The Regency Looking Glass

Halloween means ghost tales, and everyone loves a good ghost story. Folks who lived during the Regency were no exception. Here are some famous ghosts of people who lived in the centuries just before the Regency. Accounts of their supernatural activities would have chilled the blood in the veins of people living in the early 19 th century. Nell Gwyn. Nell Gwyn would have been a familiar name during the Regency, even though she lived during the 17 th century. She was the very “pretty and witty” (as the diarist Samuel Pepys described her) mistress of the Merry Monarch, King Charles II. In those times, in which the English were bitterly divided by religion, she is said to have quieted an unruly mob by declaring “Good people, you are mistaken. I am the Protestant whore.” (She was referring to one of King Charles’s other mistresses, the Catholic Duchess of Portsmouth.) Nell Gwyn   Nell is reputed to haunt Salisbury Hall. For more about Nell and her afterlife activities yo

Recently I had the good fortune to be in Washington, D.C., which is quite a distance from my home state of Oregon. On this, my first-ever trip to our nation's capital, I was cruising through the National Museum of Natural History when I got a delightful surprise. Sitting in a room by itself on a slowly rotating pedestal in glass display case was the famous Hope Diamond. The 45.5 carat stone (about the size of a walnut) is a deep blue color, encircled by 16 white diamonds and hanging on a  platinum  chain made up of 46 smaller diamonds. I  wasn't  expecting to see such a stunning piece of jewelry in the same building that houses a  woolly   mammoth . What a show-stopper! There’s really no excuse for my ignorance; I discovered that the Smithsonian has had the Hope Diamond for over 50 years. I also learned that besides being utterly dazzling (not to mention insured for $250 million), this gorgeous blue gem has a link to Regency England. But the famous stone’s