A Right Royal Scandal:Two Marriages That Changed History

We’re absolutely thrilled to announce for our followers in the US and Canada that our latest book, A Right Royal Scandal: Two Marriages That Changed History, has just been launched ‘across the pond’. We have added a link on the sidebar that will take you directly to the page on Amazon, should you wish to order through them. It is also available through other retailers too.

For those who have already pre-ordered it, we have been advised that it should be on its way to you very shortly and we really hope that you enjoy it – do let us know your thoughts and don’t forget we’re always here to answer any questions you may have.

In the past couple of days, we have written a couple of guest blogs. We are delighted to be featured on Laurie Benson’s site, talking about The Allied Sovereign’s Visit to England, 1814, and its connection to Lord Charles Bentinck who is featured in our book.

Phillips, Thomas; The Allied Sovereigns at Petworth, 24 June 1814 (George, 1751-1837, 3rd Earl of Egremont, with His Children Looking on, is presented by George, Prince Regent, to Tsar Alexander I of Russia in the Marble Hall at Petworth with the King of Prussia, Frederick William III); National Trust, Petworth House

Our second blog is hosted by Geri Walton, who covers both the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries on her site, so for Geri we have penned a somewhat later piece about The Marriage of Lord Glamis and Miss Cavendish Bentinck in 1881. Again, it has a connection to A Right Royal Scandal.

Fashion plate from 1881 Revue de la Mode (Historia mody/History of Fashion by Kajani)

If you would like to find out more about either or both of these then please do head over to their blogs by following the highlighted links above.

 

A brief trip out of the Georgian Era

As part of blog tour to launch our latest book A Right Royal Scandal we are thrilled to have been invited to write a guest post for the lovely Mimi Matthews. Mimi focuses on Regency and Victorian which fits in very nicely with our latest book which sees us leave the Georgian Era and move into the Victorian age, but worry not, this is a brief hiatus we will be writing and blogging about the Georgian Era for some considerable time to come.

Queen Victoria at Drury Lane Theatre, 15 November 1837 by Edmund Thomas Parris (1793-1873), drawn 1837. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016

With no further ado we would like to invite you to take a brief trip from Georgian England into Victorian England or, to be more precise, to Queen Victoria’s first visit to the London theatres as a monarch in 1837 by following the highlighted link.

 

A Right Royal Scandal blog tour

As many of our readers are no doubt aware we’ve been busy bunnies finishing our second book A Right Royal Scandal and are now working on our third and so today,  rather than hosting our own blog, we thought we’d let you know that we have, in the past few, days been guests on the blogs of Naomi Clifford and the ‘Georgian Gentleman’ which is hosted by Mike Rendell. We thought you might like to check our guest posts on their blogs – Elopement in High Life and Publish and be damned.

Both Naomi and Mike are Pen and Sword authors, Naomi already has her first book out, The Disappearance of Maria Glenn and Mike’s book, In Bed With the Georgians is due to be published on 30th of this month.

So, with that we would like to direct you over to our articles on both sites by following the links below and we really hope you enjoy them:

Naomi Clifford: In Elopement in High Life: Anne Wellesley and Lord Charles Bentinck we give a little taster on the details of their scandalous elopement in 1815, which is recounted in full in A Right Royal Scandal. Anne was the married niece of the Duke of Wellington, and she ran away with her lover just weeks after the Battle of Waterloo.

Georgian Gentleman: In Publish and be damned we take a look at the Regency courtesan Harriette Wilson and the dandy Beau Brummell, and their links with the people we have written about in A Right Royal Scandal.

Please do also take the time to have a look at the other wonderful articles to be found on Naomi and Mike’s sites while you’re there.

 

Amazing Grace Dalrymple Elliott: courtesan and spy

We are delighted to be featured on the fabulous Amazing Women in History website, with an article about Grace Dalrymple Elliott. We think that Grace certainly qualifies as an ‘amazing woman’ and we very much hope that you do too.

Grace was a born survivor; when she was cast out after her divorce, her reputation in tatters and her options limited, she dusted herself down and determinedly set out on a career as a high-class courtesan. But there was much more to Grace than just her infamy and frequent appearances in the gossip columns.

She showed incredible bravery when she remained in Paris during the French Revolution, hiding a royalist sympathizer at great personal risk to herself and undoubtedly saving his life, intriguing for the ill-fated French queen, Marie Antoinette, and dabbling in espionage. She was the author of one of only a few first-hand accounts of those years written by a woman.

So, without further ado, we invite you to check out our article by clicking here to read more on Grace. Do have a look at the bio’s of the other amazing women too while you’re there as they make for fascinating reading.

Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliott by Thomas Gainsborough (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

 

Header image: Marie Antoinette with her children and Madame Élisabeth, facing the mob that had broken into the Tuileries Palace on 20 June 1792 (via Wikimedia).

Our guest post on The History Vault: A Disaster in Bolama

We are delighted to be featured on The History Vault, an online history magazine, with a post relating to Grace Dalrymple Elliott’s elder brother, Henry Hew Dalrymple and the ‘Bulam Expedition’.

Henry Hew was a slavery abolitionist and one of two men who were the driving force behind a project to colonize an uninhabited African island, with the ultimate intention of freed slaves being able to settle there. Many ‘ordinary’ people were caught up in this scheme, and both their and Henry Hew’s stories have been largely lost to history. We cover this in our biography on Grace and her family, An Infamous Mistress: The Life, Loves and Family of the Celebrated Grace Dalrymple Elliott, but we did not have the space to go into greater detail within its pages about the people who travelled with the expedition to settle the island and who suffered tragedy and heartache. It was important for us to record some of their names however, and you can find out more about them and the expedition by checking out our post on the History Vault (click here).

Do take time to check out the other fascinating articles on the History Vault too, while you are there.

Grace Dalrymple Elliott and a Fateful Trip

Our book An Infamous Mistress: The Life, Loves and Family of the Celebrated Grace Dalrymple Elliott is now available in the US and to mark this we are delighted to have been invited back by the wonderful Geri Walton to write another guest blog on her fascinating website.

We thought it might be interesting to tell you more about the events that led to Grace becoming a courtesan, so without further ado we will hand you over to Geri to tell more over on her blog ‘Unique histories from the 18th and 19th centuries‘. Please click on the following link  HERE to find out more.

 

An Infamous Mistress and the Georgian Gentleman

Today we are going to direct you to the Georgian Gentleman which is hosted by Mike Rendell, author of The Journal of a Georgian Gentleman, where you can find a guest blog we have written as part of our blog tour.

Having read Mike’s post about George Pocock and his splendid Charvolant, we thought he might enjoy this story about Grace Dalrymple Elliott’s cousins Henry and Charles Mordaunt, 5th Earl of Peterborough, who would definitely have benefitted by some assistance from George Pocock!

So, with that we would like to direct you over to Mike’s excellent blog to find out more. Click here.

 

 

 

The Celebrated 3rd Earl of Peterborough

As part of our ‘Blog Tour‘ we are delighted to be travelling over to see Madame Gilflurt aka Catherine Curzon, author of the soon to be released Life in the Georgian Court, which is being published by Pen & Sword Books in a few months time.

Over on her website A Covent Garden Gilflurt’s Guide to Life we will be telling you about an ancestor of Grace Dalrymple Elliott’s uncle by marriage; none other than Charles Mordaunt, the celebrated 3rd Earl of Peterborough. He’s a fascinating character who we looked at during our research for An Infamous Mistress: The Life, Loves and Family of the Celebrated Grace Dalrymple Elliott and although he couldn’t be included within its pages we’re delighted to be able to share his story with you, including details of his secretive late marriage to the opera singer Anastasia Robinson.

Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough (1658-1735) by Charles Jervas (c.1675-1739). Burghley House Collections.

So if you would like to know more, please click HERE to be transported over to see Madame Gilflurt.

 

 

A Jacobite link to Grace Dalrymple Elliott’s cousin

Constance Bouchier Smith and the grandson of the Young Pretender.

As part of our ‘Blog Tour’ we are delighted to have been asked to write a guest post for the wonderful Geri Walton.

We have chosen to focus on Grace Dalrymple Elliott’s cousin who was connected to a young lady by the name of Constance Bouchier Smith and we examine her relationship to the grandson of the Young Pretender. Without giving any more away, we will hand you over to Geri to tell more over on her blog ‘Unique histories from the 18th and 19th centuries’ by clicking HERE.

 

‘Mother M.’ at the Ridotto in 1777

We are thrilled to have been asked to write a guest blog  by the lovely Laurie Benson and so, we’ll hand you over to her exceptionally cozy drawing room where amongst other things you’ll be able to find out more about one of Grace’s relatives by clicking here.

Like us, Laurie is a lover of all things Georgian and Regency and her new book An Unsuitable Duchess will be available later this year.

If you haven’t visited Laurie’s site before, we’re certain you’ll find lots of fascinating things to enjoy and we hope you enjoy our blog post.

Jacintha Dalrymple and the Winckley Jacobite Relic

Today we are going to direct you to the site of our friend and fellow Pen and Sword Books author, Geri Walton, where you can find a guest blog we have written.

Our blog is about Grace Dalrymple Elliott’s sister, Jacintha Dalrymple, and her connection with a Jacobite relic owned by the family of her second husband, Thomas Winckley of Lancashire.

So, without further ado, we’ll direct you to Geri’s site by clicking HERE where you can read more about Jacintha and also discover Geri’s site if you have never visited it before.

Grace Dalrymple Elliott, as regular readers of this blog will know, is the subject of our forthcoming biography to be published by Pen and Sword Books in January 2016.

Divorced wife, infamous mistress, prisoner during the French Revolution and the reputed mother of the Prince of Wales’ child, notorious courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliott lived an amazing life in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London and Paris. Strikingly tall and beautiful, later lampooned as ‘Dally the Tall’ in newspaper gossip columns, she left her Scottish roots and convent education behind, to re-invent herself in a ‘marriage a-la-mode’, but before she was even legally an adult she was cast off and forced to survive on just her beauty and wits. The authors of this engaging and, at times, scandalous book intersperse the story of Grace’s tumultuous life with anecdotes of her fascinating family, from those who knew Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and who helped to abolish slavery, to those who were, like Grace, mistresses of great men. Whilst this book is the most definitive biography of Grace Dalrymple Elliott ever written, it is much more than that; it is Grace’s family history which traces her ancestors from their origin in the Scottish borders, to their move south to London. It follows them to France, America, India, Africa and elsewhere, offering a broad insight into the social history of the Georgian era, comprising the ups and downs, the highs and lows of life at that time. This is the remarkable and detailed story of Grace set, for the first time, in the context of her wider family and told more completely than ever before.

It is currently available to pre-order at the following sites.

Please note: if you are reading this from outside the UK, we are expecting it to be available in America a few months later than the UK publication date, and hopefully elsewhere worldwide too. We will keep you informed and update this page as soon as we have more information.

 

General Jean Sarrazin

 

This week we planned to write about  one of the French Generals, however, there has been a change of plan as we have had the immense honour of  being asked to write a guest blog for the wonderful Madame Gilflurt,renowned for her love of Georgian gossip and whose fascinating blog is one we would highly recommend to all our readers.   Our blog concerns General Jean Sarrazin, one of Napoleon’s highest ranking generals, a spy, traitor to his country and not just a bigamist but worse, a trigamist! Learn all about him at Madame Gilflurt’s ‘ A Covent Garden Gilflurt’s Guide to Life‘.