With the amount of forced marriages in historical romance novels, you’d really think that couples back then were getting caught in flagrante left and right!

Were they really? Not exactly … but that isn’t to say that unconventional marriages did not happen. The trope is in fact as old as the Regency era itself, and speaks to some of the anxieties surrounding unmarried women who might get 'ideas.'

I’ll defer to Jane Austen, who—though not the sole representative of the Regency era—can give us an idea as to what ‘compromising’ situations demanded of the people involved. A famous example can be seen in Pride and Prejudice. While away with her aunt and uncle, Lizzie Bennet receives news that her younger sister Lydia has run off with George Wickham. Lizzie’s rightfully devastated. It seems the situation can only be salvaged if the couple end up in Gretna Green, but “something was dropped by Denny expressing his belief that W. never intended to go there, or to marry Lydia at all …”

The scandal places Lydia and her family in hot water. After all, she had run away—unchaperoned—and if she did not return a married woman, she’d be deemed ‘fallen.’ In this case, marriage is necessary, and it's Mr. Darcy who later forces them to tie the knot.

The events of Pride and Prejudice, while fictional, reflected the reality of life for unmarried women in the Regency era. They had to guard their reputations. And Lydia wasn’t exactly at fault for her silly decision—she genuinely thought Wickham had meant to marry her. It’s also wise to remember she was only 15 in the novel … young and impressionable indeed.

Contemporary newspapers often reported events resembling the Lydia-Wickham disaster; however, many couples did not see a happy ending. In late November 1818, for instance, over a dozen newspapers related a story about a rather Wickham-like character. In essence, a man named William Beale had been courting a “respectable” woman named Ann Sarah Webb; he told her family that he was a gentleman entitled to a large inheritance. The Webbs believed Beale and allowed their daughter to go on walks with him—a man they considered her “future husband.” Unfortunately, Beale took advantage of Webb; after their walk one afternoon, he pulled her into his carriage and attempted to assault her. She managed to get away, and the family later pressed charges.

… It turned out that Beale had been lying about his identity. He was in fact a married man, and an impoverished one at that! The magistrate overseeing the case offered the Webb family a settlement, but Mrs. Webb rejected the offer, observing that “the wealth of the world could not wipe away the disgrace of her child, nor restore the happiness of the family, which had been destroyed by [Beale’s] infamous machinations.”

If Mr. Darcy had not rescued the Bennets, they could have very well ended up in a similar situation. But up to this point I’ve been covering unconventional marriages as they occurred in the gentry and among other respectable families. Did the aristocracy see similar scandals?

To be honest, I haven’t come across any examples of men and women being caught together in the ‘modern’ Bridgerton-style. By that I mean a party of people stumbling across a couple kissing in a garden, an orangery, a library, or what have you. (Of course, if anyone does know of a specific example that took place during the relevant time period, I’d be happy to read about it). For the most part, a lady wouldn’t kiss or be alone with a lord she didn’t intend on marrying. The risk was too great. And in cases of ‘forbidden’ love, most couples didn’t have one night of passion before going their separate ways (à la Anthony and Kate) … they eloped!

Eloping was nothing new to the Georgian era. For brevity’s sake, I’ll only include one example: On 21 October 1769, Elizabeth Seymour, Duchess of Northumberland recorded that “A daughter of Lady Kerry’s who had run away with a hairdresser was stopped here [Dover] … she slipped into an open boat with only two rowers and so escaped to Calais.” The young woman, Gertrude Tilson, was the granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Cavan. Her elopement was not a wise decision—the man she married ended up abandoning her a couple years later.

Again, it appeared that defiant or unconventional matches tended to have something in common: the promise of marriage in the first place! Modern Regency fiction doesn’t like this idea—after all, it’s less dramatic if you ‘force’ together a couple who already love each other. But to be fair, this trope works in theory … technically speaking, if a bunch of people did come across Lady X kissing Lord Y, they would have to marry (lest the woman and her family be rocked by scandal). But in reality, unmarried couples—particularly those of the upper-class—had no good reason to 'give in' out of sheer curiosity. I'm not saying it never happened over the course of the Georgian era, but if a woman planned on having pre-marital sex with someone, it would most certainly be with the man she intended to wed!

Sources

Peck, Linda Levy. Women of Fortune: Money, Marriage, and Murder in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Perkin, Joan. Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England. Routledge, 2014.

Schutte, Kimberly F. Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485–2000. London: Palgrave, 2014.

What about attempts to catch wealthy men? Did this really happen? Attempts by single females to compromise a male, and force him into marriage?