Chapter Text
This book is dedicated to Sybell Challoner,
who could have hardly known what trouble she was getting up to
but surely would have chosen to do so if she had.
***
When Captain Harriet St. Germain with her Longwing Mortiferus landed in Kew Green on December 2nd, 1807 to evacuate the Royal family from London, there were many questions facing the English crown: Would the royals flee to Windsor, to Scotland, to Ireland, to Canada? Would Napoleon’s invading force successfully sink its teeth into the English countryside? Would the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, created by Parliamentary act only seven years before, be able to withstand such an existential threat as the invasion all Britons had feared since Napoleon Bonaparte was created the First Consul of France in 1799? More pressing, perhaps, was the question in front of their faces: Who is the aviator urging the King and Queen to come aboard, and why is she wearing trousers?
Admiral Jane Roland, later created the Duchess of Dover, was the first female aviator to attain the rank of Admiral in the midst of both the disastrous War of the Third Coalition and the Dragon Plague of 1806. This momentous occasion was marked only in the London Gazette , buried under dispatches and a flurry of announcements from the War Office regarding militia and regimental appointments: ADMIRALTY OFFICE, June 30 1806. The following Officers of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps were promoted in pursuance of the King’s Pleasure: J Roland, captain of HMD Excidium, to be Admiral of Dover. Dated June 21, 1806. But the King, in the throes of the illness that would define the rest of his life, was as in the dark as the general public on the service of female aviators. And now, in front of King George III, Queen Charlotte, their unmarried daughters, and the entirety of the royal household, proof of their existence had been irrefutably, unequivocally laid at their feet.
There was no time to explain; Napoleon’s forces were encircling London already. The royal family, including Princess Augusta Sophia, Princess Elizabeth, Princess Mary, Princess Sophia, and Princess Amelia, were removed from Kew; first to Windsor, and then later to Edinburgh with the rest of the provisional government. The second removal was performed by the King’s son, Prince Edward, Duke of Strathern and Kent, aboard his Bright Copper Gloriana, but the first landing was the one which lit the world alight: there were women in service of King and Country, and more than being in service, they were and would remain in command.
***
The service records of women in the Corps before 1806 are notoriously difficult for modern researchers to reconstruct, due in no small part to the bureaucratic sleight-of-hand such as the one performed by The Gazette to conceal them from public view. Jane Roland, for instance, never had her promotion to the rank of Captain published for public view, but burial records indicated that Sarah Roland, who baptised a daughter in 1773, was buried in 1798 just outside of the Dover Covert. Harriet St. Germain’s was gazetted under her own, full name when she was promoted to be the Admiral of Weymouth in 1819, but it was the first mention of her service put into the public record since she was assigned as a midwingman aboard HMD Excidium in 1782. Some female aviators seem to have been posted under pseudonyms, rather than abbreviations: both Louisa Andrews and Charlotte Edgeworth were gazetted under Louis Andrews and Charles Edgeworth, respectively, when they were made Lieutenant. Some female aviators seem to have been elided from the records entirely; Catherine Harcourt, despite being at the center of the British success in the Peninsular Wars, does not appear at all in the written record of the Admiralty, and it was not until her daughter Jane was promoted to the rank of Captain upon her mother’s retirement that HMD Lily was entered into the archives of The Gazette.
Aviators from previous eras are even more difficult to track for a multitude of reasons. In the earliest days of women's service in the Corps, it was not yet uncommon for Longwing handlers (as they were known in the day) to marry, taking their husband's last names as they did. Any woman who was born or died within five miles of a known covert is immediately suspect of having been an aviator, but this ambiguity has haunted the scholarship of female aviators since the very first days of the knowledge being spread throughout the United Kingdom. Compounding the confused information of the era, of course, is the heightened level of mobility that female aviators experienced, compared to their civilian counterparts. In a time of women who lived, married, and died within the same village, female aviators were not bound by the same logistical concerns of women who could not cover a hundred miles or more in the span of hours, rather than months. Researchers have therefore relied heavily on the oral tradition of the Corps, draconic memories, and incidental documentation (such as diaries and letters) to reconstruct the hidden lives of those women.
In the earliest days of the Corps, the female aviators could be quite secluded from the male-dominated Corps when not at war. The integration between Elizabeth I’s so-called “women’s aeries” and the Corps’ coverts was not an abrupt process and indeed occurred slowly, as the lines between the public and private lives of women all over England began to blur. By the beginning of the Georgian period (1714-1837), however, all of Elizabeth I’s aeries had gone the way of the Tudor dynasty: for better or for worse, female aviators had come to live and serve alongside their male counterparts full time by rule rather than by chance.
***
The women of coverts (civilian, enlisted, and commissioned) have long been discussed for their social transgression, their military excellence, their incredible bravery, and their conflicted gender performances, but rarely have they been given their own voice. This volume puts forward a collection of letters from the earliest women of the Aerial Corps, some being published for the first time, so they might be considered on their own weight. This is far from a definitive edition. It is an unfortunate reality that the bulk of their correspondence has been lost to the winds of change. In publishing what letters they do have, though, we may peel back the veil of secrecy they were intentionally hidden behind: perhaps for their own safety, and perhaps for the safety of the society which oppressed and empowered them in equal turns.
This volume could not have been collected without the cooperation of the Strathvagan National Trust, the Roland Library Archives, the Edinburgh Covert Archives, the National Archives, and the Three Elizabeths Collection at Weymouth Covert, but most especially the living descendants of all the aviators found within these pages and the living dragons who served alongside these remarkable women and kept their memory alive long enough for human scholarship to catch up.