Some of the best inspiration for stories comes from history books. So as an author, but also as a history lover, I wanted to include a short note about the real-life history that inspired A Rogue by Night.
It is often unusual to come across more than a passing mention of the Napoleonic Wars in British Regency-set novels. Yet there are extraordinary documented accounts of courage, hardship, and bravery that can’t be overlooked. My hero, Harland Hayward, is a veteran of this conflict. But so is my heroine, Katherine Wright. An estimated four-thousand women accompanied the British Army, working and sometimes fighting alongside husbands and lovers, brothers and fathers.
The wars that engulfed almost the entire European continent for nearly two decades cost 2.5 million – 3.5 million soldiers their lives. And even though the battles were not fought on British soil, they still had a huge impact on the lives of those British citizens left behind. Massive taxes to fund the war effort were levied. At the same time, food prices and unemployment skyrocketed due to wartime trading restrictions and increased industrialization. Many desperate men— and women— faced with starvation enlisted in the military. But at the war’s end, circumstances did not get better.
For those soldiers who did survive to return to Britain, there were no war memorials or recognition. Many were weakened, crippled, or severely maimed. They, like the widows and families of fallen soldiers, were left to fend for themselves as best as they could, reduced, in many cases to stealing or begging. Or, in Kent, where the Devils of Dover series is set, smuggling.
Over the centuries, the smuggling trade had flourished along the Kent coastline with its proximity and easy access to the continent. The practice was not without its risks, yet after the wars, the illicit trade became even more dangerous with the reassignment of the Crown’s soldiers from the battlefields of Europe to the coastlines of England. Their directive was to bring order to the lawless coasts and end all smuggling for good.
For it wasn’t just material goods that were smuggled in and out of England and France. In the years following the French Revolution, many French nobles, their families, and sometimes their hoards of art and wealth, were smuggled into England. At the same time, and in the years leading up to and after the decisive battle at Waterloo, many French prisoners of war were smuggled out of England and back to France. Often, these French prisoners were held in deplorable conditions on the Thames prison hulks.
If there was a silver lining in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the resulting political, economic, and social unrest helped ignite the beginnings of reform. The conflict was huge in scope and their direct and indirect effects were profound. Writing about some of these effects – real facts woven into my own fiction – seems not only justified but essential. The men and women who faced impossible odds and prevailed offer an author no end of inspiration.


If you’d like to read further about the history mentioned above, here’s a list of books I’d recommend:
Smuggling in Kent and Sussex 1700-1840 by Mary Waugh
Smuggling in the British Isles – A History by Richard Platt
In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815 by Jenny Uglow
The Napoleonic Wars by Richard Holmes
The Intolerable Hulks – British Shipboard Confinement 1776-1857 by Charles Campbell