eighteenth century

The eighteenth century in the novel is not merely a date on the historical background: it is a legal and political order in which royal authority, inherited custom, and aristocratic status determine who may be seized, confined, or recognized as an heir. The narrative places the House of Lords under Anne alongside older practices of silent arrest and prison torture, making the period’s institutions part of the machinery that governs Gwynplaine’s fate.

Historical and Political Setting

The account looks back across changing regimes rather than confining itself to a single year. Gwynplaine’s birthright is traced to a child sold at the age of two by order of King James II, then abandoned on the coast of Portland ten years later. He is identified as the only legitimate son of Lord Linnæus Clancharlie and Ann Bradshaw, and the inheritor of his father’s titles and estates. The political history thus enters the personal plot as a royal intervention with enduring consequences: the boy’s identity and inheritance are concealed, while his life is redirected toward itinerant performance.

The novel also describes the House of Lords at the beginning of the eighteenth century as an institution whose size and composition reflected political choices. Under James II, the upper house had been increased to 188 lords, or 186 if two peerages belonging to royal favourites are excluded. Under Anne, its total, including bishops, stood at 207. The narrative treats the expansion of the peerage as a means by which monarchy could dilute aristocratic power within the assembly, while noting that membership remained ordered by rank and seniority.

Law, Arrest, and Local Authority

The period’s legal order includes arrest without an explanation at the moment of seizure. The narrative presents this as a familiar police practice despite the Habeas Corpus Act, particularly in politically delicate cases. Such arrests were conducted in silence and could defer explanation while matters remained unresolved; the practice is associated with the logic of state interest as well as with inherited legal customs. The account distinguishes this mode of capture from a public appeal for justice: silence itself signalled that a person had been taken under an authority not yet openly explained.

Local administration gave that authority a specific structure. County sheriffs received royal commissions, apart from the hereditary sheriff of Westmoreland and the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, who were elected by the livery in the common hall. Sheriffs escorted and protected judges on circuit. Their officers included the under-sheriff, who accompanied the sheriff, and the justice of the quorum, who assisted him. With the bailiff of the hundred, the latter apprehended, examined, and, under the sheriff’s responsibility, imprisoned people awaiting trial, including those accused of serious crimes and vagrancy. The account therefore presents justice as both a hierarchy of offices and a chain of delegated action.

Imprisonment and the Recovery of Identity

The account’s description of the torture chamber in Southwark Jail places imprisonment within a longer history of punitive confinement. It notes that prisons dating from the time of King John had chambers of torture and names the crypt of Beauchamp Tower and the cell in the Lollards’ prison as other settings used for that purpose. In the novel’s scene, Gwynplaine sees a chamber of this kind; the prison is not simply a holding place but part of the coercive legal environment through which the concealed truth about his identity is brought forward.

The confrontation over Hardquanonne makes procedure decisive. A bottle bearing his name is shown to him, and he recognizes it as his. He refuses to answer after the enclosed parchment is read, even when a further reading presents the declaration and confession of his accomplices. On the legally appointed fourth day, Gwynplaine is brought before him; the sheriff declares that the man abandoned on 29 January 1690 is present, and Hardquanonne recognizes his victim. The identification links the old crime to the living claimant and turns the concealed record into evidence of Gwynplaine’s birth and inheritance.

Parliamentary Form and Historical Memory

The Lords’ chamber is presented as a carefully ordered political space. Peers take their seats according to the date their peerages were created and their rank within the nobility. The royal ceremony distinguishes temporal peers, who wear coronets, from spiritual peers, who wear mitres; the archbishops and bishops have their own prescribed insignia and precedence. These arrangements make rank visible in the room as well as defining it in law.

The narrator draws a comparison between the square formed by the throne, bishops, and barons, with magistrates kneeling within it, and the ancient parliament of France under its first two dynasties. Hincmar’s description of a ninth-century assembly is said to resemble the eighteenth-century House of Lords, producing a deliberate reversal in historical perspective: the past appears to anticipate a later institution. The surrounding account adds that Parliament was required to assemble only once in seven years, that the Lords deliberated behind closed doors while Commons debates were public, and that the Crown could use the creation of new peers as a political instrument. The eighteenth century is consequently rendered as a period in which ceremony, secrecy, and numerical management all helped sustain political authority.