, Wellington had over a hundred thousand men encamped and waiting, while the Prussian army, Britain’s allies, had even more men than that ready and waiting to fight, and while they waited they learned the terrain, choosing the places they would prefer to fight.
But the soldiers did not keep themselves entirely distant from the revelry, there would have been different personalities responding different ways, and different ranks of soldiers behaved in different ways. There was a lot of gambling going on amongst all ranks, though, charged by fear and boredom as they waited around Brussels for weeks. And for the officers one of the things they used to escape thoughts of war was dancing. The waltz was a dance that found its greatest favour with the army in Brussels, when many were still hesitant about it. The army brought their love of it back to Britain after Waterloo. It was a very intimate dance, (danced more closely and more intimately than the Venetian Waltz most often danced today) in a time when previously dancing had not included holding your partner close.

The first sign that things would progress to a battle came on the 10^th June 1815 when word reached Brussels that the leaders representing all the European countries involved in the war against Napoleon had signed a charter declaring that Napoleon was not an emperor and had no right to France. In defiance, Napoleon had signed a new constitution claiming his Empire, and he’d paraded through Paris, to the cheers of thousands of supporters. The tourists heard this news with excitement. The soldiers who had spent weeks waiting, trying not to think of battle, must then have seen its eventuality, and Napoleon’s army had a reputation for moving fast; one of the key elements of their earlier successes was their ability to march long distances swiftly. It was at this point that a few tourists decided to get out of the way and the crowds in Brussels first began to thin.

I’ll post again about the lead up to the Battle of Waterloo on June 14th, and I am lucky enough to be heading over to Brussels for the commemoration, so I will share everything I discover later this month when I come back too or maybe even when I’m out there on my Facebook page Jane Lark Author ~see the righthand column to ‘Like’. I think the days are going to be packed with reenactments and museums and site visits, though, so I am not sure how much time I will have to share while I’m there 🙂 But I will definitely share when I get back, if not before.

Check out the exceptional discounts Harper Collins have placed on The Lost Love of a Soldier during June 2015 to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo

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click on the cover in the righthand column

Lady Caroline Lamb’s whole disgraceful truth… Part Nineteen ~ The pressures that open the cracks in the Lambs ill-fated marriage

Caroline gave birth to her child, Augustus, in my last piece on Caroline Lamb but unfortunately for Caroline fate liked to play cruel games with her life…

Read the history to this series of posts if you are new to my blog, but if you’ve read it before as always skip to the end of the italics where I have marked the font bold.

I was drawn to Lady Caroline Lamb, who lived in the Regency era, because Harriette Wilson the courtesan who wrote her memoirs in 1825, mentions the Ponsonby and the Lamb family frequently. Also the story of Caroline’s affair with Lord Byron captured my imagination. Caroline was also a writer, she wrote poems, and novels in her later life. I have read Glenarvon.

Her life story and her letters sucked me further into the reality of the Regency world which is rarely found in modern-day books. Jane Austen wrote fictional, ‘country’ life as she called it, and I want to write fictional ‘Regency’ life rather than simply romance. But what I love when I discover gems in my research like Caroline’s story is sharing the real story behind my fiction here too.

Lady Caroline Lamb was born Caroline Ponsonby, on the 13^th November 1785. She was the daughter of Frederick Ponsonby, Viscount Duncannon, and Henrietta (known as Harriet), the sister of the infamous Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

Caroline became an official lady when her grandfather died, and her father became Earl of Bessborough earning her the honorific title ‘Lady’ and she grew up in a world of luxury, even Marie Antoinette was a family friend. Caroline was always renowned as being lively, and now it is suspected she had a condition called bipolar. As a child she earned herself a title as a ‘brat’, by such things as telling her aunt Georgiana that Edward Gibbon’s (the author of The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire) face was ‘so ugly it had frightened her puppy’.

And when she grew up Byron once described Caroline as “the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.”

Caroline loved her new son Augustus, and from her letters she took an active part in his life. She often mentions things that imply she did not simply leave Augustus in the hands of servants. She wrote a letter to William on one occasion stating ‘After Dear boy was gone to bed‘ and to her mother she wrote, ‘My little boy has had the Cow pocks very effectively I hope for it has pitted him sadly and made him look thin & pale. He really is a beautiful Baby but feverish as he has been these four days past. William is growing very fond of him- but of course is less so than I in outward demonstrations.‘

But when Augustus was nine months old something happened to distress her, Augustus had a convulsive fit. Yet fits are common in small children and there was no reason to assume it might be anything more than a response to a high temperature. Doctors at the time also said it might be due to Caro’s regular fainting spells when she was pregnant.

Caroline fell pregnant again and she continued to write to her family both of Augustus and of her own condition. ‘my little boy is really grown as blooming stout and lively as your little Georgiana which is saying everything he has more colour in his lips than he did when quite a baby…’ ‘Augutus continues well while I am roundelete…’ ‘I have a little pain in my chest, they think from taking too much exercise & carrying the dear heavy boy, who improves a vue d oeil… ‘

But Caroline had given birth at the same time as others in her family and in William’s family and comparisons were constantly made. I found that mothers at the school gate could be very gloating about a child who had achieved something yours had not, and I used to fight like hell not to care because I didn’t want to put any pressure on my child, and I can hear in Caro’s words above a mother who is trying to ensure her cousin that her child is just as good, but then she goes on to say, ‘though a year and a month old tomorrow he can neither walk alone nor speak a word – but laughs like a Lamb and grows very like me...’ 13 months would be young to walk and talk so she could not have been worried too much, and yet some children can walk at nine months, and perhaps she was comparing her son to her cousin’s child, or perhaps simply trying to brag that Augustus laughed.

Yet by the time Augustus was seventeen months old he was still neither walking nor saying and words, and Caro then lost another child, she gave birth to a premature little girl on the 29th January 1809, the child lived for a day, then died on her grandmother’s lap, and after this, Caroline’s and Williams marriage endured still more trials when Augustus began to have regular fits. It could not then be swept a way as something unusual and minor, it was clear that all was not well with Caro’s and William’s child, and in that era, in a family in high society, that was an embarrassment.

While William’s parents called Caro ‘the beast‘ behind her back, Caroline’s and William’s marriage began to develop cracks. He had the power to leave the house and travel, while she was left at home to mourn the loss of another child whom she had carried for months seen into the world and then lost, and to try to understand and support the only child she did have with an illness which in those days would have parents choosing to lock a child away out of sight and out of mind, and yet Caro loved him.

Caro wrote to William on the 14th September 1809, ‘I have been playing all day with that pretty little Augustus of yours, he is the dearest child I ever saw & shows where you are gone by pointing to the sea… God Bless you love, your own faithful Wiffins.’

But I think beneath her bright words and her hopefulness, she was beginning to feel distance because at this time, she started writing numerous letters to her cousin Hart, the heir to the Duke of Devonshire, though he did not often write back, and considering he had thought of himself as Caro’s future husband for most of his life, her letters were very flirtatious. ‘Caroline George is the delight of Brocket Hall give her 3 kisses for me & mind I never will give you another while you live – you are a bad good for nothing boy..’

Caro’s and William’s marriage splits into infidelity in my next post – follow my blog to make sure you don’t miss it and if you would like to read my historical romance story that’s inspired by Caroline’s life it’s available now The Dangerous Love of a Rogue.

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the story of the real courtesan who inspired The Illicit Love of a Courtesan,

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional Historical and New Adult Romance stories, and the author of a No.1 bestselling Historical Romance novel in America, ‘The Illicit Love of a Courtesan’.

Click here to find out more about Jane’s books, and see Jane’s website www.janelark.co.uk to learn more about Jane. Or click ‘like’ on Jane’s Facebook page to see photo’s and learn historical facts from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras, which Jane publishes there. You can also follow Jane on twitter at @janelark

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