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  Coke of Norfolk, Thomas William Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester (1754–1842): Owner of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, Coke (pronounced ‘cook’) was an agricultural pioneer who invested much of his energy in his estate, to the benefit of both his tenants and his purse. Overcoming stubborn resistance to new farming techniques and crops (he was among the first to grow wheat successfully in Norfolk), in less than forty years Coke increased his annual rental income from £2,000 to £20,000. Eager to share his farming success with others, Coke played host to the Holkham Clippings, an annual three-day event to which many people—including Adam Deveril of A Civil Contract—came from all over the world to learn and share ideas about farming. A successful and energetic Whig MP, Coke held his seat in parliament for 57 years.

  Coke of Norfolk.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): Best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, Coleridge was one of the founders of English Romanticism. He studied at Cambridge and met the poet Robert Southey with whom for a time he became a pantisocrat and (with Drusilla Morville’s father in The Quiet Gentleman) made plans to create an equitable community on the banks of the Susquehanna. Instead he married Sara Fricker (Southey married her sister Edith) and continued writing. His career as a poet was adversely affected by ill health and an opium addiction, but he continued to write and lecture, producing a weekly paper called The Friend as well as critical and theological works, plays and, in 1817, his famous Biographia Literaria.

  William Godwin (1756–1836): Novelist, philosopher and political writer, Godwin had been a dissenting minister but became an atheist with decided views as to the true nature of man. He believed in the power of reason and that rational behaviour could enable people to live harmoniously without laws or institutions. In 1797 he married the famous writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

  Lord Melbourne.

  Charles Lamb (1775–1834) and Mary Lamb (1764–1847): Charles and Mary Lamb were brother and sister who spent much of their life together writing plays, poems and prose works. Charles had become responsible for his sister in 1796 when, in a fit of insanity, she had tragically murdered their mother. Mary continued to suffer from intermittent seizures, but was devoted to her brother who also suffered from occasional bouts of madness. The two are best known for their children’s book Tales from Shakespeare.

  William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1779–1848): The son of the famous Whig hostess, Lady Melbourne, William may have been fathered by the Earl of Egremont. A dutiful son and a kind, amiable husband, William married Caroline Ponsonby in 1805 and quietly endured her affair with Byron and her many other indiscretions. The birth of a mentally disabled son was a personal tragedy and added to his disinclination to deal with harsh realities. The death of his elder brother, Peniston, in 1805, made him heir to the title and he entered the House of Lords as a Whig conservative. He was Queen Victoria’s first prime minister.

  Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830): A talented artist from his youth, Thomas Lawrence was a renowned portrait painter who, in 1792, succeeded Sir Henry Reynolds as the King’s principal painter. He painted many of Europe’s most notable figures, including the heroes of the Napoleonic Wars (and also Nell, Lady Cardross, in April Lady). He lived for a time at 65 Russell Square where he undertook private commissions at a cost of more than 400 guineas for a full-length portrait. Knighted in 1815, Lawrence became president of the Royal Academy in 1820.

  Matthew Gregory ‘Monk’ Lewis (1775–1818): Lewis became known as ‘Monk’ after the publication, in 1796, of his popular Gothic novel Ambrosio, or The Monk. His writing influenced Walter Scott’s early poetry and Lewis collaborated with him and Robert Southey on Tales of Wonder (1801). As a liberal he was concerned about the treatment of slaves and twice visited his Jamaica plantation before dying of yellow fever in 1818.

  Lord Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool (1770–1828): The longest-serving of all British prime ministers, Liverpool entered parliament in 1790 and became prime minister in 1812, overseeing the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, and consolidating the position of his ministry with both the parliament and the people. Although not in favour of many of the reforms proposed during the period, Liverpool was an astute and responsive politician who addressed many of the economic issues of the day. He believed strongly in public order and the rule of law and his government’s introduction, in 1819, of the Six Acts in response to the Peterloo massacre was strongly criticised.

  Louis XVIII, King of France (1755–1824): The younger brother of Louis XVI, who was executed during the Revolution, Louis XVIII left Paris in 1791 and went into exile, eventually settling in England. When Napoleon was defeated and sent to Elba in 1814, Louis returned to Paris as King. He enjoyed a brief reign before Napoleon’s escape from Elba and unopposed entry into Paris—at which point Louis and his family beat a hasty retreat from the city. He regained the throne after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo and was the first French monarch to reign with an elected parliamentary government.

  Prince William of Orange (1792–1849): Heir to the Dutch throne, William lived in exile during Napoleon’s rampage across Europe, spent two years at Oxford and served under the Duke of Wellington (who described him as ‘a stupid, untidy and dissolute young man’) in Spain, where he was known by the general staff as ‘Slender Billy’. In 1813 the Prince Regent, feeling that the Dutch fleet would be a useful addition to the British navy, encouraged his daughter to accept the Prince’s marriage proposal. The engagement was broken off, however, and William married the Tsar of Russia’s sister, Anna.

  Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832): A poet in his early years, Scott enjoyed great popularity with his Scottish border ballads and long narrative poems such as The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). The rise of Byron in 1812 saw Scott turn to novel writing and, drawing on his deep love of Scotland, its history and people, he produced the landmark historical romance Waverley. Over the next decade Scott anonymously published a series of best-selling books including Guy Mannering (1815), Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Ivanhoe (1819) but did not acknowledge authorship until 1827.

  Robert Southey (1774–1843): A prolific writer, Southey was a popular poet and biographer who became Poet Laureate in 1813. Best remembered for his biographical works including his Life of Nelson (1813) and Life of Wesley (1820), in his day he was admired by the likes of Scott and Byron, and his epic poem The Curse of Kehama (1810) was enormously popular. One of the ‘Lake Poets’, Southey had studied at Oxford where he became good friends with Coleridge with whom he had been a pantisocrat with plans to establish an equitable community on the banks of the Susquehanna. Instead he married Edith Fricker, the sister of Coleridge’s wife Sara, and spent much of his life writing.

  THE BEAU AND THE DANDIES

  Beau Brummell.

  George Bryan ‘Beau’ Brummell (1778–1840): The subject of countless anecdotes and credited with many famous sayings (such as asking, ‘Who’s your fat friend?’ in reference to the Prince Regent), for many years Beau Brummell stood at the centre of the fashionable world. Born into the middle class, Brummell entered elite circles by way of Eton—where his wit and elegance earned him the nickname ‘Beau’—and Oxford. After a short stay at the university he was gazetted a cornet in the Prince of Wales’s regiment, the 10th Hussars, and the two became friends. Brummell sold out of the army on his regiment being ordered to Manchester and moved to London where he soon established himself as arbiter elegantiarum, remaining the acknowledged leader of fashion and close friend of the Prince of Wales for more than a decade. Brummell’s neat, plain style of dress, his mannerisms and his social decrees were everywhere adhered to and slavishly copied. In dress he insisted upon personal cleanliness, freshly laundered shirts, a perfectly tied neckcloth and a simplicity of attire that did not draw attention to the wearer. It was Brummell who began the fashion for perfectly cut, dark-coloured coats for evening wear (which continues today in the form of the dinner jack