Would it have been possible for a spy to kidnap and replace the King? While it certainly didn’t happen (at least, not that we know of), I don’t believe it would have been outside the realm of possibility. Despite assassination attempts in 1786 and 1800, the King showed remarkably little concern for his personal safety. Burney’s journals recount the King (while still sane) slipping off entirely alone, without any attendants, to visit friends in Kew, causing the anxious Queen to come searching for him (as Burney reports, “Yes,” [the King] cried, “I ran here without speaking to anybody”). One of the most surprising facts I learned in the course of researching Crimson Rose was that the King’s bedchamber in Buckingham House opened directly into the Great Library. Public access to the library was provided through the binderies in the basement floor. The presence of pages and other members of the King’s household would have ensured a certain modicum of security, but the sheer size of the King’s household would have also made it relatively easy for interlopers to infiltrate unnoticed.
By 1804, the royal court was no longer the center of political power and patronage it had once been (a fact that Charlotte’s grandmother, reared in an earlier era, finds hard to grasp), but it was still an immense and complex entity that employed a plethora of people from all walks of life, from the Earl of Winchelsea, the King’s Groom of the Stole, all the way down to the seamstresses and starchers who dealt with His Majesty’s linen. For those interested in the workings of the royal household, I recommend the exhaustive report prepared by the Institute of Historical Research, Office-Holders in Modern Britain (Volume 11): Court Officers, 1660-1837, which lists every single office in the King’s and Queen’s households as well as the individual holders of those offices ( just in case you feel a burning need to know the name of every one of the Queen’s maids of honor). The chapter on the later Hanoverian court in Anne Somerset’s Ladies in Waiting provides a more general overview of life in the Queen’s household, while Fanny Burney’s journals present a detailed personal account of the odd mix of formality and informality that made up day-to-day life with Their Majesties.
Most of the action in the novel takes place in the Queen’s House, now known as Buckingham Palace. Although St. James Palace was still the ceremonial center of royal life, the setting for the King’s formal levees on Wednesdays and Fridays and the Queen’s Drawing Rooms on Thursdays and Sundays, the royal family preferred to live in Buckingham House, which the King had purchased for Queen Charlotte in 1762. For those of you who have noticed that the palace looks rather different, it was; the building was extensively remodeled in 1847. For the details of the palace’s design and interior decoration in 1804, I am deeply indebted to Jane Roberts’s George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste.
Like Buckingham House, Medmenham Abbey is a real location. In 1752, Sir Francis Dashwood founded the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, known to posterity (although not to its members) as the Hellfire Club, providing inspiration for generations of libertines to come. Geoffrey Ashe’s The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality provides a thoughtful and thorough account of both Sir Francis’s club and those that preceded and followed it. As always, for the purposes of the story, I took some liberties with the record. I decided to place the Lotus Club’s orgies in the caves, even though Ashe states that, contrary to popular legend, the group’s revels probably took place inside the Abbey. Although the layout of the caves, including the River Styx, is much as I described, I added an anteroom to the back of the Banqueting Chamber and a ladder leading up to the mausoleum. Likewise, while the golden orb on top of the Church of St. Lawrence was indeed hollow and designed to seat several guests, I moved it to the back of the church and made it accessible only by portable ladder.
As for the revels of the Order of the Lotus, they are very loosely based on the orgies of the Monks of Medmenham, combined with a few practices borrowed from a similar group that set up shop in Poona, in British India, in 1813. The Asiatic trappings represent a hodge-podge of unrelated elements appropriated, willy nilly, for their exotic flavor. (Neither Wrothan nor Medmenham was particularly concerned with cultural accuracy.) Despite the genuine setting, Sir Francis Medmenham was entirely a figment of my imagination; upon the death of Sir Francis Dashwood (by then, Baron Le Despenser), Medmenham Abbey and its grounds were inherited by Sir John Dashwood-King, not the fictional Sir Francis Medmenham.
About the Author
The author of four previous Pink Carnation novels, Lauren Willig received a degree in English history from the Harvard history department and a J.D. from Harvard Law, where she graduated magna cum laude. She lives in New York City, where she is hard at work on the next book in the Pink Carnation series.
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