The Angel and the Cad by Geraldine Roberts - book review

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the ghostly gate pillars of Hampstead Marshall. There is another pair of surviving entrance posts in Wanstead, London, marking the site of the now-lost mansion of Wanstead House.

Wanstead House was a grand, stately home in the Palladian style, built for Lord Castlemaine in the reign of King George I. It was demolished a century later. Why and how is described in Geraldine Roberts' excellent book The Angel and The Cad. It is a tragic story of an heiress who made a disastrous marriage to a man who was wholly without principles, who dissipated an immense fortune in a few years of reckless and debauched living.


The Angel and the Cad

Love, Loss and Scandal in Regency England

Geraldine Roberts has researched the story from legal archives, and traces every step of the painful disillusionment of the innocent young Regency girl, Catherine Tylney-Long, who cast her entire destiny into the hands of a spendthrift and libertine, William Wellesley-Pole. Roberts calls him a cad - we could add to that, a rotter and a swine. He brought her to ruin and he broke her heart.
The book bears some signs of having started life as a thesis, containing long disquisitions about the rise of the mass media for example. I would also cast doubt on whether Miss Long, had she married the royal Duke who courted her, would ever have been allowed to share his rank, or her children permitted to inherit the throne. There were prohibitions in place. 
Another dubious claim is that the tradition of the white wedding dress was established by Catherine's wedding in 1812. There are many earlier examples. 
Nevertheless, such minor points aside, it is an enthralling subject, and the author is to be congratulated on having researched it so thoroughly. Does a film contract loom for her? I hope so. She really deserves it. 

     There is actually a family link between the Craven and Tylney families. In 1721 the third Baron Craven married Anne, daughter and heiress of Catherine's ancestor Frederick Tylney. But she died young in 1730 and her only child pre-deceased her. Her considerable fortune, an estate in Rotherwick in Hampshire, was then inherited by her niece, Dorothy, whose husband Richard Child assumed the named of Tylney. From Dorothy and Richard it passed, with other accumulated estates, to the ill-fated Catherine.

If you like Regency history you would also enjoy reading 
 by Julia Gasper
published by Vernon Press.

https://vernonpress.com/title?id=334
23 Jun 2017 - Elizabeth Craven's fascinating life was full of travel, love-affairs and scandals but this biography, the first to appear for a century, is the only one to focus on her as a writer.





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