I’ve written before about going down a research rabbit-hole which was in danger of developing into a rabbit warren.

Well, it’s definitely a rabbit warren now.

It has also extended out of the Napoleonic period to include Samuel Johnson’s essays and Lives of the Poets (a selection only at the moment). I still have my Napoleonic collection, which now also features the letters of Wellington’s ADC John Fremantle (who appears in Heyer’s An Infamous Army) and a reprint of a collection of extracts from Wellington’s letters and speeches from throughout his entire career, both military and political.

I’ve also come across one of Baron Muffling’s (liaison officer between Prince Blucher and Wellington) memoirs on the Internet Archive, which led to the discovery that the Duke was not the only one whose words Heyer borrowed, with a scene from after the battle of Waterloo in which Muffling tells Wellington that Prince Blucher will call it “La Belle Alliance” after the village nearby, only to look at Wellington to realise that Wellington will not, is lifted from Muffling’s memoir. Wellington, you see, headed his Despatches with where he slept the night before his battles, and he had slept at Waterloo.

But I’m gaining a whole new appreciation for the attention to historical detail in Heyer’s writing, especially in An Infamous Army and The Spanish Bride, for the Real People who litter the pages. Never mind the details of dress or the slang they use. Those are the ‘easy’ bits to get right.

It’s the attitudes of all the different parts of the alliance, of the people themselves. And that’s so much harder, because how can you really know anyone other than yourself? And when the people in question are long dead, and so are those who might have known them – well, that’s a whole other ball-game.

Really, I’m getting to the point where if Heyer says something about the historical people, something they say or do (unless they’re interacting with fictional characters, of course), I’m going to accept that it happened Just Like That in Real Life.

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