Guest Grace Burrowes on Illegitimacy During the Regency

Linda Banche here. Today I welcome New York Times best-selling author Grace Burrowes and her second Regency historical, The Soldier. Devlin, the hero of The Soldier, is illegitimate. Grace tells us how the illegitimate have fared throughout English history.

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The winners are Suzanne Barrett and Anonymous! Anonymous, I have no address for you. Please send me an email at linda@lindabanche.com. If I do not hear from the winners by July 5, 2011, I will select alternates.

Welcome, Grace!

Grace Burrowes:

This is a fascinating topic, particularly when traced down through centuries of English history. William of Normandy, known to us as William the Conqueror and founder of the modern English monarchy, was illegitimate. By law and by custom, Queen Elizabeth I was illegitimate, and by my count, Queen Victoria had close to twenty illegitimate cousins thanks to Prinny’s siblings. His successor to the throne, younger brother William, was responsible for eight of those cousins.

When I first came across facts such as these, I’d set each one aside and think, “Well, that’s an exception. Illegitimacy was heavily frowned on. We know that.” But the facts kept piling up: King Charles II is said to have had as many as twelve illegitimate children, and of the eight who survived to adulthood, he created six of them as “first duke of something,” and the lone female in the pack ended up a countess. The case of the eighth child, Charles Fitzroy is illuminating.

This young fellow was born to the Earl of Cleveland’s wife, and thus became the Second Earl of Cleveland, though he was also titled First Duke of Southampton. Not surprisingly, his legal parents separated upon his birth. Upon the death of his mother, through a special remainder in the dukedom, Charles Fitzroy became Second Duke of Cleveland in addition to First Duke of Southampton—a double duke, though clearly illegitimate.

Fitzroy inherited his dukedom through his mother, something we’re often told cannot happen; he was given a title though illegitimate, something else we’re told isn’t likely; and though illegitimate, he inherited a very exalted title as a function of special wording in the dukedom’s letters patent, something I’ve been confidently assured is “impossible.”

The longer I nosed around in the history books, the more examples I found of illegitimacy in high places not following the rubrics we’re told are historically inviolable—the Duke of Devonshire’s infamous ménage being another case in point.

I think two forces have combined to give us a somewhat skewed view of those born on the wrong side of high ranking blankets. First, illegitimacy was indeed frowned upon, legally and socially. An illegitimate child could only inherit from a parent through an explicit, specific, uncontested written bequest, and inheriting a title from a parent was rare indeed, though not, as we’ve seen, quite impossible. For the common folk, illegitimacy was a significant problem. The mother had custody of the child, but the father had no legal obligation to care for his illegitimate progeny whatsoever. Paternal honor or family resources were the only safeguards for offspring of non-sanctioned unions, regardless of social rank.

And we have no way of knowing how many illegitimate children the nobility and peerage left to dire fates, and yet, with no reliable means of contraception, no practical access to divorce, and a sense of entitlement rampant among the upper classes, we do know illegitimacy happened.

The second factor that might be affecting our view of aristocratic illegitimacy is the Victorian reaction to Regency excesses generally. King William did not create his Fitzclarence progeny as dukes and duchesses, he gave them courtesy titles, as if they were the children of a marquis.

Princess Sophie’s illegitimate son, Tommy Garth, was raised by his father, given a military commission, and never acknowledged as royal offspring (and the debate is not entirely resolved among historians). William Wordsworth took financial responsibility for his illegitimate daughter (conceived in France during the Peace of Amiens), but as poet laureate of Victorian England, he kept her existence very quiet.

We see the Regency period in part through those Victorian eyes, which cast a long, stern shadow over the history immediately preceding them. Peeking under that shadow at some of the facts and figures in history, gives us a different, more interesting, and sometimes surprising picture indeed.


THE SOLDIER BY GRACE BURROWES—IN STORES JUNE 2011

Even in the quiet countryside he can find no peace...
His idyllic estate is falling down from neglect and nightmares of war give him no rest. Then Devlin St. Just meets his new neighbor...

Until his beautiful neighbor ignites his imagination...
With her confident manner hiding a devastating secret, his lovely neighbor commands all of his attention, and protecting Emmaline becomes Devlin’s most urgent mission.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grace Burrowes is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Heir, also a 2010 Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. She is a practicing attorney specializing in family law and lives in rural Maryland, where she is working on the next books chronicling the loves stories of the Windham family. Lady Sophie’s Christmas Wish will be in stores in October 2011, and The Virtuoso will be in stores in November 2011, with more to come in 2012! For more information, please visit www.graceburrowes.com.