Regency Trivia!

Today, let’s discuss Illegitimacy.

Illegitimacy was extremely prevalent during the Regency. As you know, illegitimacy occured when the parents were not married.

But wait, it’s more complicated than that. A child not of the marriage would be considered a child of the marriage if the husband did not immediately object. If, for example, a husband discovered a wife was pregnant and knew it was not his. He would most likely send her away to have the child and force her to give it up. That happened to the Duchess of Devonshire (Georgiana).

But some husband’s didn’t. Her name escapes me, but it was said that one peeress had a different father for each of her children. Her husband accepted them all.

When a child was accepted, or the husband didn’t know it wasn’t his child, the child was legitimate. This was the law almost everywhere until the very late 20th century. In these cases, a son could inherit a title, sons and daughters could inherit property, and NO ONE had the right to challenge their legitimacy. Therefore, for legal purposes, they were fully legitimate.

But what about the poor children whose father was married to someone else or did not, for whatever reason, wed the mother? Sons could not inherit a title. But sons and daughters could inherit property if the father or mother left it to them in a will. It would be treated like any other bequest.

In the best of all worlds, absent legitimacy, the father would acknowledge the child, provide for him or her financially, educationally, and socially. In some cases raising them with their legitimate children. In that case, the father was most likely to petition for guardianship of the child. That was important, because an illegitimate child who did not have a court appointed guardian was deemed to have no guardian, making it impossible to wed by a special or regular license before the age of twenty-one. Naturally, they could marry by having the banns called before they reached their majority.

Also, illegitimacy in England, particularly among the ton, was not the stigma it was in the United States. During the Victorian period, one woman, from the US who was in England trying to marry off her daughter to a peer, was shocked to discover that illegitimate children of the ton were as accepted as legitimate children.

#RegencyTrivia #HistoricalRomance