Maybe I shouldn’t extract paragraphs from a novel I am only a quarter of the way through. And I certainly should double check facts, especially the ones I’m staring directly at and thinking, “Wait, is this right?”
So my mea culpa is, by 1691 the Restoration was well past its silk-clad legs. Both restored Stuart kings, Charles II and his brother, James II*, were no longer around. Charles had died and James had been booted out of the country in 1688, when the so-called Glorious Revolution put The Oranges — Dutch William of Orange and his wife, Mary II, daughter of James II — on the throne of England.
OK, that was my egregious historical error.
As to Thackeray, his creation I lauded previously –the wonderfully evolved Rachel, Lady Castlewood — went on rollercoaster drop in her evolutionary progress, in a later chapter after her husband was killed in a duel (hope I’m not reuining the suspense for youse who haven’t yet read Henry Esmond). She wrongfully blamed Henry, our eponymous good guy, for everything, turned against him totally and thoroughly wrecked him emotionally, never mind turning me, the reader, against her. Furiously. I was so mad and disappointed, I wanted to smack her.
Maybe she’ll pull herself together in the near fictional future. I am not optimistic.
*James II, a/k/a the Duke of York, was the reason my homeland, New Netherlands, became the English colony of New York, in 1664. So there’s a certain historical satisfaction in knowing the Dutch tossed the English out of England, a few decades after the English pushed the Dutch out of New Amsterdam.
On this July 4, I note that we Americans began the process of tossing the English out of America.