Could Benedict and Sophie have lived happily ever after? The true history behind Bridgerton's cross-class romance

We’re back in the candlelit ballrooms of the ton this month for a new series of Netflix’s Bridgerton, this time watching second sibling Benedict waltz his way towards marriage.

But his love interest is no debutante expensively dressed by a fashionable modiste, drilled in the latest dance steps and declared a diamond by Queen Charlotte.

Sophie Baek is a working lady’s maid in the household of the Bridgerton family’s neighbour, Lady Araminta Gun. It’s an upstairs/downstairs romance that could only ever prosper in the pages of a romantic novel – or so you might think…

Were there cross-class romances in the Regency era?

In fact, there are several true stories from the late Georgian age that give hope to those wanting to hear wedding bells chiming for Benedict before the end of season four.

In early 1789, for instance, it was an open secret in the Banbury area of Oxfordshire one Mr William Wykeham, the young owner of the stately Swalcliffe Park, was besotted with Elizabeth Marsh, who was the cook to the tenants then occupying his ancestral home.

As the sun came up on a bright day in early March, he stopped his carriage a discreet distance from the house where she toiled long and hard every day. When she jumped in, he whisked her away from a life in service for good – to the mingled indignation, amusement and anxiety of her employer, MP’s wife Henrietta Wrightson, who shared the news of their flight in a letter to her sister.

It was an unlikely match between the teenage nephew of a viscount and the daughter of a Lancashire smallholder – not to mention that Elizabeth was some 18 years senior to her determined suitor. But they went on to wed in a local church not long after their elopement. Their marriage was tragically short, but Elizabeth gave birth to two children, a boy and a girl, before she died in 1792. When William followed her to the grave in 1806, their surviving daughter inherited not only the great house where her mother had once been employed, but another even grander property, too.

How exactly the Wykehams became acquainted, let alone able to conduct a courtship, remains tantalisingly undiscovered. But beginning an upstairs-downstairs affair probably wasn’t as difficult as we might imagine. During the Regency era, servants were a constant presence in elite households, living and working in close proximity to the family they served and interacting with their wider social network, too. Footmen and housemaids were in and out of a house’s main rooms all day long, with tasks including greeting and ushering in visitors, carrying messages and bringing tea trays. The former waited on the family and their guests at the dinner table, and were sometimes also responsible for escorting young ladies when they ventured outside the house.

The duties of a lady’s maid, meanwhile, often kept her by her mistress’ side; she might accompany her on shopping trips and attend her at balls, and usually travelled with her when she was invited to house parties. Added to that, many servants spent years working for the same aristocratic family, becoming well known to all. The name of Sally, who served as lady’s maid to Henrietta, Countess of Bessborough for almost three decades between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, frequently appears in her ladyship’s letters.

Servants were a constant presence in elite households, living and working in close proximity to the family they served

As a cook, Elizabeth Marsh had less reason than other servants to venture above stairs. But as William Wykeham appears to have remained a resident in the area after surrendering his stately property to tenants, perhaps he retained the management of his wider estate, giving him business which took him into the house’s servants’ quarters. Or perhaps Elizabeth caught his eye in one of the local villages and he sought her out. She was, after all, “a Very pretty woman” – at least, according to her employer.

Masters and maids: a recurring pattern

It wasn’t exactly unusual for attractive female servants to catch the eye of a gentleman. But alongside the maids and housekeepers who had sexual attentions forced upon them by employers or members of their households in the 18th and 19th centuries, there were also those who embarked on relationships willingly.

Lady’s maid Anne ‘Nanny’ Hawkins may have been one of them. Sir Henry Harpur Crewe’s “unfortunate connection” with her (as described by his mother) began at Eastbourne in southeast England in the summer of 1790, where she was perhaps holidaying with her employers. Anne came to live in a house on his Calke Abbey estate in Derbyshire, initially as his mistress, but then, in 1792, two months after the birth of their first child, Henry married her – despite vociferous opposition from his maternal uncle.

His contemporary, the Honourable Frederick ‘Poodle’ Byng (so-nicknamed on account of his thick, curly hair), likewise married Catherine, a lady’s maid (in this case, his mother’s attendant) after she gave birth to his child. It is possible that guilt or honour played a part in such a decision, but few aristocrats who seduced their female servants thought it necessary to marry them if they became pregnant (in the 1860s, one peer was widely called crazy for feeling himself honour-bound to do so).

Even a lasting relationship was no guarantee that marriage would be the result. The widowed 3rd Duke of Richmond had three daughters with his housekeeper Mary Blesard in the Regency period. He gave her a smart property in Earl’s Court in London, and in his will provided her with a large annual income and generous dowries for their girls. But he never made her his wife. The fact that the Honourable Frederick did wed Catherine suggests that, as with Sir Henry – who was said to be “violently attached” to Anne in the early stages of their relationship – there may have been an uncommon strength of feeling between them.

The lady loves a footman

Men, of course, had greater opportunity to become acquainted with women of other social classes and far more opportunity to conduct a clandestine romance, being free of the shackles of chaperonage and the strict parental control that curtailed the lives of their sisters. But that’s not to say that upstairs-downstairs relationships were unknown to the fairer sex.

Lady Henrietta Watson-Wentworth, sister of the Marquess of Rockingham, was one of several women who became romantically entangled with a footman. In the mid 18th-century, she and a handsome Irish ex-soldier named William Sturgeon, who was employed at her family’s townhouse in London’s Grosvenor Square, grew close after she began tutoring him in grammar, mathematics and music.

Theirs was certainly not the genteel kind of courtship that played out in the ballrooms and opera boxes of Mayfair either, for the unmarried 26-year-old Henrietta became pregnant. Yet it has all the appearance of a love match, for despite knowing her family would regard their union as a scandalous mésalliance, in 1764 the pair were wed secretly in the fashionable St George’s church in Hanover Square, only telling her relations once the knot was safely tied. The couple’s marriage produced five children, saw them set up a pottery business together in Rouen, France, and lasted until Henrietta’s death 25 years later.

Could a couple like Benedict and Sophie have a happy-ever-after?

Of course, all of these relationships courted great risk, and no such union between aristocrat and servant would have offered guaranteed marital bliss. In marrying her footman, Lady Henrietta not only ruptured relations with her nearest and dearest, who were palpably shocked, but left behind the luxury and security of her aristocratic existence. She also took care to draw up a watertight legal settlement that prevented William from accessing the bulk of her fortune (he was to have only £100 a year for life), and made provision for a possible separation, which stands testament to the risk she knew she was taking. Some wealthy parents even had the power to disinherit sons or daughters who married without their consent.

There was a social cost to cross-class romances

There was also a social cost to cross-class romances. Snobbish as it seems today, the doors to elite houses and entertainment venues would generally have remained stubbornly closed to a spouse raised from such a humble background. There were men of wealth and title who married ex-courtesans, actresses and opera singers, with each perfectly content to host and be hosted by the others’ wives, but the Regency diarist Thomas Creevey gives a glimpse of the difficulties that women like Mrs ‘Poodle’ Byng faced when he wrote cruelly of her: “You know I have the greatest aversion to playing at company with such kind of tits”.

The 1825 manual The Duties of a Lady’s Maid, meanwhile, painted a miserable picture for any female servant imprudent enough to dream of a marriage with an upper-class gentleman. “You must always be considered as an intruder” by the gentleman’s friends, it warned, while “he will, probably, look upon your relatives … as unfit associates, and will despise perhaps your very parents.”

Unsurprisingly, some couples found it easier to shun society altogether. After Sir Henry and Lady Harpur Crewe married in 1792, they lived in quiet retirement at Calke Abbey, even selling the family’s London house (though neither seemed to have viewed that as a terrible disadvantage, the Baronet having a very solitary nature).

Nor did the challenges stop other unlikely couples taking a chance on love, even into the Victorian era as snobbish attitudes around class grew even more entrenched. In the early 1880s, the parents of John ‘Patrick’ Chaworth Musters, heir to the estate of Annesley Park in Nottinghamshire, sent him off to their fishing lodge in Norway with nursery maid Mary Anne, who was pregnant after a clandestine affair.

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The family presumably hoped that the pair’s mutual ardour would cool. But when Patrick inherited Annesley on his father’s death, he married Mary Anne in 1888 and returned to his estates in 1889, bringing her back as his wife, along with their first four children. A private family history records some nervousness about how the daughter of humble straw-plaiters would fare as the house’s chatelaine, but goes on to report that she proved her doubters emphatically wrong: she became a respected member of county society, not to mention the loving mother of their eleven children.

In real history, the fairytale ending to a cross-class romance remained entirely possible, if not always probable. We’ll have to stay tuned to see what awaits Benedict and Sophie, in this season’s trip to Regency London.

Felicity Day is the author of The Game of Hearts: True Stories of Regency Romance (Blink, 2024)