why now? why this duke?

aristocrats, part II

Last week, I wrote about the actual history of dukes, how we talk about dukes in romance, and my dissatisfaction with where those conversations meet. One of the major issues I have with duke chat is the lack of examples in context of the genre. We have the ill-begotten definition of a romance novel¹ from the RWA about what a romance novel is, but there’s an unspoken intent element in what makes something a genre fiction romance novel. Reformed Rakes just read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters for an upcoming episode and that novel has lots of overlap with genre fiction romance and meets the minimal, two element definition. But Fingersmith is not a genre fiction romance novel, as determined by the intent of creation by Waters or consumption its readers.

This is just not a judgment, but a description. I think genre fiction distinctions are important when talking dukes because, as we’ll see, the history of the duke in romance splinters at parts from the literal history. Authors begin to borrow world building just not from history’s conception of a duke, but from romance’s. This dual process is only available when there is an intent to be in conversation with the genre’s history.

In this issue, I’m going through what I consider hallmark examples of the ducal title in romance through the first decade of the 2000s. I tried to pick popular or stand out books as zeniths of the traits I see as trends, not just my favorite duke books from each period. I think this books are necessarily in conversation with each other as the image of a romantic duke develops, even if the responses are not direct.

1926-1985: Origins

Pre-1985, there are really two types of dukes in the books I’ve found: the Georgette Heyer model of dukes who are dandies and pulpy Gothic dukes seeking vengeance, though before 1985, either type is as likely to be antagonist as a romantic lead. Georgette Heyer’s first ducal hero was Justin, Duke of Avon in These Old Shades (1926). Avon is a bit of an outlier in this overview because These Old Shades is set in France, though Justin is English. The book is the spiritual sequel to The Black Moth, Heyer’s first novel (1921) where the English duke is the cad and villain, who keeps dueling the hero and kidnapping the heroine. These Old Shades renames the characters, puts them all in France, and gives the duke his redemption and happy union. Avon is the typical Heyer dandy: debonair, fastidious, and devastatingly and sarcastically witty. He is introduced wearing red high heels, a purple cloak with a rose-colored lining, and gold lace around his collar.

Early in the book, the Duke adopts a poor teenage boy named Léon to be his page and the boy becomes incredibly devoted to Justin, thinking of the duke as a honorable man. Justin’s other servants encourage Léon to loathe Justin, both for being a duke at all (we’re in pre-revolutionary France) and for his wicked ways (including killing a man in a duel). It is revealed that the page boy is actually a young woman name Léonie and the Duke makes it is his mission to protect her and her idolized vision of him. Of course, there’s a secret legitimacy, a comeuppance of a villain, and a marriage that follows. But here we have our first genre romance duke who gets redeemed through the power of a young woman thinking he is more noble than his past. Still notably, all of Justin’s rakishness happens off page. It is referenced widely, but the third act break up comes from Léonie being convinced by a villain that she is hurting the duke’s reputation, not from bad behavior on Justin’s part.

Most of the books between These Old Shades and the 1970s boom of historical romance post-The Flame and Flower, have duke characters engaging in villain-like behavior. These older, rich men can be the conflict in the love story between the heroine and the more appropriately aged hero or the hero themselves. Even Justin, though he is redeemed, is 40 to Léonie’s 19. Heyer only returned to duke heroes three more times by my count, but her sometimes peer and often rival, Barbara Cartland would publish over a hundred duke books.² In Cartland’s world, there are two options: a duke falls in love with his own ward or a duke is the third party villain, preventing his heir from falling in love. The potential for dukes as villains and main characters gets explored more in post-The Flame and the Flower romances where dukes are not quite redeemed or totally reformed, but are the romantic leads.

The Price of Vengeance by Freda Michel (1976) and Moonstruck Madness by Laurie McBain (1977) are the earliest post-The Flame and The Flower romances that I’ve found with dukes as heroes and they have strikingly similar set ups. In both, a heroine has to make money by working in disguise as a highwayman. She steals from a duke’s carriage, and unknowingly, becomes wrapped in a revenge plan he is executing. Lucien, Duke of Camereigh in Moonstruck Madness is earliest duke I’ve read that is stressed by the bounds of his title in any way. He has already inherited the title, but his grandmother, the Dowager Duchess retains the main house of the family and puts a condition on the inheritance: Lucien must settle down and marry by a certain date. She threatens to divert the house to his cousin, Percy. Percy is almost comically, over the top evil. This mostly serves to make Lucien’s villain-like traits seem not that bad, even as he is manipulating Sabrina into marrying him.

A description of the Duke of Camereigh:

“A mere thought at my own expense, Newley, nothing more,” the Duke commented, the smile momentarily ‘widening over his aquiline features, touching just briefly the thin scar that etched its way across the left side of his face, from the edge of his high cheekbone to the corner of his mouth. It added an almost sinister cast to his features, his expression masked in heavy-lidded, thickly-lashed eyes that gave nothing away in a mocking glance.

These pulpy, manipulative dukes who are the romantic leads help create impossible circumstances for the heroines, forcing their hands, feel like transition points, opening the door for more ducal main characters, who are unequivocally the virile romantic protagonists, even in the Regency, but retain some of that sinister dukishness from the Duke of Andover in The Black Moth, before Heyer redeems him as the Duke of Avon in These Old Shades. Importantly also, both Moonstruck Madness and The Price of Vengeance are Georgian³ set historical romances. They are neither Regency in their setting nor their genre. So they exist slightly outside the funnel of Heyer descendants, bringing Gothic and bodice ripper influences to the DNA of the duke.

Where that union really comes together is in Clayton, Duke of Claymore, our first self-aware duke.

1985: Clayton Westmoreland, Duke of Claymore

My main reaction when I read Whitney earlier this year was “oh, everyone’s just doing this book.” I couldn’t believe it was written in 1985. Barring some bodice ripper plot points, many of which have been relegated from main stream historical romance, so much of Whitney felt so fresh and I think it is because I was reading the text that so many authors I love were using as inspiration. Whitney, My Love is a hallmark in part because McNaught combines the setting of Regency romances, which descended from the era of Heyer, and the drama and stakes more associated with longer, more violent historical romances, often set outside the Regency, or at least outside the ballroom. That these two things were ever so separated is still a little mind-boggling to me, but that’s semantics. In this interview with All About Romance, McNaught talks about how she threw out the rulebook was what was allowed in a Regency set romance.

I discussed this some in an old newsletter, where I offer a new model for defining romance based on how film noir defined, but the availability of parody is an important factor for how a genre comes together. Before parody is available, books in a genre are just a collection of alike things. Parody, or being able to poke fun from within, and creating a genre work that is aware of its place in the genre, signals that the definition has a circumference. Whitney, My Love is definitely not a full blown wallpaper wink at romance—so much of it so earnest. Whitney Stone is like the hoyden that every hoyden after descends from, while Clayton Westmoreland feels like a major branch of the duke family tree. But he is only himself in the context of his precedents. There’s level of self-awareness in Clayton’s dukeness that feels like a response to the way that dukes were for the first fifty years of historical romance.

McNaught directly makes fun of some Regency (genre) conventions about dukes. When Whitney and Clayton first meet as a masked ball in France, she asks who he is and he says “Women always admire noble titles—would you like it if I told you I am a duke?” Whitney does not believe him, citing his lack of quizzing glass. Clayton questions how he could use quizzing glass with his mask and Whitney retorts: “A duke does not use a quizzing glass to see, it is merely an affectation.” Justin, Duke of Avon from These Old Shades does indeed use a quizzing glass as an affectation.⁴ Clayton is also literally dressed up as Satan at this masked ball, and one of Justin’s nicknames is Satanas. Whitney concludes that Clayton simply cannot be a duke because he does not “walk with a cane…or wheeze and snort…[and he] cannot claim even a mild case of gout,” seemingly referencing the non-hero type of duke who might be the old man preventing the couple from being together.

Whitney has a low opinion of dukes—she has no interest in marrying one and Clayton knows this, so he continues to hide his identity from her, taking on the rock solid alias of Clayton Westland (reminder, his real name is Clayton Westmoreland, Duke of Claymore. This also feels like a point in favor of Clayton being a parodying duke.) His seduction of Whitney as a commoner does not run smoothly, but at this point, he has already effectively purchased Whitney by paying off her father’s debts. Clayton is the all-powerful, wealthier than Croesus duke, with supreme position in society. But these traits are not the stuff of fantasy for the reader or for Whitney. They are detriments to his character that make her hate and mistrust him and allow him to feel like he can treat her pretty terribly for most of the book. And Clayton really does not get redeemed to a level that feel equivocal to his harm of Whitney. (Linking Chels’ great piece on this novel again.)

Reading Clayton and seeing how McNaught’s fingerprints are all over so many future romantic aristocrats makes me question the idea that an appeal of dukes is always their coming around to the heroine, or learning how to be a person and not a duke, or even some sort of redemption. There’s some appeal to reading a duke who continues to be kind of evil by the end of the book! I also read The Silver Devil (1978, Teresa Denys) in the past year and I don’t think you could say that either Clayton or Domenico is redeemed or repaired fully by the end of those books. They are both bodice rippers and bodice rippers that don’t pull back from the violence enacted in them.

But I don’t think the questions of those books are “what do these men need to do in order to deserve love?” I think both might read closer to bildungsromans of the heroines—as they grow and develop to be women who can match and take on their violent (and powerful! because they are dukes!) partners. The Gothic novel method of a Duke! As a reader, I want to be with neither Clayton nor Domenico, but I am rooting for Whitney and Felicia to win and survive by siphoning off power from their ducal partners. This is what makes Clayton Westmoreland feel so special and distinct as a duke. He’s that Gothic villain displaced into a Regency ballroom and now that character type is in the sandbox of Regency tropes.

1990s: Self-Reflections

The dukes are here and they’re trying to learn cognitive behavioral therapy.

If Clayton in Whitney, My Love is the duke the calls attention to the fact that there is meaning in being a duke in a romance novel set during Regency, the dukes immediately after each take an element of that modern duke form and explore the structures in place that give the title weight. Clayton’s narrative as Duke is self-aware and our 90s dukes’ narratives are self-reflective.

Mary Balogh has written over a dozen duke heroes and The Secret Pearl (1991) was her third. Adam Kent, Duke of Ridgeway, is the earliest duke that I have read who mainly thinks about his title in terms of honor, rather than power, though he does wield ducal power to his advantage. I think one of Balogh’s strengths in writing dukes is writing other people’s reactions to them to show that amorphous, organic power associated with a title that comes not from a law, but from other people buying in.

The plot of The Secret Pearl is fairly complicated, but Fleur Hamilton is a gentlewoman who has been framed by her cousin and guardian for a murder and a theft. When she flees her home after this incident, she begins work at a sex worker. An encounter with the Duke of Ridgeway where she loses her virginity causes great guilt in the Duke. He did not realize that her awkwardness was inexperience, so he arranges for Fleur to work as a governess to his young daughter. The identity of her employer is initially unknown to Fleur—both that he is a duke or that he is the man who she had sex with. She is terrified to realize this, thinking he has brought her to be his mistress. Adam struggles with Fleur jumping to this conclusion; he is a Duke! He wouldn’t do something so dishonorable as to conduct an affair with a woman in his house, where his wife and daughter live. A lot of Adam’s journey is realizing that he is perhaps less honorable than his title makes him believe, but also that always aiming for honor may be less truthful than listening to his feelings.

A house party brings Fleur’s accusing cousin and guardian, Lord Brocklehurst, to the ducal residence and he terrorizes her, threatening exposure of her crimes if she does not marry him. This is all while Fleur is seeing the duke in a new light and they are both falling in love with each other, primarily driven by shared affection for Adam’s daughter. Fleur believes that no one will believe her version of events over Brocklehurst, who is a baron. But Adam interviews him and manipulates Brocklehurst’s natural disposition to agree with a duke into catching him in a lie. The baron first characterizes his association with Fleur as a love match, and then has to backtrack when he realizes that Adam knows about the accused crimes; it’s a bad look to know a servant has been accused of murder and theft and not tell her employer. It is true that no one would believe Fleur over Brocklehurst about the events of the framed crimes, but Adam makes it clear that everyone would be believe him in a court over Brocklehurst about his behavior at the house party. Behavior that makes it seem like Brocklehurst was offering to help Fleur get away with murder in exchange for sexual favors, which is the truth. Adam makes it clear that to avoid punishment himself, Brocklehurst needs to publicly clear Fleur’s name, begging accident and misunderstanding.

Later, Adam’s secretary points out an obvious lie that Brocklehurst could have committed to to avoid the bounds of Adam’s trap, but clearly Adam’s presence and bearing kept Brocklehurst from thinking on his feet. The whole scene points to the nebulous, but very real, power of a duke. It is given to them by other men who treat them differently because of the title and who totally believe that a duke holds more weight than other peers.

Adam is wealthy in The Secret Pearl, but his money does not come up that often between him and Fleur, outside of his realizing just how much of a gap there is in their situations and how an amount that has little meaning to him is life changing to her. Christian, Duke of Jervaulx from Flowers from the Storm (1992) by Laura Kinsale is a duke with money, but little power to use it.

After he has a stroke on the morning of a duel, Jervaulx loses the ability to speak and communicate. His family believes this is punishment for his rakish lifestyle, so they effectively incarcerate him in a Quaker hospital. There Maddy Timms finds him. She is a Quaker woman who had an acquaintance with Jervaulx before his stroke through her mathematician father. Jervalux struggles to communicate with words at all post-stroke, but finds numbers easier and Maddy, with some math skills, is able to see that he is communicating. Given that she is the first person to act like he is not mad, Jervalux becomes immediately attached to her, even before he really gains back any capacity for language and even though she is a prim, religious woman who he never would have given any notice to before.

Flowers is the one of the best books I’ve ever read, no genre qualifiers needed. It’s the most concrete example I have seen of an author depicting the system of debts that sustained the aristocracy, based on banks trusting that institution as a good bet. While Jervaulx was hospitalized, his family made moves to find him legally incompetent and the fine balance of credits and debits in his estates with his lenders was pushed to the edge. After marrying Maddy, mostly for his own protection, he returns to his estate to find letters asking for repayments of the debt. A duke is a sure thing, until he has a stroke and is under threat of a competency trial.

The delicate framework of his enterprise and income, debt and endeavor, improvements and speculation and capital in a complex interplay of his own making—it required intense application…and a rock-solid confidence in him by the men who advanced their money with his. Like interlocking arches, like a beautiful tiered aqueduct that could stand for centuries or fall with a stroke, it all rested on one vital point.

The keystone was trust, and it was gone.

Jervaulx realizes that the way to deal with creditors on his back is to act like a duke, which he has not been doing publicly since his hospitalization, worried about his limited speech revealing too much about his injury or confirming his incompetency.

And the answer came. He had to be too strong. He had to be the duke again, the real duke, not this muddled coward run-hide not-man. Power was his only true protection—the power to meet force with force—name, influence, fortune, control. He had lost it. No money, no authority, no command—they could come here and take him and send him back to that place

The financial issue in the romance here is that Maddy is Quaker: she believes debt is sinful. Jervaulx’s plan is to go to London and spend more money, to make it clear to society that he is not, as assumed, bankrupt and disabled. If he gives off the appearance of having money, his creditors will trust their bets again. This requires Maddy to appear in society as his Duchess. Maddy wants him to make an effort to pay off the debt, an action that he knows will be read as a sign of desperate straits. Jervaulx struggles to explain the reality of the system to Maddy, given that he speech is still stunted from the stroke.

He could not seem to explain it. He could not convey to her the enormity of what tottered, the number of men whose own fortunes stood at risk with his, who would turn on him—if he was not the duke, if he let them see weakness—who would be upon him like wolves on a deer that had stumbled. They were on him already—these polite letters, the growing pressure of the demands. He should pay them, she said. With what? Sell these paintings, she said. Not enough. Sell this house. Not enough—she frustrated him in her obtuse morality. Even if he did sell up, wasn’t it obvious that suddenly advertising to the world that everything he owned was on the market must create a crisis? That the value of his property would plummet?

Jervaulx is able to pass off his new staccato style of speech as indifferent duke quips to some important lenders and with Maddy’s aid, rights the juggling acts of his debt. Like Balogh does with Adam in The Secret Pearl, Kinsale explores the house of cards that makes up the aristocracy system of power. Adam has power over Lord Brocklehurst because Brocklehurst believes that Adam will be trusted over him, not because there is any rule that a duke is more trusted in court than a baron. Jervaulx’s enrichment comes from the ability to make risky investments, protected by his title from civil arrest and trusted by lending institutions because of his title.

It’s an ouroboros of confirmation. They have power through status and money because people trust their power because of their status and money.

The last 1990s duke that I think exemplifies an expansion of the nature of a duke that was happening in that decade is The Last Hellion by Loretta Chase (1998). Every duke I’ve talked about up until point, and most I think in the genre, start the books as duke. They are established in their title and were likely raised as heir. This is not the case for Vere Mallory, Duke of Ainswood. Vere’s journey is one of my favorites in romance, but as often I reread Lord of Scoundrels, its predecessor in the series, I’m not sure if I’ve ever revisited The Last Hellion all the way through. The grief depicted in it is so harrowing to me.

Vere is mourning the loss of his surrogate father, Charlie, the fifth Duke of Ainswood, when he becomes guardian of the sixth Duke, a young boy named Robin. Look at this passage from the prologue. 

There was no one left who mattered. Of the main branch of the Mallorys, only one male remained besides Vere: nine-year-old Robin, Charlie’s youngest, now sixth Duke of Ainswood. Charlie had left two daughters as well—if one cared to count females, which Vere didn’t—and in his will named Vere, as nearest male kin, the children’s guardian.

We see Vere’s sexism and outright dismissal of Robin’s sisters in this prologue, which will be important for Vere’s growth over the course of the book. His impulse to dismiss women won’t last long once he meets Lydia Grenville, an investigative journalist nicknamed “Lady Grendel.”

But in the prologue, in a few short pages, Chase is able to show how a brotherly affection develops between the cousins—Vere’s titular hellion quality is what a mourning nine-year-old Robin needs to distract from the level of loss he is experiencing. Robin loves his larger-than-life rakish cousin. And Vere similarly processes his loss by taking care of a child who adores him, by going on adventures all over England. When Vere eventually is convinced to return the child to his home, Robin almost immediately catches diphtheria and passes away.

Vere is now the seventh Duke of Ainswood and his grief has turned him inside out. He leans into the worst of himself and the first chapter starts two years later. 

This prologue struck me so hard when I was reading it because I think it was the first time that on page, something that is inherently true with titles, was spelled out for me as a part of a plot of a romance. That if we want a hero who doesn’t have the personality of an heir, that person will likely have to have grieved a loss of some kind, whether it is a loss of family, like Vere, or just a loss of a potential life plan, like a career or freedom from the pressure of the title. Many titled men that I have read have this implied backstory, but Chase makes the consequences of this origin central to Vere’s relationship to his title and the power that goes along with it.

I think with this period of dukes, we’re see tensions start to be explored of what it means to inherit power, be it expected from birth or suddenly as an adult. Especially when set in a romance narrative, where some sort of unity or equity is what gets us to a satisfying HEA. The power has to be combined with some sort of vulnerability in order to get to HEA.

2000s: Bad Duke Dads

I think the last set of dukes’ model sort of stays with us, that emotional arc of power and vulnerability coming together to make up a duke’s journey. We can see ripples of this through the next thirty years of romance. What I see changed in the 2000s generation of dukes is what exactly the dukes are trying to reconcile within themselves. Wulfric Bedwyn, Duke of Bewcastle, Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, Sebastian St. Vincent, Viscount St. Vincent,⁵ and Robert Knight, Duke of Hawkscliffe are our models here for ducal heroes in the 2000s who had bad dads.

At this point in the history of duke books, we get to a point where if a duke hero is going to be redeemed, he is going to have to right the ship of the whole line that came before him. This generational conflict is new context in the question of “what does it mean to be a duke?” It is no longer about maintaining the family’s legacy, it is about correcting it.

Wulfric is the duke who buys in the most here and even though he comes from the middle of the decade, I think we can see him as a transitional duke. Mary Balogh did start publishing the series where Wulfric would eventual be a hero in 1999, even though his book, Slightly Dangerous doesn’t come until 2004. Wulfric’s self-doubt and loathing comes from his need to control and stage manage those around him—a frequent ducal trait, particularly when it comes to their siblings. The Bedwyns are a loud, boisterous, self-assured family and Wulfric is deeply involved in most of their love stories. When his book opens, all five of his siblings are now married off, his long time mistress has passed away, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself.

They all had their own lives now. They all had spouses and children. They were all happy. Yes, he believed they really were-all of them.

He rejoiced for them.

The Duke of Bewcastle, very much alone in his power and the splendor of his person and the magnificence of the London mansion surrounding him, continued to stare off into space as he tapped his steepled fingertips against his chin.

Wulfric was separated from his siblings when he was 12, after his father suffers a health scare that makes it clear Wulfric will be a very young duke. And he becomes duke at 17. Wulfric sees his role as brother and duke in opposition to each other, since he frequently finds himself ordering his siblings to behave in ways that he thinks will best serve them and the family and has for his entire adult life. In his relationship with Christine, an uncouth widow who is uninterested in playing by the rules after she tragically loses her very jealous husband, Wulfric has to journey to uncover and show Wulfric the Man and not just Bewcastle the Duke.

Wulfric’s relationships are sad, but presented matter-of-factly. He does not resent his father’s choices as much as bemoans the whole circumstances of his birth. But as he begins to show Christine Wulfric the Man, we see Wulfric the brother and uncle, who no firewall could completely divide from the affections of his family. And when Christine and he have a son in the epilogue, we trust that Wulfric would never silo his son from his family in the same way.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t point that Wulfric has the all time great quizzing glass arc for a Duke. He weaponizes devastatingly against his siblings in the first five books of the Bedwyn series and what Balogh does with it in his book is one of my favorite things in romance.

Simon and Sebastian of The Duke and I and Devil in Winter go the opposite direction of Wulfric’s starchiness and instead go full rake. Simon and Sebastian have been raised, or more rightly ignored, by the kind of dukes who populated the first fifty years of dukes in romance: the manipulative old men who were sinister, cruel, uncaring and in their cases, never get redemption. Simon and Sebastian are both concerned with correcting course and both think the best way to do this is to throw themselves into rakedom and to refuse to commit to a family (Simon wants no wife and children and Sebastian doesn’t mind having either, but is initially uninterested in fidelity or child rearing).

Many dukes were raised by a duke and this chip on their shoulder about the inadequacies of their fathers as both fathers and dukes will continue as a narrative trend for the next quarter century (explored in the Bareknuckle Bastards series by Sarah MacLean, most Tessa Dare books about dukes, The Duchess War by Courtney Milan, the Wicked Trilogy by Madeline Hunter, A Caribbean Heiress in Paris by Adriana Herrera). The elder dukes who are so invested in one image of what a duke must be, it nearly destroys their children, either through pressure to perform or through bad habits by the elder duke that become less acceptable as the country tramples toward modernity.

But Simon and Sebastian also feel devoid of ducal context in other ways. Simon’s title, though it impresses Violet Bridgerton, does not seem to have any particular weight over Anthony Bridgerton’s (viscount). He attracts scheming mamas of the ton because he is single and newly returned, the title is just a bonus. There’s no reference to any politicking on his part and though we know he has massive land holdings, we don’t see him doing anything with them. Even Bridgerton the show gives us more context of the tenants of Clyvedon, his main country estate.

And Sebastian becomes an aristocrat with a job when he marries Evangeline Jenner, wealthy daughter of Ivo Jenner, gambling den owner. When Jenner dies in Devil in Winter, Sebastian takes over the club, working until he can inherit the impoverished title from his father, who was a vaguely distant father compared to Simon’s acutely cruel one. Most of the context of Sebastian’s lost fortune is actually described in It Happened One Autumn, one book earlier in the series. His father, the duke, has cut off Sebastian’s annual portion and driven the title’s estates into near ruin. We don’t see him at an estate, he doesn’t have specific notions about honoring his title. He doesn’t even really resent the bourgeois work he must do at Jenner’s club to sustain Evie’s inherited fortune. Sebastian, in his own story, reads much more like Kleypas’ self-made men than her aristocrats.

The main trait that makes either Simon or Sebastian dukely is their fraught relationship to the title. This is one choice of the direction on where ducal trauma can come: the author can zoom in so much on the family discord that context recedes and is blurred. For Simon and Sebastian, being a duke is a personal injury.

While Simon and Sebastian are in the vague duke void⁶, Robert Knight, Duke of Hawkscliffe from The Duke (2000) by Gaelen Foley is very specifically a political duke. His political aspirations, including trying for a place in Lord Liverpool’s cabinet, mean he thinks he cannot participate in some of the renegade behavior we see other dukes indulge in. When considering how he might exact revenge on a man who may have killed a woman he loved, Robert thinks “As a man of justice, he was bound by principle to give cool objectivity its due. He could not spend his waking hours fighting for justice in Parliament, then murder a possibly innocent man in a duel in a fit of rage.” (Spoiler: he does participate in a duel, and many more scandalous things throughout the book.)

Robert’s main political aim is reform, specifically focused on the penal code and prison reform, though during his affair with courtesan Belinda Hamilton, he also begins an interest in support for impoverished children. Belinda, or Bel, is a gentlewoman who has been manipulated into poverty by an earl’s heir who has become sexually obsessed with her named Dolph. Dolph is the man that Robert is considering dueling because he believes that Dolph may have killed the object of Robert’s chaste affection, Lucy, Countess of Coldfell. The Earl of Coldfell is an old family friend to Robert, so Robert never considered consummating his love. Dolph is the Earl of Coldfell’s heir and the supposed motive to killing Lucy is to prevent a new heir from taking his place.

Like Simon and Sebastian, Robert has to deal with the legacy and pressure of his forebears. Robert is known as starchy duke in the ton, a paragon of virtue—he is in the conservative Tory party, but he argues vehemently for reform and has never publicly courted scandal before. Robert’s sterling reputation, combined with being the majority party, helps him push more reform minded bills through Parliament, despite his party’s generally reactionary politics. He worries about his family’s reputation, colored by his late mother, who was known as the Hawkscliffe Harlot, since so many of her children were fathered by men other than Robert’s father. Robert resents his mother’s reputation and fell in line with his father’s cruel way of speaking about her, though he loves his siblings. Later the circumstances of his mother’s life and death are revealed and it is clear that Robert has been flattening her into a cruel caricature in his mind as a means of self-preservation.

Robert’s politics are not hollow, but they are neither perfect nor ahistorical. He argues for prison reform, but also at lease twice in the book, condemns someone to spending time in prison, either for debts or for a crime without a trial, because it would benefit him. He is not an enlightened abolitionist. He uses his duke title to bend the criminal punishment system to serve his own, selfish needs. Foley does an outstanding job of threading this needle, between Robert clearly being a progressive, but also still being an aristocrat that struggles to see why the rules shouldn’t be different for him. Robert also has pocket boroughs in the House of Commons that he doles out, and when Bel questions the fairness of this practice, he dismisses her concern: sure the parliament should be reformed, but could it ever? We see exactly where Robert’s vision ends, so his politics never seem anachronistic, even when they are sympathetic.

Foley also imbibes the whole work with historical mise en scène. The book is set just before the Congress of Vienna begins in the fall of 1814, and Robert’s many political allies and enemies are real people. So his politics do not exist in a vacuum of the novel—famously reactionary Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth shuts down Robert’s suggestions about providing more resources for homeless street children. And by the end of the book, Robert plans to switch parties, accurate to the fracturing that would happen multiple times to the Tories in the first half of the 19th century.

Robert’s politics ground the setting and create conflict in the book. Bel becomes his mistress, but they both know, given the current stakes of his politicking, that they cannot marry. A duke creating new circumstances in order to marry the woman he loves is not radical in this genre, by any means. But Foley has Robert pull off the magic trick of winning the woman and winning the political game. Often times in romances published more recently, the duke has to convince vague “society” of the appropriateness of a working class match. Again, this does not inherently mean a worse book, but it does mean the stakes are lower without work done by the author to heighten them with fictional elements. Robert’s stakes are high because of the history Foley includes.

The Duke does not seem to have the nostalgia factor the aristocracy that is so often the assumption made about what makes historical romance compelling nowadays. In that same USA Today article linked last week, Johanna Shupe said: “A duke pretty much had it made. He couldn't lose his title, no matter what he did. He could commit a crime, or run up as much debt as he wanted, without worry of punishment. And he had to marry and procreate to ensure the future of his title — a motivation that romance writers love!”

I think Wulfric, Simon, Sebastian and especially Robert confound the notion that the aristocracy is a solver of personal problems. It is the source of rot for all these men. For 19 years, Wulfric loses himself in the title, making any sort of personal connection very difficult. The pressure for an heir for the title spurs Simon’s father to push his mother into a pregnancy that they know will likely kill her and she dies in childbirth, which in turn makes Simon swear he will never marry. The lack of industry in the aristocratic class leads Sebastian’s father to wastreling and keeps Sebastian from having a direction other than rakedom. The moment he is allowed to have a career in Jenner’s, he suddenly has a purpose and an interest in fidelity to Evie! Yes, the position gives Robert access to the political changes he wants to make, but the pressure and abuse of it drove his mother to scandal and her death and he must reckon with that consequence before it claims the woman he loves.

In the decade that follows, we’ll retain some of these new ducal elements, including the bifurcation of political plots, where dukes will be devoid of context or hyperpolitical and the generational awareness of righting a past duke’s wrongs. Next issue in the series will be about three authors that I strongly associate with the 2010s who have all written multiple dukes: Sarah MacLean, Tessa Dare, and Courtney Milan and what they do with the title over their oeuvres, along with some 2020s dukes to see where we are at now with the title.

recommendations

Keeper of the Dream by Penelope Williamson: This is going to be an upcoming Reformed Rakes episode. I told Chels I wanted to read an old school medieval romance and they know I struggle with Julie Garwood, so they picked this and I adored it. I say this in our episode but it is somehow one of the funniest and the most harrowing romances I’ve ever read. There’s a teen sidekick who is going to be my favorite character of the year.

Out of Sight (dir. Steven Soderbergh): potential future Restorative Romance about Soderbergh millennium work, many of which are romance novels (Erin Brockovich, this, Ocean’s Eleven). This movie was very sexy and every time a new character appeared and was a character actor I recognized, I did a Lucille Bluth Gene Parmesan reaction.

Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran: I read this last week. I don’t think it will ultimately be a part of the conversation of ducal romance history because as much as I loved it, Julian doesn’t spend a lot of time lingering over his title. His other identities and roles are much more important to the plot of the book. Still—I stayed up all night reading it and I’m now fully Duran-pilled. Everyone says this: I can’t believe this is a debut.

1. “Central love story” and “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.” I hate this definition! It is poorly written.

2. Heyer specifically accused Cartland of plagiarizing These Old Shades and Cartland does return to this plot many times over.

3. The Georgian Period is history refers to 1714 to 1837, when Queen Victoria ascends to the throne. The Regency is named after the Prince Regent’s rule, which is 1811-1820, but the “long Regency” really begins with 1795 with the War of the First Coalition and ends with Queen Victoria. Georgian romances are generally set in the 1700s before the Regency begins. Genre conventions include people are wearing wigs, highwaymen and generally more violence than Regency romances. See: Elizabeth Hoyt of authors writing now.

4. Other dukes with quizzing glasses pre-Whitney: The Little Pretender by Barbara Cartland (1971), The Duchess of Vidal by Dawn Lindsay (1978), and The Silken Net by Rachelle Edwards (1979).

5. Sebastian St. Vincent, the titular Devil, is not a duke, but a viscount who will inherit a dukedom by the time he reappears in the Kleypas universe in the Ravenels series.

6. Imagine I am saying this like Kate says “pink void” in her Tiktok series about princesses.