If she was believed to be dead, there was no one who could make any claims on her. No one who had—or thought he had—the right to order her life and tell her what to do.
For the first time in her life, her future was under her own control. She could go anywhere, be anything she wanted. England—she could not risk going to England where someone might recognize her. But she could go anywhere else. No one would know her.
And she had the jewels.
Author’s Note
Impressment
Impressment was essentially the British navy’s draft service. Officially, there was no conscription in Great Britain, but since the middle ages the navy had been empowered to grab hold of as many men as were needed in time of war.
As a practical matter, this had not been a major issue in earlier years, but during the Napoleonic Wars, the navy had grown enormously, from 20,000 to 100,000 men. Volunteers did not begin to fill up the numbers needed to man the ships. Men with either sea or riverboat experience were preferred, but when push came to shove, landsmen were to be taken. In fact, they had to be taken because there simply weren’t enough qualified seamen to go around. This is when the press gangs came to be regarded with fear and loathing, and they were occasionally resisted with force.
Service in the navy did have some advantages over the merchant marine. The food was better, and almost certainly better than that available to town or farm laborers, and since crews on naval vessels were larger, there were more hands to share the work.
However, the pay was considerably worse. The rate of pay had been set in the 1660s. Prices were stagnant for a long time, so that even a century later the pay was not unreasonable. But the constant wars of the late 1700s had driven prices way up, and pay for the crew members did not change until after the Spithead Mutiny in 1797.
In addition, once a man was assigned to the crew of a ship, there he stayed until the ship was decommissioned or until he was too badly wounded to be useful. Not every man was eager to spend the rest of his life at sea.
Consequently, desertion was a constant problem. Admiral Nelson, the great naval hero, estimated that the navy had lost at least 40,000 men that way. The best place to search for deserters was aboard merchant ships. To fill up their ranks, the navy stopped and searched not only British ships but also the merchant ships of other nations, hunting for British deserters. And when it came to American ships, there tended to be arguments about who was American and who was English. The British on occasion even resorted to force of arms to remove the men they wanted. Dick Hodgson was not the only man whose impressment was of questionable legality.
Popular outrage over the seizure of American seamen was one of the reasons for the War of 1812.
Radicals
There were grand celebrations in London after the defeat of Napoleon, but not everyone was celebrating Napoleon’s downfall. Peace was welcome, but the collapse of the wartime economy brought widespread hardship. Even without the economic distress, a sizeable segment of the population thought the wrong side had won, and years later many mourned deeply when Napoleon died.
There had long been protests from the Radicals calling for reform of Parliament. Parliamentary boroughs established centuries earlier had little connection with contemporary populations. The notorious Old Sarum, a town with three houses and seven residents sent two representatives to Parliament. Manchester, with a population of some 120,000, sent none. Then there were the pocket boroughs, completely under the control of a single aristocratic landholder who could appoint half a dozen or more candidates who were dutifully elected by his tenants and who would dutifully vote as he told them.
In addition, the Radicals sought to expand the number of those eligible to vote, calling for universal male suffrage as well as for annual parliaments and a secret ballot. Nor did they have any great fondness for the monarchy. The gross profligacy of the prince regent led many to think the revolutionaries in France had the right idea when they sent their king to the guillotine.
All of this was exacerbated when, at the end of the war, the economy collapsed. Men returning from the war found their families scattered and their old lives nothing but a memory. There was mass unemployment, and the government was more concerned with putting down protests than with doing anything for the poor. Lord Liverpool and Lord Sidmouth, the prime minister and Home Secretary, suspended Habeas Corpus, which gives people protection against unlawful imprisonment, and had spies infiltrate suspected radical groups.
The flyer that Ashleigh shows Merton in Chapter Two is a real one, and one of the milder ones circulating at the time. The Spa Fields meeting that Merton mentions in Chapter Sixteen was also real and extremely threatening from the government’s point of view. The first day ended peacefully enough, with the decision to send a petition to the prince regent asking for parliamentary reform and economic relief. The regent refused to accept it.
The second day, however, turned to riot and gunfire. Four men were arrested and put on trial for treason. Then, after the first man was acquitted when the jury declined to accept the evidence of the government spy, the charges were dropped.
Liverpool and Sidmouth were not entirely wrong in their fears. A number of Spencean radicals were still prepared to take violent action, and another of Sidmouth’s undercover agents, George Edwards, persuaded them to agree to a plan to assassinate the prime minister and the entire cabinet. The idea was that this would trigger widespread revolution across the country. However, when the conspirators gathered to prepare for the attack, they were captured by the waiting Bow Street Runners.
This was the notorious Cato Street Conspiracy, named for the address of the house that was the basis of the operation. The conspirators—including Arthur Thistlewood, who had been one of the men arrested after the Spa Fields riot—were all convicted of treason and most of them sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. This medieval punishment was commuted to hanging and beheading, and it was never handed down again.
About the Author
When she retired after too many years in journalism, Lillian Marek felt a longing for happy endings and stories where the good guys win and the bad guys get their just desserts. Having exhausted her library’s supply of non-gory mystery stories, she started reading romance novels, especially historical romance. This was so much fun that she thought she’d like to try her hand at writing one. So she took her computer keyboard in hand, slipped back into the 19th century, and began.
She was not mistaken—writing romance novels is as much fun as reading them.
Her list of story ideas now numbers more than 80. She may be spinning tales for quite a while.
The Earl Returns Page 28
