The Duke of Zamorna was written shortly after Stancliffe’s Hotel, in July 1838. ‘In a distant retreat … I am now forgetting all the worries of the past spring and winter,’ Charles Townshend opens his narrative. His creator, too, was still at home in Haworth, on her summer holiday from Roe Head. She was able to immerse herself in Angria and she was, this tale suggests, thinking about the relation between its past as recounted by Branwell and the situations she had begun to develop in Mina Laury and Stancliffe’s Hotel.
Here, once again, the narrator is Townshend, not cocky and ironic as in Stancliffe’s Hotel, but – at least at the beginning – in a more reflective mood. Now far from the temptations and distractions of the city, he recalls the tales he heard as a child, of the dissolute ‘western’ aristocracy in the years before the establishment of Angria. Musing over old letters, he presents the reader with a series of vignettes of some of the darkest passages of the past, all of which Branwell had portrayed in his Life of Alexander Percy, written in 1834 (Neufeldt 2, pp. 92–190): the murder of Alexander Percy’s father, the doom of Augusta di Segovia, the decline of Maria Henrietta Percy, the wild ‘extravagance of vice’ (p. 144) into which Percy plunged after her death. We hear, too, of the youth of Zamorna, then Marquis of Douro, and his passionate early friendship with Alexander Percy, by then Lord Ellrington. And there is a ‘sketch’ of these two in the more recent past, discussing Percy’s former mistress, Louisa, and her daughter Caroline Vernon, during the visit made by Zamorna to his aged father-in-law.
In the second half of The Duke of Zamorna, we move to the present day, and narrative attention turns from the passionate attachment between Douro and Ellrington to the more ironic friendship glimpsed in Stancliffe’s Hotel between Sir William Percy and Charles Townshend. In a series of letters, Sir William writes to Townshend of the world of Angrian society: of a county ball, of his audiences at the Foreign Office and the Home Office in Adrianopolis, of his final interview with his sister, before his departure for Paris. The tone of the letters gradually changes from flippancy to seriousness, as the complexities of his character are revealed.
Here, once again, rather like a soap-opera in which a number of different strands are developed, the Angrian saga has moved on. Hartford has not died, but has begun to ‘dash out like a good’un’ into Angrian society, done up like a dandy, ‘with his chest padded and set out with stars and chains and orders, his waist strapped in, and his grizzling locks curled and oiled’ (p. 164). Jane Moore reappears, irritating Sir William with her equable good-humour. Sir William’s military exploits in Africa have led to his selection to go on a mysterious diplomatic mission. Rumours about Hartford and Mina Laury are circulating in Angria, enraging Zamorna and annoying Sir William, who here begins to hint at a hopeless passion for her.
The Duke of Zamorna seems more like a scrapbook of sketches than a coherently constructed whole. The time of the narrative shifts back and forth between the distant and the more recent past; tangential characters appear and disappear. The tone changes abruptly, from melodramatic darkness to sardonic anti-romanticism. ‘Let it suffice to say that I found this pitch far too high for me. I could not keep it up. I was forced to descend a peg,’ announces Charles Townshend (p. 163), as he turns from a histrionic depiction of Augusta di Segovia’s death to Sir William’s mocking account of Colonel Hartford’s dandy ball. Yet many of the concerns of preceding tales are brought to the fore and developed in the juxtaposition of these apparently random scenes. The heroics of the past are contrasted here with the irritations of the present, long vanished passions and agonies with the often ridiculous vanities of a sharply seen social world. Questions are left open, tensions left unresolved. Jane Moore’s meaningless good-humour is mystifying in its blandness. In a moment of rare directness, soon overlaid by irony, Sir William confesses his loneliness. Through it all, a disturbing undercurrent, runs an awareness of the continuing decline of the once-mighty Northangerland, and of Zamorna’s growing unpopularity with the Angrians over whom he rules.