A Cad and a Bounder

I have just typed the word "cad" in my current manuscript, knowing it is anachronistic, but needing a word to describe a downright blackguard. Up until recently I thought the word "cad" was contemporary with the Regency period but I read just the other day that it was only coined after 1830. This knowledge came courtesy of the wonderful Jenny Haddon who in 2002 took us on a splendid Georgette Heyer Walk around London, visiting many of the sites mentioned in the books and throwing in plenty of other riveting aspects of Regency history as well.

The term "cad" then originally attached to Prince Felix Schwarzenburg who seduced Jane Digby when she was married to Lord Ellenborough, got her pregnant, took her off to Paris in 1830 and abandoned her.  He was apparently nicknamed "Cad" after his horse "Cadlands" and as the first cad gave his name to a scoundrel's behaviour. I read about Jane Digby in Mary Lovell's The Scandalous Life of Jane Digby. She was quite a woman. Her first affair was apparently with her cousin, whom she believed to be the natural father of her first son. After Schwarzenburg left her she had affairs with Ludwig I of Bavaria and Baron Von Vennigen, whom she subsequently married. She then took as her lover the Greek Count Theotokis and after him the Greek King Otto. She moved on to an Albanian general but walked out on him when he was unfaithful to her. She ended up marrying a sheikh who was twenty years her junior and lived happily with him until her death twenty eight years later.

The other word one sometimes c0mes across in romance books to describe a scoundrel is bounder. As far as I know it does not have such an interesting derivation as cad and is well and truly a late Victorian word, being coined first in about 1889 to describe someone who is outside the "bounds" of accepted society. It later came to have the connotation of a social climber as well, someone who was not of the first rank in society but was trying to "bound" up the social scale.

So back to the manuscript and the word blackguard, which dates from the 1520s although its original meaning is obscure, and scoundrel (1580). Interestingly the picture that came up when I put the word "scoundrel" into a Google image search is Han Solo, so here he is! Can anyone suggest any other words for a Regency villain? Or indeed any other scoundrels like Han Solo for whom we have a soft spot?

©2010 Nicola Cornick. All Rights Reserved.

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