The Virtuoso

Author’s Note

Careful readers will note that St. Just explains to Valentine that St. Just’s adopted daughter will hold the title on behalf of her legitimate heirs. This is in contravention of conventional wisdom telling us that adopted children would not have inherited titles. In the usual case, the conventional wisdom would prevail because an adopted child would not meet the criteria in the letters patent for most titles, which typically required the title to pass to “the oldest legitimate male natural issue surviving at the time of the titleholder’s death.”

Titled men could and did adopt children, but having letters patent reworded was a much trickier proposition. His Grace influenced the wording of St. Just’s original letters patent, which put a very different face on the heritability of St. Just’s earldom. Furthermore, in Bronwyn’s case, I can assure my readers that both the Helmsley and Rosecroft earldoms included baronies among their predecessor titles, and among the old baronies, it was not at all unusual for female heirs to be able to hold titles in abeyance, sometimes for centuries. As for whether an illegitimate female might qualify, well, this is, as the scholars say, an area for further research—or a just a touch of literary license I hope the purists will find excusable.

Then, too, we know that Prinny’s brothers and his sister, the Princess Sophia, had among them something like twenty illegitimate children, and I hope The First Gentleman might have found it in his heart to indulge a royal eccentricity on behalf of our dear Bronwyn’s offspring. His Grace, when fixed on a goal, can be very determined and persuasive after all.