When He Was Wicked
54 pages • 1-hour read
Julia QuinnWhen He Was Wicked
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Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Series Context: Julia Quinn and the Bridgerton Series
When He Was Wicked is the sixth book in Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series. Quinn published her first Regency romance in 1995 and launched the Bridgerton series in 2000 with The Duke and I, which follows the eldest Bridgerton daughter, Daphne. The series is structured around the eight Bridgerton siblings—Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory, and Hyacinth. Each novel traces one of the siblings’ journeys toward self-discovery and romantic realization. When He Was Wicked is Francesca’s story and traces her search for love in the wake of loss.
This sixth novel was published in 2004 and departs from the pattern of the earlier books in two notable ways. The first five novels center unmarried debutantes and first-time bachelors; this book builds a romance around a widow and her love affair with her late husband’s first cousin. At the same time, this novel abides by the patterns of the previous books by focusing on characters who previously played minor, background roles. For example, Francesca, Michael Stirling, and John Stirling appear briefly in the margins of the first five titles, but Quinn fleshes out their storylines in this title.
When He Was Wicked is preceded by The Duke and I, The Viscount Who Loved Me, An Offer From a Gentleman, Romancing Mister Bridgerton, and To Sir Phillip, With Love and is followed by It’s in His Kiss and On the Way to the Wedding. The Duke and I tells Daphne’s story, The Viscount Who Loved Me tells Anthony’s story, An Offer From a Gentleman tells Benedict’s story, Romancing Mister Bridgerton tells Colin’s story, and To Sir Phillip, With Love tells Eloise’s story. The latter two books, It’s in His Kiss and On the Way to the Wedding, respectively follow Hyacinth’s and Gregory’s love affairs. In When He Was Wicked, Quinn delves into Francesca’s story, offering the more reserved sister a fully-fledged characterization, narrative, and dimensional love affair.
The second Epilogue of the novel also plays a role in the larger series context. Set three years after the main plot, this extension of the When He Was Wicked narrative was first published as a standalone e-book and later collected in The Bridgertons: Happily Ever After—a volume that gathered second epilogues for all eight Bridgerton novels along with a novella about the matriarch Violet Bridgerton. The 2021 trade paperback reprints reflect renewed interest in the series following the December 2020 launch of the Shondaland-produced Netflix adaptation titled Bridgerton, which began with The Duke and I.
Genre Context: Regency Romance and the Widowed Heroine
The Regency historical romance as a commercial subgenre traces directly to Georgette Heyer, the British novelist whose Regency-set books, from the 1930s through the 1970s, established the period’s recognizable aspects: the London season, Almack’s, the ton, the matchmaking mother, and the duke or earl as hero. Quinn writes inside Heyer’s vocabulary and updates it with longer scenes of physical intimacy and more interior access to the protagonists, both standard in late-20th-century mass-market romance.
The widowed heroine occupies a particular place inside the genre. Where the debutante’s romance turns on whether she will marry well, the widow’s romance can ask whether a woman who has already loved one man can fully love another and what the social mechanics of a second marriage actually look like. The convention predates Quinn (readers of Mary Balogh’s 1990s Regencies, among others, will recognize the basic shape), and the convention permits sexual experience without scandal, which expands the writer’s available material for a contemporary audience. In When He Was Wicked, Quinn extends the trope by casting the heroine’s prospective second husband as a man who has already loved her throughout her first marriage and by rendering Francesca’s first husband, John, as a rich presence on the page long after his death; like Francesca, the reader must come to terms with the possibility of making peace with John’s death while accepting Michael’s authentic love.
When He Was Wicked is in conversation with other parallel romantic works like J. A. Stevens’s A Change of Pace: A Reimagined Regency Romance, India Holton’s The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels, and Martha Waters’s To Woo and to Wed.
Historical Context: Widowhood, Inheritance, and the Committee for Privileges
When He Was Wicked hinges on three intersecting features of British aristocratic life in the early 19th century: primogeniture, the rules of mourning, and the legal mechanics of peerage succession. Primogeniture (the principle that titles and entailed estates pass to the eldest male heir) means that John’s death without a male heir creates an immediate succession question—as his closest male relative is his cousin Michael Stirling. Because Francesca is pregnant with John’s baby in the immediate wake of his death, the title remains in abeyance (suspended until the question of an heir is resolved).
This is where the Committee for Privileges enters the plot. The Committee for Privileges of the House of Lords adjudicated disputed peerage claims, and Quinn writes its intervention as a scene with Lord Winston arriving at Kilmartin House to demand information about Francesca’s pregnancy and insist that a committee member be present at the birth to keep her from swapping her potential female baby for a boy to maintain the estate. English peerage law did include such real mechanisms for verifying births where a title depended on a child’s sex; Quinn compresses and intensifies the practice for narrative purpose and dramatic effect. The same legal scaffolding shapes Francesca’s later freedom: As a widow with independent finances and no living children of her first marriage, she controls her own movement, her own household, and her own decision to remarry—choices that an unmarried daughter could not have made.
Mourning practice provides a parallel structure. Regency widows wore deep mourning (full black) for one year and then half-mourning (gray, lavender, mauve) for a further year or longer. Francesca’s choice to wear blue four years into widowhood is a deliberate social signal that she is open to remarriage, which is why her sister-in-law Sophie immediately notices the dress at Violet Bridgerton’s birthday ball and proposes that the family help spread the word. Quinn also uses the difference between English and Scottish marriage law to drive the plot. In Scotland, a couple could marry without marriage banns (public marriage announcements) and without the three-week waiting period that English ceremonies required; this is why Michael and Francesca are able to elope within a week of Michael’s proposal.
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