I've recently been reminded by some discussions on a mailing list that there are plenty of people who don't really have much grasp of the social context of dance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or that a ball could be a much more complicated and socially perilous event than just a bunch of folks getting together and having a nice time dancing.
Here's an interesting example of rudeness on the dance floor wielded as a social weapon.
Frederick, Duke of York, the younger brother of George IV, the former Prince Regent, died on January 5, 1827, and was memorialized in an "illustrative memoir" published in the February, 1827, issue of the ladies' magazine La Belle Assemblée.
As would be expected, most of the memoir was devoted to his military and administrative accomplishments as Commander in Chief of the British army during much of the Napoleonic wars. Also rating mention is a famous duel he fought on May 17, 1789, with his military subordinate Colonel Charles Lennox. Lennox was of higher social status than his military rank alone conveys; he was a grandson of the second Duke of Richmond and would eventually succeed to the title as the fourth Duke. His wife, Charlotte, held the very famous ball in Brussels on June 15, 1815, the night before the Battle of Quatre Bras and a few nights before the Battle of Waterloo on the 18th.
The duel seems to have been caused by some gossip repeated by the Duke about Colonel Lennox and was resolved by Lennox narrowly missing the Duke (grazing his "curl") and the Duke declining to fire. Anyone interested in the details can read an 1841 account in Volume 2 of J. G. Millingen's The history of dueling. What is much more interesting to me is that the Belle Assemblée memoir also found it appropriate to include a gossipy account of what happened at the King's birthday ball soon afterward. I don't know the date of the ball, but George III's birthday was June 4th, so it would likely have been within a few weeks of the duel.
While the Duke of York appears to have held no grudge, his brother the Prince of Wales was a different matter:
At the ball in the evening, Colonel Lennox stood up, in a country dance, with Lady Catherine Barnard. The Prince of Wales, when he came to the Colonel's place in the dance, took the hand of his partner, the Princess Royal, just as she was about to be turned by the Colonel, and led her to the bottom of the dance. The Duke of York and the Princess Augusta turned the Colonel without notice or exception. The Duke of Clarence and the Princess Elizabeth followed the example of the Prince of Wales. However, the dance proceeded, and Colonel Lennox and his partner danced down; but when they came to the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal, the Prince led his sister to the chair by the side of the Queen. "You seem heated, Sir, and tired," said Her Majesty. --"I am heated and tired, Madam; not with the dance, but with dancing in such company." --"Then, Sir, it will be better to for me to withdraw, and put an end to the ball." --"It certainly will be so," rejoined the Prince, "for I will never countenance insults given to my family, howsoever they may be treated by others." --Accordingly, at the end of the dance, the Queen and the Princesses withdrew, and thus the ball was closed. --The Prince afterwards, with his accustomed gallantry and grace, explained to Lady Catherine Barnard the reason of his conduct.
That is a truly shocking display of rudeness. To break it down:
- As the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal were dancing down the set of a country dance, when they came to Colonel Lennox, who would have to turn with the Princess as called for by the figure of the dance, they stopped dancing down and just moved to the bottom of the set.
- The Duke of York and Princess Augusta danced down without incident, Augusta turning the Colonel.
- The Duke of Clarence and Princess Elizabeth danced down as far as the Colonel and they, like the Prince of Wales and Princess Royal, declined to have Elizabeth turn with the Colonel and instead dropped to the bottom of the set.
- When it came the Colonel and Lady Catherine's turn to dance down the set and they got to the Prince of Wales and Princess Royal, the royal couple exited the set completely.
- The Prince of Wales then complained to his mother the Queen about the company and, as soon as the dance ended, she and the Princesses withdrew, bringing the entire event to an end.
That makes three serious snubs within the dance itself, plus the Prince effectively having the ball shut down early in a fit of pique.
The whole affair must have been infamous, to have been remembered sufficiently almost forty years later to make it into the memoir, though one has to wonder about how much it may have grown in the telling over the decades. I haven't been able to find a contemporary account; the earliest I've found appears in suspiciously similar language in John Watkins' 1819 biography of Queen Charlotte, Memoirs of Her Most Excellent Majesty Sophia-Charlotte. This account includes the additional detail that Colonel Lennox had also offended the Prince of Wales by joining the country dance in the first place when he had not danced in the minuets, and it slightly expands on the Prince's apology to Lady Catherine:
The Prince afterwards, with his accustomed gallantry and grace, explained to Lady Catherine Barnard the reason of his conduct, and assured her ladyship that it gave him much pain to be under the necessity of acting in a manner that might subject any lady to a moment's embarrassment.
The story reappears in basically the same language in a biography of George III published in 1821, authored by Robert Huish, Esquire. I suspect that either Watkins, Huish, and La Belle Assemblée pulled information from the same earlier source or that La Belle Assemblée copied directly from either Watkins or Huish. The minuet detail may have seemed so antique a custom by 1827 that it was not deemed worthy of inclusion in the fashionable pages of Belle Assemblée.
Even taking the story back to Watkins still leaves a gap of thirty years between incident and account. For now, I'll have to take it as at least having been considered plausible enough to publish as late as 1819, 1821, and 1827.
As far as what the Prince did and its impact on the country dance:
The royal couples went down the set in order of rank. The Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, and the Duke of Clarence were the three oldest sons of George III and Queen Charlotte. The Princess Royal (Charlotte), Princess Augusta, and Princess Elizabeth were the three oldest daughters. In the absence of the King (supposedly due to stress over the duel, but George III was of course notoriously prone to fits of madness) and the non-participation of the Queen, these would have been the highest ranking dancers and thus, most likely, the first three couples in the set. Simply moving to the bottom of the set would have been insulting but not a huge problem for the physical success of the dance; they would just have ended up in the same order at the bottom of the set, either naturally or via the latter two royal couples quickly swapping places, depending on the length of the set and exactly where the Colonel was placed.
Dropping out entirely in mid-set, though, was a huge escalation, leaving the Colonel and Lady Catherine short a couple (three were generally needed in each minor set) for almost the entire length of the set. They'd have had a full minor set only once, assuming that the couple dancing down ahead of them was alert enough to immediately start dancing up again. (Normally they would have one iteration out before starting again.) And they really had no option but to keep progressing down the set, since waiting out one iteration to fix the lack of a third couple would have messed up the dance for every couple following behind them.
Depending on how long the figure was and how complex, being short a couple could be very awkward indeed. While it's possible to dance figures of this era with a "ghost" couple, and necessary to do so once at the very bottom of the set, doing it repeatedly in mid-set is going to be a noticeable problem even for skilled dancers. And the complexity of the figures would have been determined by the Prince of Wales and Princess Royal. If this was a pre-planned insult, they could have thought ahead about figures for which being short one couple would be especially problematic.
One has to really feel for the couples below the Colonel in the dance. It's a testament to the general level of social poise and dance skill at the time that all the other couples apparently managed to finish out the dance despite these disruptions.
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