Poor George IV.  He was set up, by fate and by family.  By the time he became king in fact he was 58 years old and had spent most of his adult life in waiting.  He was an arbiter and patron of fashion and the arts but, by virtue of his unique role as heir to the throne, had little in the way of responsibilities or work.  And as he pursued his interests in architecture and style, he was increasingly disapproved of by his father and his nation.  Can you see I’m a little partisan here?  I think George IV, for all his many flaws, got a raw deal.

Jobwise, the Prince of Wales was expected to be a Good Example to the Nation and to wait patiently until it was his turn to be King.  Since George III had no interest in relinquishing so much as a thimbleful of his own authority (and this was a time when royal authority was diminishing anyway) this meant, in practice, that  Prince George got to stand around for decades essentially waiting for his father to die so that he could have something like a meaningful life.  His brothers were given work (his brother Frederick, Duke of York, was a military man who, among other things, founded Sandhurst)–even countries to rule–but the Prince of Wales had to play a waiting game.

When he was a young man he was regarded as the leader of the new guard of European royalty, “the First Gentleman of England,” the one with liberal ideas, sophisticated taste.  He was handsome and charming and smart, and his interests lay in cities, in architecture and the arts and theatre, and (of course) all the fashionable dissipations of a young man of his time.  His interests were, as a matter of fact, diametrically opposed to those of his father the King.  It’s not for nothing that George III was derisively called “Farmer George;” the King liked the comforts of home and family, and would possibly have been happiest as a well-to-do squire with a big farm (which, in a sense, is how he saw himself).  The King loved children–until they turned old enough to begin to have opinions and ideas of their own (I’ve always thought it telling that the child of whom the King spoke the most fondly was Prince Alfred, who lived less than two years.) Virtually every communication or quote I’ve seen attributed to the King on the subject of his eldest son was full of disappointment; there was nothing the prince could do right as a boy or a man.  When George got out from under that glare of disapproval he was 18; he was given his own establishment and he promptly went off the deep end, overspending and generally raising hell.  And who could rein him in?  The only one with the authority, really, was his father, who seemed to think that scolding his son and being Very Disappointed was going to solve the problem.

And then there was his marriage.  Or rather, his marriages.  As a young man George fell in love with Maria Fitzherbert,  a widow, a commoner, six years his elder (he had a lifelong thing for older women), and Catholic.  She would not consent to become his mistress; nor would she convert from Catholicism.  That last was a real problem, as by law marriage to a Catholic would bar him from succession to the throne.  And George wanted her, and by his lights I think loved her.  So, secretly and illegally, he married her.

But the King wanted his heir to marry and produce heirs.  The prince had, by this time, hell’s own pile of debt (if you can’t be happy, spend money!) and the King would only assist him if he agreed to marry his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick.  The kindest thing that can be said about that marriage (aside from the fact that, morally if not legally, it was bigamous) is that the parties did not get on.  They managed to produce an heir, the Princess Charlotte, but by the time the princess was born George and his wife were separated.  He later tried to divorce her, without success; neither party led what might be called a blameless life.

By the time he achieved the Regency the young, liberal prince had become a middle-aged man.  I don’t think his father would ever have approved of him, although the prince did not gratify his early Whig supporters by shifting the government in a more liberal direction.  He had become a figure of fun; even Beau Brummel, who had thrived under the prince’s patronage, began to believe it was safe to snub George (no, it wasn’t; saying loudly “Who’s your fat friend?” to an acquaintance walking with the prince was an example of a zinger that bit Brummel right back).  When he was crowned he sought to have Caroline (his “legal” wife) barred from asserting her rights as Queen, an action that only increased his unpopularity.  When he died, the Times (the mouthpiece of the establishment) kindly noted “There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?”

I’ve read half a dozen biographies of George IV.  He was not a good king.  He became a self-absorbed, self-serving voluptuary, and he was wildly inconsistent politically and personally.  But he was also what his times and his expectations made him.  I feel a certain sympathy for the prince.  Allowed to marry as he wanted, given work to do and some responsibility, and people around him who did not regard him as a failure almost from his first moments, he might have been an okay guy.  Which is why the Prince of Wales that Sarah Tolerance encounters in Point of Honour and Petty Treason is an okay guy.  In my history he got those advantages.  I figure it was the least I could do.

One of the things I found myself doing when I started Point of Honour was deliberately trying to take up the glittery surface of the historical romance (particularly the Regency romance, since that’s where I got my start) and check out all the worms and slimy bits below.  A number of the Regencies I read when I was a teen had so little to do with the actual period that even I, as a fifteen-year-old, could catch them out.  And there was one, in particular, that drove me nuts.

Understand, this was multiple decades ago.  I no longer remember the title or the author; I do remember the set up of the book because it was so intriguing.  Briefly: Our Heroine, having lived with a man without benefit of clergy for philosophical reasons, is left alone when said man dies.  He leaves her an income, not large but enough to keep herself on, and the house in which they lived.  The only condition: to keep the house she must live in it or lose it.  Only, see, the house is in the same town where she grew up, where her history is known to all.  To the men in town she’s a dirty joke, a woman to be had for the asking.  The matrons who knew her as a child refuse to speak to her or let their daughters speak to her; she is a cautionary tale, a hissing and a byword.  Maybe some of the servants and peasant-types talk to her, but maybe they don’t.  She’s looking at a lifetime of misery, and I began to wonder why she got involved with a man who would set her up to be punished and ostracized this way.

Well, my fifteen-year-old-self thought.  That’s really interesting.  She’s ruined; can’t even rehabilitate herself by moving somewhere else. How on earth is the author going to rehabilitate her and give her the happy ending this category romance requires?  This ought to be a really fabulous read; I’m dying to see how she does it.

Simple: she didn’t.  Having built herself a really interesting box, the author got out of it by deciding the box wasn’t there.  Within a chapter or two you’d have thought the worst this young lady had done was be seen talking with the guy after church with her chaperone beyond arms’ reach.  By half-way through the book no one seems particularly concerned by her moral lapse.  And even at fifteen I knew this was cheating.  I knew the consequences of making a decision to live with her lover would be serious, and it infuriated me that the author had ignored it.

So many years later, when I sat down write Point of Honour, I wanted to avenge my disappointed fifteen-year-old self by writing a book in which the consequences of a decision were serious, life-defining, and potentially deadly.  I had first readers ask me why I had to make things so hard on my heroine; because the times would have been hard on her, and I couldn’t magically forget that.  All I could do was give her the character and resolve to cope, and follow her lead.

A single sentence can start a cascade of trouble.  Twenty years ago I was working in the production department of a Major New York Publisher; it was, as I remember, a rainy day.  Sales conference, the materials for which were my responsibility, was getting closer every day, and I was slammed.  And I got a call from some of my colleagues on the Editorial side of things.

Understand: I got my start writing Regency romances when I was just out of college.  I had published five of them, and my co-workers knew this.  So when they had a brainstorm, they figured I was the one to share it with.  So I put down the six different conflagrations I was dealing with in that moment and went down the hall to my co-worker’s office.  They had an uncharacteristic lull in their work flow, and had been chatting, as people do.

As a result, as I walked in the room, one editor announced happily, “We’ve come up with a great new genre, and you should be the one to write it!  The hard-boiled Regency!  Think of it!  It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a single man of good fortune must be packing a piece!”

I was so concerned with sales conference that I simply laughed, said it was very clever, and fled back to production to keep pumping out slides and cover flats.  But the idea lodged in my hindbrain and kept nibbling at me.  I was, at that time, writing an entirely different book, a dark fantasy about New York City besieged by its own psychic energy–the book that became The Stone War.  But that idea of a hard-boiled Regency, a book that looked at the under side of those lovely, frothy Georgette Heyer concoctions, and worked with all the conventions of the hard-boiled detective story, took root.

Finally I sat down at the computer and wrote “It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a Fallen Woman of good family must, soon or late, descend to whoredom.”

The rest, as they say…