Part One: Beau Brummell: The First Celebrity and Inventor of the Suit and Tie

Robert sits down with Princess Weekes to talk about Beau Brummell, the first fashion influencer and modern celebrity, and discuss whether or not he was really a bastard.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
What's got a functional sedative? My host of this podcast,
This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast hosted by someone
with PTSD who has not been sleeping well for the
last like six months and finally got on a good sedative.
I went out like a fucking zombie last night, and
I woke up actually feeling like I slept. So I'm

(00:25):
unstoppable today, I'm unconquerable. I've built up at eleven ten am,
which is the earliest I've gotten up in months, feeling great.
Everybody really feeling good. I can't mix these with alcohol,
which is a bummer, unlike Benzo's, which my doctor says
are safe to mix with alcohol. No, don't do that.
It'll kill you. Killed everybody in the seventies. That's why

(00:46):
there's none of those people left.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
I'm really glad that you've gotten some sleep, mostly because
that makes my life a lot easier, but also good
for you.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Speaking of not speaking of doing drugs in the nineteen seventies,
but speaking of being as cool as the nineteen seventies.
Our guest this week, Princess Weeks. Princess, you are a YouTuber,
a comedian, and you are here today. How are you feeling.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
I wish I had slept as well as you. Now
I know what I need. I'm so high. I'm so high.
I am a history nerd. I love this podcast. I
want to know who my bastard is so badly.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
All right, well, we're going to get into it. I
do want to ask you one question first about the past,
because you know it's been going around this year. I
think it was this year that this started the whole, Like,
how often do you, as a man think about the
Roman Empire? And for most, at least for me and
all of my social serve, my male social circle, it's
a daily thing. But what I think is a more

(01:43):
universal experience, at least among the people that I know
and care for, male and female, is how often do
you think about getting access to those good height of
the seventies kuayludes, Because that's what I don't stop thinking
about every day. For me, it's thinking about louds hourly, hourly, hourly, hourly. Okay,
that's good, Yeah, speaking of quailudes. That was the drug

(02:04):
of the fashionable set in the height of Hollywood. I
don't know, like grime and shit in the seventies, degeneracy,
financial industry, degeneracy. And when I think about degeneracy, when
I think about fashion, one thing that comes to mind
is the suit, right, the suit and tie the uniform

(02:24):
of the finance industry, the uniform of business, of class,
of wealth and power in the Western world. And today,
this week, we're going to talk about where the suit
and tie came from. And we're going to talk about
where the concept of a celebrity came from. Because the
modern suit and tie, our conception of a celebrity, the

(02:45):
fashion influencer, everything that's going to become, like the way
influencing works on Instagram and TikTok, all of it was
created in the seventeen hundreds by one man and his
name was bau Brummel. And that's what we're going to
talk about this week. Princess, have you heard of bo I?

Speaker 4 (03:01):
Hate him already? I've never heard of bo I was
really writing.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
My brain, But every time we said suit and tyke,
I thinking about Justin Timberlake, so like it.

Speaker 4 (03:09):
Was gonna be either way. We were gonna get him.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
We all we all have Justin on the brain.

Speaker 4 (03:14):
This is interesting.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
I kind of wonder how you're gonna if you're gonna
wind up actually hating this guy. But well, we'll move
to that after the cold open, because we're done with
the cold open.

Speaker 4 (03:22):
We're going up.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
We're ready to hit the fucking ground running.

Speaker 4 (03:33):
We're back.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
I am so excited. You had me at seventeen hundreds.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yes, And what's weird to me is how of the
stuff that, like a lot of times, you can if
you we're like, yeah, this is the origin of this
very modern thing, and you can be like, well, I
can see how it built from there. When it comes
to him, everything he's doing as a fashion influencer is
exactly the way it works today for people using social media.
But he's doing it person to person in very like

(04:00):
intriguing ways. He like knows this is the guy who
learns how to make shit spread virally, but he's doing
it all analog and it's really interesting the way that
he like makes this work. But I'm also here's the thing,
the admission I'm going to make to you as we
come back, is I don't know that he's actually a bastard.
A lot of people are convinced that he was. This

(04:21):
is gonna be an interesting one for us. I guess
I should just get into it. Are you ready for
me to start the script? Princess, I'm sorry, so you
look great. I am not what you would paul a
fashionable man. I am wearing like a discount Chud hoodie
that I got from the hunting store.

Speaker 4 (04:37):
Chut hoodie.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, it's head stuff. Yeah, yeah, everybody loves a good Chud.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
One of my one of my favorite things about when
like Robert and I fly in for like a business
meeting or go meet with own for a business meeting,
is like, I'll come and I am business Barbie, and
then there's Robert in his chut hoodie and it just works.

Speaker 4 (05:02):
It just really works.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
He's kind of yeah, I look like someone like I'm
confident enough to say this about myself. I look like
I'm not. But I look like someone who might pull
a gun on you in the parking lot for taking
the space for my f two fifty, which I park
in four spaces, right Like, that's it. That's the hi
I give off. I'm very polite with my parking, but

(05:25):
I don't dress well. I did used to, which I
think is surprising because I haven't in a long time.
Kind of the change for me was back in twenty seventeen,
I had a near death experience and I was wearing
uncomfortable pants and a belt, and I was like, well,
if I'm going to die, and I am some day
I'm not going to die, I'm going to die wearing
like sweatpants, like some nice thin Merino blend or something right,

(05:47):
And that's all I've worn ever since. So I might
be better primed than most people to accept at the
inventor of the suit and tie, Bo Brummel could be
a bastard. But before we, you know, go further, I
need to clear that, like, first off, Bo did not
invent He's not a tailor. He doesn't actually like make
any of this stuff, So he didn't actually he didn't
literally invent the suit and tie, like a bunch of

(06:09):
different guys over a long period of time invented the
suit and tie iterating, But he is the one who
first combined a series of fashion trends in the way
that guaranteed the suit and tie would be the result,
you know, a couple of generations down the line, right,
and he is most It seems like broadly agreed by
fashion historians that it's fair to credit him as being
the father or at least the spiritual father of the

(06:31):
modern Western suit, right, even though he did not literally
make it. We'll walk through that whole process, and I
think that'll make it more understandable later. So I was
excited when I started doing my research on him because
I refused to wear a tie. I did just get
fitted for a suit for the first time in like
a decade, because in my dad's funeral, I looked like
shit and my brother looked reasonably nice in a suit,

(06:53):
and I was like, actually, kind of feel bad that
I look like shit, you know, like my dad wouldn't
have cared, like he knows, he knew the kind of
trash person that I was. But I'm I'm trying to
dress up a little bit more now. That said, you know,
I'm not inherently sympathetic to a fashion influencer. And I
found a couple of articles and I started doing this.

(07:13):
That's why I started reading about him that made him
sound like a sinister figure. And the first of them
was a piece in Esquire that describes him as a boring,
uptight villain by Alexandra Rowland, and she makes the case
that he killed the era of like elaborate, creative, colorful
men's fashion and is kind of responsible for the fact
that men men today. That's her argument that men today

(07:36):
are scared to express themselves through clothing right lest they
feel effeminate. And I'm going to read a quote from
her article bo Brummel, who was the beginning of two
hundred years of death for men's fashion, and the reason
that many straight, white, heterosexual men today feel self conscious
about wearing color or textures, or patterns or anything else
that makes them stand out from the sea of dull
blues and grays. Sure, there have always been flares of counterculture,

(07:58):
almost all of which werelied on style appropriated for marginalized communities.
But the prevailing baseline, if appropriate and presentable men's wear,
the things worn by senators, CEOs and lawyers, has not
significantly changed in centuries now. And I think what she's
it comes to her overall analysis of like fashion. I
don't think that's wrong. I mean, it's obviously like it's
a paragraph that's simplifying it a bit, but I think

(08:19):
there's an argument to be made there.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
I think it's interesting because like every year during the
met Gala, that's always the conversation is, like the women,
whether or not they're on theme or not.

Speaker 4 (08:27):
That's a whole different conversation. But the women were white.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
He's extravagant outfits, like really live lavishly, but it feels
like post Halloween middle grade. It just becomes like your
batman's your black suit, Like, yeah, the batman outfit is
the suit and tie of Halloween men's wear. So I'm
so intrigued about, like why he decided to be so boring, Like, and.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
I think this is where I disagree with Alexandra, and
I think she's she's being unfair because I think she
wanted to find an easy way to think to blame
for what is a much more complicated problem, which is
men feeling like they'll be considered gay if they express themselves.
Because bo was not boring. And I don't actually think
it's fair to say that he made fashion boring. I

(09:11):
think it's fair to say that because of some of
the trends he started, other people made fashion boring. But
he was a disruptor of fashion in a way that
I think was Actually he deserves credit for being creative
in he was an artist in a lot of ways.
And I think that the reason Roland comes down on
him so hard and The reason a lot of like

(09:31):
pop history writers do is that you're always looking when
you do kind of pop internet history, looking for traffic.
You're searching for like algorithmic glory.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Right.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
You want be able to make a quick case that
seems to explain something frustrating about the world. And everyone
can get angry at a guy, and sometimes it's easy
to do that. Sometimes there's good ways to do that, right.
We do that a decent bit around here. But also
I think when you do that, you can run into
the trap of over extending a few facts about someone

(10:01):
and ultimately losing the person's humanity and kind of exaggerating
and missing where a lot of the harm actually came from.
I'm not trying to come down on Alexandra Well. I've
done this myself. There's plenty of criticism, you know, for
my body of work, but this whole subject is personal
to me because I'm not just a guy who dresses
like shit because it's comfortable. I'm also a guy. I've
dealt with an eating disorder. I've spent a lot of

(10:22):
my adult life insecure about my appearance. It took me
years to like figure out who I was, and I
think that's the case for a lot of men, right,
We're no different from anybody else in that regard. And
I think that like the way Hollywood, I actually really
appreciated Channing Tatum's talked a good amount about like the how,
you know, being as gorgeous as he is, but like

(10:43):
how many weird body image issues he got because if
you were a leading man, you are basically your job
is to be professionally a disordered eater, like you're supposed
to have mons too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's
good that they do say that, right, Like, you know,
you can argue there's they contributed to the harm, but
I think it's more like in the same way that

(11:05):
we all drive cars, right, because we've got to, you know.
I think it's it's useful when people come out and
acknowledge this stuff. And I think that's kind of how
I came in looking at bo right, And I think
what I saw in him when I did a deeper
dive and read some of the more the actual like
not pop history, but like like like professional, rigorous academic

(11:25):
history about him, is I saw a man who was
not just dealing with his own insecurity, but who was
living inside of a vis one of the most viciously
evil social systems that ever existed, which is the upper
crust of the aristocracy in the early British Empire. It's
one of the most hideous and cruel cultures that ever existed.

(11:47):
And I think he was a decent man who was
desperate to find a way to survive and protect himself,
and he kind of did the best that he could.
And that's where I come down on bo Actually, I
think there's still some a lot of harmful aspects of
his legacy, but I think it's a much more interesting
story than just like he hated fashion and he made

(12:08):
men afraid to dress. Well, right, we'll see how you
think when we get through this. Ultimately. I do want
to note I think a lot of the conclusions from
Alexander's article are still valid. Brommel did inaugurate a sea
change in male fashion that is dominant today, and this
has had toxic knock on effects. He's also the first
modern celebrity. He is a man who his life was

(12:28):
very similar to modern professional fashion influencers today in ways
that are like so direct it's kind of boggling. But
I don't know if I would call him a bastard
that said, by talking about his life, we're going to
go into the deep sickness at the heart of the
British Empire and its culture. So either way, we are
going to get behind some bastards. You know, I promise

(12:51):
you will fit.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
The name a seventeen eighteenth centuries British Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
I was like, this is the regency, this.

Speaker 4 (12:59):
Is ever were Y. Yeah, baby, let's go if.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
You want the most. The biggest touchstone culturally for this
era is Jane Austen. Jane Austen is a contemporary of Bow.
She's born I think two and a half years before him,
but they live in London basically during the same time,
and she never references him directly. I read a very
detailed article by some scholars with the Jane Austen fan club,
who I trust to know their shit, who argue like,

(13:28):
she didn't reference him directly, but most of the male
characters in her novels were either based on him or
reactions to him. Not entirely, right, but like, like mister
Darcy has a lot of Bow in him, right, So
that's an argument that people make.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
Right.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
I'm not a Jane Austin scholar, but these Jane Austen.
Scholars make that argument. So, George Brian Rubble was born
on June seventh, seventeen seventy eight in Downing Street, London.
The house he was born and partly raised in was
essentially a palace yea Downing Street. So that's like the
heart of government.

Speaker 4 (14:05):
Yeah, exactly, say I know that address.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
He is raised there. I mean they are basically it's
a palace for government employees at the highest level of
British government. That's where he's raised and he spends most
of his childhood. Right, this is where the people who
are running the empire live well for very little while
they make the empire go. His father is a guy
named Billy Billy Brummel, and he is private Secretary to

(14:30):
Lord North, the first Lord of the Treasury. So that's
a big gig, right, This is the guy who is
running the purse for the entire British empire, Lord North,
Lord North. Yes, he's a powerful man.

Speaker 4 (14:46):
Billy is notable.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, George's dad, and George is going to become bo.
Billy is notable because he's one of a small elite
cadre of men who old hide positions in the British state,
but are not members of the aristocracy. They are commoners. Right,
technically they are commoners, but they are not common You know,
their families had been in living memory. They are not
of the nobility, but they are extremely wealthy and very privileged,

(15:13):
right Billy's.

Speaker 4 (15:14):
Dad like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah, exactly, exactly. You might even look at them as
like the cheneye to be honest. So these are the
people who they have a lot of money and a
lot of power. You know, their dads generally made a
lot of money and a lot of power. And then
before that the family lineage was a little more common.
Billy's dad bose grandpa had made the family fortune because

(15:38):
he owned a boarding house. And on paper that makes
him sound like he owned a motel. The reality is
that he was a pimp, right because of where this
is and this is this is reading between the lines,
but historians seemed to broadly agree given where the boarding
house was located, he made his money providing beds and
employing women who stepped out with the men who ran
the country. So this is not a tawdry boarding house.

(15:59):
This is a guy who and this is not like
some street pimp. This is a guy who provides escorts
to the most powerful men in the mp too, kings
literally to the.

Speaker 4 (16:08):
King, official mistresses and all those kinds of things.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Billy's dad is going to die with
an estate worth the modern equivalent of something like fifteen
million dollars. Right, So he is not He's not just
like running a motel six. You know. This is a
man who is doing he's doing some pimping, right, Like, yeah,
he's quick. It is not easy, no, but you could
argue it's necessary someone. He also had a private apartment

(16:35):
in Hampton Court, which is a former royal palace. Right,
So it's one of those places where it's a fashion,
it's you don't. I don't think you pay to live there.
I think if you are important and well liked enough,
you basically get an invite from the aristocracy, like you
can have a subsidized apartment at Hampton Court. Right. So
again not a not just a guy running a boarding house, right,
this is a man who is powerful. His son, Billy

(16:58):
Bo's dad started out as a and a valet. If
you're technically common by blood, you a lot of times
you're going to work as a valet. That is, you
could call it a working class gig, but it's basically
this kind of this class of people who do a
lot of the administration of the empire, but who aren't
nobility themselves. They start out as basically body servants for

(17:20):
the aristocracy, and they're part of that job is making connections,
becoming liked and trusted, and then eventually as the young
man that when you're both nineteen twenty twenty one, you're
squiring about to parties, you're holding his hair back as
he pukes. When he takes his positions in the empire,
he'll give you positions below him, right, because he knows
he can trust you. You know, that is how a

(17:41):
lot of the actual like business of the empire gets done.
Billy does well enough to make himself indispensable to a
number of powerful men, including Lord North, his son George
the future. Bo is baptized on July second in the
parish church for the House of Commons. Right, so again
he's a com but not common. He grows up. His

(18:03):
child playmates are royal, right, they're members of the aristocracy.
They're you know, princes and princesses and the like. Most
of the adult influences around young George are women because
his dad's working all the time, so he is largely
raised by his mom and his aunts. And as a result,
he's got to be really good with women. And I
don't mean like, oh, he's a lethario. I mean that

(18:25):
like he genuinely enjoys their company and is a good friend.
And most of what we know.

Speaker 4 (18:30):
About him respects women a little bit.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
He a lot, Like most of what we know about
him is like a lot of the women were who
were his friends or his mistresses wrote about him, and
they all tended to be like, yeah, it.

Speaker 4 (18:41):
Was fucking rad.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
Like he didn't suck, he would listen to what you
had to say, he didn't hit you. He was like
a nice guy.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Like I keep reminding myself that we're talking seventeen hundreds,
eighteen hundreds, Great Britain. Yeah, because I'm waiting for the bastardy.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
There will be there's a lot of bastardy in the
social class. But like, again, one of the things you
have to respect about this guy is we have a
lot of women who wrote about him, and none of
them were like and this is the time he was
like an abusive prick to me, you know, and you
really have to be pretty cool to not have stories
like that about you in the seventeen hundreds as a
man of means.

Speaker 4 (19:17):
Right Exactly.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
It's like when they're like, yeah, Hunter Biden, he does crack,
but he's very nice while he does it.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
So yeah, it's it is if you've known people who
use a lot of crack or cocaine, it's really hard
to do that every twenty minutes and have someone be
like I felt safe with him.

Speaker 4 (19:34):
He just seemed like such a nice, chill process of
like calming.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
Interesting, he did eleven thousand dollars worth of crack a day,
but I felt like really calm around him. This is
centering presence. Yeah, most of the adult influences for again,
for young George are women. His aunts noted later that
he was a massive baby with a massive appetite. That
is the number one thing to say about him as

(20:01):
a baby. It's like he was fucking huge. One of
the stories we get about him is he was They
had tarts one day, and he was so into eating
a tart that when he got full and he couldn't
eat anymore, he started screaming because he wanted to eat
more tart. Classic fable. Yeah, yeah, same homie, my cat.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
She's like, she's like, I know you just fed me,
but like I can use another round, Like.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
Yeah, yeah, I feel I feel I feel that. So
in seventeen eighty, Lord North and the party of men
that George's dad had made his bed with were firmly
on the downswing of their careers. Because you know, seventeen
eighty what do we all know happened a couple of
years earlier. The Great Britain loses freedom North America.

Speaker 3 (20:48):
Right, freedom, freedom, Yeah, freedom, freedom, the best parts.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
All the good parts. My god, you know, the Virginia,
New York, probably other states. Delaware, Delaware, Oh my god,
can you imagine losing Delaware and all of the great
I feel like sheets. They've got sheets is in Delaware.
Maybe I'm wrong about who has sheets.

Speaker 4 (21:13):
They got a bank there. I think they've got the oldest.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
A crushing blow to Lord North and the cadre of
men who were running the empire. Right, And so George's
dad and his friends, they're not going to be out
of power immediately, but this is going to kind of
their past and a deer of their power because they
are he is like one of the guys who helps
lose the United States, and you're going to take a
hit for that. Yeah, And it's you know, that's not

(21:40):
the only thing that happens. They also are the men
who like win a big war against France. So that
part's good. But Lord North makes some other mistakes. His
biggest is that he doesn't really hate Catholics as much
as most men in the UK do. And that's that's
going to hurt him. Mistake right now, not being just
enough against the Irish. Yeah. So the fact that he

(22:04):
just doesn't hate Irish people quite enough culminates in June
of seventeen eighty in an angry mob attacking the Brummel
home in London. George is not directly exposed to any violence,
but he would have heard the shouting, he would have
seen the fear in his family's faces, and he would
have heard volleys of gunfire from Royal troops who had
to put down the rioters by shooting into crowds. It's

(22:27):
pretty ugly. So his family, they spend most of their
time out in the country after this, a lot of it. Right,
This is not an uncommon thing for people with means
and wealth to do during this period. We're and they're
lead up to the French Revolution, right, so things are
not going to get a lot calmer in the near future.
They also officially get given rooms at the Hampton Court

(22:47):
Palace then, which is something of an upgrade from Downing Street.
And during this period, George is going to have his
first brush with fame because he and his brother are
painted by a famous artist named Joshua Reynolds. And this
is Bow and his brother as like four year olds.

Speaker 4 (23:03):
Oh that's these kids.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, literally a very very yeah. They look
you would say, if you don't know much about like
classic art, you would say, well, they look like little girls.
And they get little girls because little boys wore dresses
back then, right, It's elegant, it's cute. Dresses are very
convenient to put on a little kid, so I get it.

(23:25):
You can find I think photos of FDR in addresses
a baby. So this this practice lasts a while. We
just don't yeah, there for no good reason.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
I remember we went to when I was in college.
We went to FDR's house in Poughkeepsie and his mother
had like clipped out his baby curls and like kept
them forever to like I guess harass eleanor with them. Yeah,
it would be off. She wasn't such a raging bitch,
but like definitely they're like all these little picture of

(23:54):
little baby FDRs, little curls.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah, yeah, he was a gorgeous baby. You can just
that baby's gonna well, he's gonna do some problematic things,
but overall one of the better presents.

Speaker 4 (24:07):
Yeah he's.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
Yeah, he's gonna commit some crimes against humanity. He's going
to stop some crimes against humanity, like net like down
to crimes against humanity, which is not bad for a president,
not great for a president either. I don't know, I
don't know whatever who cares. So while the painting's being made,
a famous poet, Mary Robinson, lover of the Prince of Wales,

(24:30):
is inspired to write a poem about Bo, who she
describes as an infant cherub that's also famous. So he
is like kind of a child star in his era,
although he's largely not aware of it. Like he winds
up in a lot of very famous art just because
he's a really cute kid and he's around all of
these artists who hang around the people running the country.
That was enlightening to me reading that was enlightening to

(24:52):
me because it made a lot of the more pop
history articles on his background read differently. I want to
give you an idea of how he's normally written about
in some of these kind of less nuanced takes. He's
a quote from a nat Geo article by Ignatio Peiro
Bo Brummel was not an aristocrat. He was a commoner
admitted to the royal circle. That's technically literally true, but
it makes it sound like he snuck his way in

(25:14):
as opposed to well, no, there's a class of people
who are common but are part of the upper class,
and his family was very, very solidly among that group
of people. The Esquire article tries to portray his family
as like economically anxious and social climbers, describing them as
middle class Londoners with loftier aspirations who were desperate to
climb that next rung on the social ladder. And that's

(25:36):
not really right because they were at the top. They
were as high as you could go in the social ladder.
Bo's dad is the body man for like the Lord
of the Treasury. There's really not a hired place for
them to have gone. Anyway, The Brumo family are not
royalty though, and as you can see, though, he was
like he's not common as a child. In seventeen eighty six,

(25:57):
his father decided to leave governance behind. He had done
very well for himself in Downing Street, and now that
he was like in his fifties, he decided to spend
his remaining years investing his wealth into property and entering
a sort of working retirement. So he buys a country
home for his family. It's a mansion. It's made in
the style of older homes that had never really existed,

(26:17):
but like this was people's idea of what older manners
have been. Yeah, and it's it was built in Greece.

Speaker 4 (26:24):
We're like, this is the fitties.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, No one ever lived this way, right,
And the guy who builds it, it's kind of like
a mc mansion in some ways. It's built by It's
like a super fancy house built by this aristocrat who
bankrupts himself building it. And then Billy's able to get
it for cheap because he's just much smarter than a
lot of these guys. Right. Here's how Ian Kelly, Bo's

(26:45):
biographer describes the process of readying the home for habitation.
Donnington Grove still bears the marks of the Brummeles social ambitions.
Like all fashion conscious Georgian landowners, they wanted to create
an arcadia without visible signs of the economy that supported
their luxury. They had a paper mill demolished, it spoiled
the view, and replaced with the medieval style of fish
and pavilion. See this is like Jefferson's doing a lot

(27:08):
of similar stuff. We're like, you don't want anyone to
see the servants, right, you don't want to see You
just want it to look like it's magical clean.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, like you want to die like minimally, like like
oh yeah, just the black people just appear in the
house and then they just vanished.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Right right, right. So we're gonna talk more about Bo's
childhood and his attendance at a little school called Eaton.
But first off, before we do that, why don't you
eat in some of these ads? We're back so as

(27:46):
a boy, as like a you know, young kid, pre adolescent.
George's idol George is the future Bo. His idol is
his older neighbor who's a semi famous guy, Tom Sheridan.
Tom is going to become like he's he's a celebrity
his day. He's a soldier, he writes plays. He's like
a professional adulterer. He's one of these men who, like

(28:06):
part of his legacy is how good he is at
cheating on his different wives and mistresses. Right, classic kind
of guy, And like most of those guys, he dies
young of tuberculosis, right, And that's how.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
You know it was big, you know, like it's like, yeah,
he was prolific.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, you're not really like a famous romantic like male
influencer if you don't die of TV. That's the that's
like the capstone, you know. That's like winning an oscar
in this era. Right, If Leonardo DiCaprio had been a
Regency era like dandy, he would have been looking to
die of fucking tuberculosis by forty as opposed to doing

(28:45):
that Bear movie where he won the oscar.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
Right, It's like you got to be out by thirty six,
le Byron, because then it's like what.

Speaker 4 (28:51):
Are we what are we been doing here?

Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, it's not going to get better right after thirty six.
You're pretty much washed in this period at time anyway.
So yeah, Tom Sheridan, the main thing that George is
going to take from him is that Tom is a wit,
and that's what George is going to grow up wanting
to be. So I should digress here. One thing the
story of Bo Brumble makes clear is that Twitter didn't
invent anything new. It just gave us a way to

(29:15):
do it online.

Speaker 3 (29:15):
Right.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
People have always appreciated sharing funny bits like little lines
by strangers, and people have always gotten famous. People have
always in part gotten famous from dropping good one liners.
Most of Regency era British culture that comes down to
us is, at least a huge amount of it is
in the form of one liners and quips from people

(29:37):
like Tom and Bo, who are more famous for like
Tom writes plays and stuff, but he's mostly famous for
like these little put downs and jokes, these epigrams, than
any play or novel. Right. Tom is said to have
originated this bit when his father demanded he'd take a wife.
He responded, yes, sir, but who's And then his dad
is like, little motherfucker, I'm not joking around. If you

(29:59):
don't Mary, I'm gonna cut you off with only a
penny to your name. And Tom's response was, can I
have the penny now?

Speaker 3 (30:05):
Then?

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Right, He's that kind of a wit right, Yeah, these
are these are the bits.

Speaker 4 (30:10):
No wonder you was sleeping with people's wives exact, of course, he.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
Is right, And this is there's no difference between this
and dunking on dudes on Twitter, right, Like it is
the same thing, right. The ancient rome they're doing this too,
a lot of like Roman graffiti is like dunks. It's
little and in fact, the these British guys, all of
them in school, are studying the way Romans and Greeks
used to dunk on each other in order to like

(30:34):
and that's like the core of a lot of like
the culture of humor in this time.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
We should teach that course before people get like podcaster mics, like,
it should be a required course before you get.

Speaker 4 (30:46):
Yes, exactly, take a class.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yeah, take take a Yeah, take a good class in
dunking people back then. You have to understand being a
poster isn't new. We've always had posters. The ancient Romans
were some of the best posters who ever lived. They
would understand the Internet in the second you know. Now,
the ancient Greeks, Yeah, they were posters too. A lot
of posters. Most people in history were posters. That's the

(31:12):
great lesson of Humankind.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
I think the Greeks would have had like a substack.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Yeah, yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
Aristotle would have loved Aristotle would have loved substacks like Jesus.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yeah, Aristotle was, Yeah, he would. He would have had
like he would have been one of those things too
where you would have gotten like ten pages in and
then they would it would have had like the to
read the rest of the you got to subscribe to
Aristotle substack. Yeah, right, and no one would have so
we just would have had like a bunch of half articles,
which is kind of what we have with Aristotle now.
So these little bits, stories about people giving these little

(31:46):
bits about these japes made at parties would spread person
to person through letters, through like human gossip, and through
newspapers and magazines which reported on a lot of like
the social gossip between the big figures of the day.
Novels were another major place where this kind of culture spread.
Jane Austen is a big part of this, right, So
Bo grows up idolizing Tom Sheridan, and specifically idolizing the

(32:10):
fact that he earns a lot of respect because he's
funny and kind of a dick. He's going to learn
from Tom that like, that's sort of how you make
a place in yourself in societies. You learn how to
put people down in a way that's so funny, they
don't really get angry at you. You know, that's the
kind of the key to social success in his culture.
In seventeen eighty six, his dad sends him away to Eton,

(32:32):
the most famous and prestigious boarding school on the island.
This is the school of the Prince and you know,
the future king, the Prince of Wales now attends. And
it's not Eton Is. It's still around today, and it
is a school today at this point in time. It's
not a school in the way modern people mean when
they talk about a school. You don't go to Eton
to learn a trade or a vocation. You don't go

(32:54):
there because like, well, I'd like to be an English major,
or I would like to be, you know, be an
engine or whatever. You go there. You do go there
to prepare for your job. But as I talked about, earlier,
jobs for people in this social class at the top
of the ladder in the British Empire are given out
by aristocrats to like the people they trust the most.

(33:15):
And so the way that you prepare to start your
future career and do get a job. Is not learning
how to do things. It's learning how to be good company. Right.
It's learning how to fit in at the parties. Right,
that will eventually secure you a gig. So Eternians they
learn Greek, they read the classics, they study philosophy. But

(33:36):
the purpose of most of this is so that they
can like share references. And you should think about this
not as today if somebody's dropping references to like Homer
or Virgil and like conversation like, oh, you want people
to know you're smart. Right in this era, it's more
like how if you're hanging out with like a bunch
of thirty something comedians, everybody's like quoting old bits from
the Simpsons, right, it helps you fit Yeah, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
Why Charles was so many Yeah because King Charles didn't
go there, right, and he was real mad about it
and definitely sent his sons there. But yeah, that makes
a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
I think we lose a lot when we see these
classical educations learning Latin, learning Greek and all this stuff
as like well, because they were much smarter than us
as opposed to like this was kind of the meme
culture of the day, being able to throw a good
Plato quote in when somebody said something or make a
good reference to him. That was how people. That was
how like you communicated.

Speaker 3 (34:35):
You know, yeah, it's like footboy finishing school. But like, yeah,
because they did it.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
In Latin, it seems fancier to us, but it's not
really any different from the way like the Internet of
cultures us all to communicate now. Right. In its early days,
back in the fifteen hundreds, education at Eton had been
largely religious, but as Britain had sucked in the world's wealth,
more and more of the focus had turned towards cultivating
a social class who would wield obscure knowledge to separate

(35:03):
themselves from commoners and gain a common identity right that
was kind of existed in exclusion to the rest of
the country and the rest of the world. The people
who did not have that education would almost speak a
different language. At the end of the eighteenth century, the
specific style of speaking that was taught in Eton was
based on classic Greek and Roman epigrammatists. An epigram is

(35:27):
an it's a bit, right, That's what we would call
a bit. It's a couple of good lines, usually satiric
that often played the role of like a rap battle. Right,
this is how a lot of like old time Greek
and Roman thinkers would like talk shit on each other
in epigrams.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
It's also how ancient Greek and Roman graffiti took, Like,
that's the form it took. One surviving epigram from POMPEII
reads and this is like, this is graffiti on a
wall in POMPEII. I'm astonished Wall that you haven't collapsed
into ruins, since you're holding up the weary verse of
so many poets, right, Like, I'm surprised that you haven't

(36:03):
collapsed into the weight of everybody trying to seem smart
by like throwing out a good one liner. You know, some.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
Tailor swift ash shit right there, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (36:11):
Yeah, yeah, right exactly, department ass wall.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
Yeah, it is kind of like that somebody bitching about everybody, yeah,
trying to put on airs seems smarter than they are.
So it's here that George Brumble is educated in the
art of observing the world and then boiling his thoughts
into a single razor sharp line. He develops a reputation
for cutting mockery and also for being the funniest kid
in school. Right, he is like the guy, he's the

(36:40):
cut up, he's the he's a charming joker. Now, and
that's your Another major focus of eating culture are the uniforms.
Boys are expected to own a dozen shirts and cravats,
plus numerous pairs of pants, waistcoats, breeches, hats, and stockings
for different occasions. And knowing what to wear and win
is part of what is big part of what you're

(37:02):
learning there, because that's part of what separates you from
the masses who have whatever set of clothes they have, right,
and maybe a Sunday set of clothes and generally look
like shit. Right, Yeah, you have the wealth to have
clothing and care about how you look. Forcing boys who
are generally twelve or thirteen, that's when you start at
Eaton to fit into this social class is not a

(37:24):
peaceful process. You don't just do it by teaching them
Greek and making them dress up. You do it by
beating the shit out of them. Right. That is a
major part of a culturating young men here. And I'm
going to quote in from an article by Austin Jensen
for reaches of discipline, a boy would be flogged Eaton
specifically used to be renowned for its use of corporal punishment,

(37:44):
generally known as beating. Friday was set aside as flogging
Day until nineteen sixty four. Offending boys could be summoned
to the head master or lower master as appropriate to
receive a birching on the bear posterior in a semi
public ceremony held in the library. So like every you
all go to get the shit beat out of you
and watch, like everybody's gotta watch is your bare askets

(38:05):
paddled in front of the school.

Speaker 4 (38:10):
And they wonder why these are not well to people?

Speaker 2 (38:13):
Like, yeah, why all of them grow up? I mean,
I'm sure it's part of why guys like Bo's grandpa
are able to make a good living as a pimp,
right because there's probably a lot of money for early
dominatrixes in this culture, right.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Right, Because you've got to develop a complex where it's
like everything about you is like latched onto like this
weird social like sado masochist thing. But you got to
be smart while you did it by like doing a
whiff after like yeah your ass beat.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Yeah, you gotta be able to make a good's there's
a great movie called If That's set. It's actually the
first Malcolm McDowell movie, like it's his first starring role.
But it's set in the mid century twentieth century at
one of these boarding schools, and there's still about this
brutal into the late twentieth century. But like, one of
the things that covers is the way in which it's

(39:05):
almost ritualized and sexualized, this physical violence that all of
the boys have to endure, and it's a pretty vicious system.
You know, the prefects where the older boys do a
lot of the actual beatings. It was called a tunding,
which was beating a disobedient student across the back of
his waistcoat with a ground ash the width of a finger,

(39:28):
so it's like a finger with ash stick. Ash is
very hard wood, and the art of it is to
catch the edge of a shoulder blade to hit someone
in the back and catch them or like hit them
over the shoulder and catch them in the back and
hit the same spot every time, right, And your kind
of the goal is to cut their vest their waistcoat
into strips by whipping them over time, because then they

(39:51):
have to pay to replace it too. Not only are
you driving up welts on their back, but they have
to replace their clothes.

Speaker 4 (39:58):
God, the British are not a well people. I hate
that they colonize my all of my groups.

Speaker 3 (40:06):
It's like, yeah, you're whipping each other's clothes off, and
then you also had time to enslave so many people
like pick a Han get.

Speaker 4 (40:15):
Go to therapy.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Anytime you read about like that's probably why they did it.

Speaker 4 (40:19):
They were like it, this is.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
Our our therapy is doing a couple of genocides, right, like, yeah,
that's how we're going to starve thirty million people in
Bengal and that's that's really is good for the soul.
It is interesting every time you read about like, oh,
the British encounter this barbarous pat practice in Kenya, or
this this horrible practice in India, and like every culture
has things that they do and have done that are

(40:44):
not certainly we don't consider to be moral in a
modern sense that we're really ugly. But they act as
if like you guys are whipping each other bloody and
you've ritualized it, and like some chunk of the boys
are always sexually molesting each other, because like that is
partly how the system is built is to like enable
these like systems of sexual abuse because you have younger

(41:06):
boys are paired. It's called the fag fag master system.
That is where the slur comes from. And a fag
is a younger boy who is paired with an older
boy and he's basically that boy servant and the older
boy can in addition to whip him basically is supposed
to control him. And it's not always sexual, but a
lot of these relationships are sexual, and they're deeply abusive.

(41:28):
And this is like part of the culture of going
to a private school is you are probably going to
get molested. That's a very especially in this period of
very high odds, right, Like these are barbarous.

Speaker 3 (41:39):
Especially when they're like right, especially when they're like fetishizing
the Greeks that were like very much oh in that
mentality of you you you rear a young boy for
that same kind of like molestation, but also like you're
supposed to be giving them access to your mind and
I'm supposed to elevate them through that whole process.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
Yeah, And so it's you're going part of what you're
doing is you're mixing in the head the things that
the kid's gonna grow up to be proud of my education,
my professional competence, And you're also chaining that to the
abuse that they endure at the hands of adults, which
is I mean, it profoundly damages the Greeks, it profoundly

(42:18):
damages the Brits. You know, we are still dealing with
some of the consequences of this to this day. One
thing that is interesting about this system is that in
this school I said, at Eton, the Prince of Wales
goes here. Most of the high aristocracy go to Eton.
They are not immune to being punished. They're not immune
to being punished by people who are lower than them
on the social hierarchy. They get. The Prince of Wales

(42:40):
and the Duke of York, who go to the school
a little before George does, are noted by their sisters
having been flogged like dogs for misbehavior. So there's also
an element of like trauma bonding for the entire upper
class in that they have this common experience that's very important.
Now George, he he goes through this system, he is

(43:02):
noted as being very well liked. He is not somebody
who ever, is noted as having flogged anyone else and
he seems to have almost entirely escaped being physically abused
himself in a way that is so unique. It was
remarked upon by his peers at the time like somehow
he always got out of it and nobody else did, right,
And part of how he got out of the bullshit

(43:24):
is like everyone really liked him. We have numerous reports
in his classmates of like he was the cool kid
in school. He was the kid you wanted to be,
and nobody, even like the upper classmen, the school teachers
just didn't seem to want to fuck with him much
because he was so funny. He was so like you
wanted him to like you and think you were cool.

Speaker 4 (43:42):
Right, do we have.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
Any information like like what books was he reading? Like
where is he getting his coolness from? Like why is
he so fucking cool he's reading at Riz?

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah, it's kind of just natural, Riz. You know, he
paid attention to Tom growing up. He pays attention to
like how you craft a joke. He does really well
in school, so he's good on his Greek and his
lad and he's good at his history. He's not the best.
He avoids doing too well because he doesn't want to,
like then people to like you if you do too well.
But he's like good enough to be noted as a

(44:15):
good student, not so good that people are like fuck
with him for it, right, he has this. He's one
of these people who seems to be born with an
innate sense of social navigation. He always knows how to
be most maximally appealing in any situation without crossing any
kind of lines that like make you tiring to people. Yeah,

(44:38):
it's riz, you know, he's just yeah, he's got yeah.

Speaker 4 (44:43):
He's got it.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
Everything you said about him reminds me of what people
said about Truman Capoti, about how like even when he
was very like toxic, but he was so funny, so charming,
new stuff about everybody that he always would have, for
the most part, a circle of people around him because
he was just so ingrat it even kind reminds me
of Shakespeare, with the idea of like this person who's
like not of the right class to some people, but

(45:06):
still like very charismatic, knows enough stuff that like it
doesn't matter enough.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah it doesn't matter, And he seems to be he
seems to be so confident and he seems to know
what he wants so well that you kind of line
up behind him, because most people, even if you're at
the top of the class, even if you're the fucking
Prince of Wales, inside you're a ball of insecurity. And
I actually think Bo was as well. I think everyone is,

(45:33):
but he seemed to have a sense of direction for
himself that kind of makes everyone feel like you want
to just follow. You want him to like you, because
then you feel like maybe you know where you're going to.
He's that kind of a person, right, He's a natural leader.
I also think of Tom Cruise when I see this,
not that Tom doesn't have his weird side, but like
if you notice how people will point this out. You

(45:55):
can look at like long shots of Tom when he's
like they're not actively filming, but like he's on set
and you'll see him like walking and he's like one
hundred yards back from the camera, but his face he
always instinctively is always turned in such a way that
it's ideally framed in the camera. He just has he
always knows in his brain how he's being looked at
and how to present himself in this part of what

(46:16):
makes him Tom Cruise, Bo's got that right. It's almost
a supernatural sense for that sort of thing. And you
know what else is supernatural the quality of our sponsors.
You'll see. God, we're back and we're talking about Bo.

(46:43):
So I've talked about you know, the system that he's
in where you've got he. You know, all the younger
kids in Eton are the job title. They have his fags,
and then you have your older boy who's your master,
who is supposed to run you. We have a quote
from the guy who is that for Bo, and this
is what he said about Bo. While they were in
school together, no one at the school was so full

(47:05):
of animation, fun and wit. He was a general favorite.
Our dame, his tutor, and my tutor and doctor goodall
all petted him. You asked me whether he was pugnacious.
I do not remember that he ever fought or quarreled
with anyone. Indeed, it was impossible for anyone to be
more good natured than he was. And again, like everyone
fights at this school, everybody gets into scraps except for Bo.

(47:26):
Nobody even wants to fight him. He's just that kind
of naturally charming. And that's what I see in that
is that like this is a defense mechanism. He is
someone who knows and we get from the women who
know him at the time. He doesn't like a lot
of aspects of how brutal this system is, like nobody
really does. And he knows that the way to protect

(47:48):
himself is by being defensively likable. Right. So yeah, now
Eton is not a placid place. Boys are given a
lot more freedom than we give adolescence today. Of the
other things you learn at Eaton is how to drink,
which you start learning as a young man in the
British aristocracy at thirteen or fourteen. So these boys outside
of school, there's a town nearby that has a couple

(48:10):
of bars that cater specifically to eat and boys. And
part of what you're learning is how to drink like
a man, right, Like you are getting wasted as a
little kid, because that you need to be able to
drink like a son of a bitch in order to
in order to exist in high society.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
Right, How can you die of a liver problem if
you don't start drinking, right.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you don't really get a handle
on this soon, you might live past forty and we
don't want that. Nobody wants to live you. You've got
to get some tuberculosis, guys, you.

Speaker 4 (48:37):
Know, come on right, amateur hour, Yeah right.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
Like what if you wind up not being sauced your
entire adult life, that would be a real loss. So
these kids are rich little shits. They wind up in
fights with local boys a lot because they can't even
communicate with these boys. They are raised speaking effectively different languages,
and often literally different languages, because they communicate a lot
in Latin among each other, right in French and Greek.

(49:04):
This passage from a biography on Beau Brummel by Ian
Kelly describes one instance of young bo confronting the violence
that resulted from this situation, this kind of discrepancy between
the local common kids and the eton boys. A boatman
who had found himself in some altercation with the schoolboys
was on the point of being thrown over the bridge
into the low waters of the Thames by a mob

(49:26):
of over one hundred Etonians. Buck Brummel, perhaps fourteen at
the time, caught the attention and laughter of the Etonian
and cad hooligans alike by shouting, my dear fellows, don't
send him into the river. That man is obviously in
a state of perspiration, and it almost amounts to a
certainty that he will catch cold. Brummell was rewarded with guffaws,
perhaps some amusement in the face of such paradoxical whimsy,

(49:46):
typical of his later style, and the Boatman was released.
So he comes upon a crowd his his schoolboys. They
run around in big groups because they will get picked
on by the locals otherwise. They start a fight with
this random work king class guy, and they're about to
throw him into the fucking river. And Bo comes up
and he makes fun of the guy. He's like, look
at how sweaty he is, Like you don't want it,

(50:07):
Like he's already wet enough, you don't even to throw
him into the river. But he makes fun of this
guy to disarm the situation and stop him from being
further abused, which I think speaks to an aspect of
his character that's actually like complex and positive. Yeah, cool guy.
So it was learning this that made me think Bo
was a more complicated figure than the first articles I

(50:29):
read made him out to be. To quote again from
that x that Esquire article attacking him, he made an
habitual performance of rye cruelty, lifting himself up by putting
other people down, and a lot of people even to
this day think that kind of thing is funny. And
I think the difference is, I think what Alexander's doing there,
She's looking at a lot of Internet put down culture,
which is deeply cruel and is focused around singling people out,

(50:52):
often making uncharitable conclusions or often uncharitable interpretations of their
words to to get in a quick dunk for social
media engagement. That's a huge most of social media today,
and it's really ugly. It's very abusive. It's part of
why harassment is such a problem online. And I kind
of see a lot of what Bose doing is kind

(51:13):
of the opposite and part of how you can get
that some of these are put downs. He says mean
things to people, they usually still like him, and the
mean things are often to diffuse tense social situations with humor,
right by taking the piss out of people as opposed
to trying to like. I think he does bet he

(51:34):
can be a dick to It's not the only thing
he does. But we get examples of him that come
down to us from three hundred years ago of him
stopping fights bye bye by this kind of thing, by
like you know, making a good joke at the right time.

Speaker 3 (51:48):
Yeah, I'm going to use my history minor cap on
and say, like, he probably I don't know, I don't
know who this guy is, but I'm guessing he probably
pissed off somebody that was high enough that they were
able to sort of like reframe a narrative.

Speaker 4 (52:02):
Because right now he sounds great.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
I would love a blunt rotation with him that sounds
like I think he'd be really cool. But I definitely
think that like there's gonna be a mixture of a
class issue because people keep talking about him in these
articles that you're referencing as if he's like a Kardashian almost,
as if like, yeah, where does he think he's coming
from with his fat ass, you know, like trying to
take up space in our society. So I can't to

(52:25):
see who he pisses off because I know I know
it's coming.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
We are building to that, because that is his fall.
His fall is he like he talks shit about the
wrong guy and that does like destroy his entire life eventually, right,
and I'll do it, and the guy he talks about
deserves it. You know, it's not fair on his part
that he gets fucked for that. But yeah, I think
you have to look at his put downs, the fact

(52:48):
that this is the primary way that he communicates with
the world. But within the context of this is how
his social class communicates with each other. Having a sharp
tongue is the key to popularity and the key of
protecting yourself. And it's a lot that his old master
describes him as like nobody wanted to fight with this guy,
which means all of the jokes he's making, none of
them like culminate and someone demanding an honor duel with him, right,

(53:11):
Like they don't. They're good natured, exactly exactly. So yeah,
I think that's what we see with bo Is. He
he enters, he's entering, and he's aware that he's entering
a culture dominated by the cruel, wealthy fail sons of
his era, who are on the lookout for any signs
of difference that they can attack and the people around them.

(53:31):
And he makes himself their idol in the most popular
boy at the school, as a method of self defense,
because that's the only way to get by in this world, right,
And I kind of see him in that as a
little bit of a rebel right, and it's from a
desire to rebel at Eton that the foundations of what
would become the modern suit are going to present themselves
to bow for the first time. Every year, Eaton Boys

(53:53):
engaged in a festival called Montam. Montam is a mix
of like how we see Halloween today and like a
child riot, like it was a controlled riot of rich kids,
kind of mixed with Halloween all of the Eton boys
of course, yeah right, yeah.

Speaker 4 (54:11):
Of course, a fun, little rich boy riot.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The kids need their little their little riot,
you know, we gotta let them beat up the commoners,
which is a lot of what happens during Montum. The
boys will elect captains, and the captains and the kids,
the upper classmen who get elected to positions. Almost it's
like a homecoming thing. They dress in these insanely elaborate,
expensive uniforms, and the younger boys dress in these quasi

(54:35):
military uniforms, and they they form up in gangs on
like the bridges, and they will rob common people trying
to cross the road basically, and it's yeah, hoodlams. It's
kind of it's ritualized, so like they're not like they
usually are not taking your actual stuff. You know what
Montum you want to have like some treats and stuff

(54:56):
for the boys who are like going to be pretending
to be brigands, Like, right, give them some beer. You know.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
That's how they're getting the trigger treat It's like it's
like we'll fight you or give us your.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
Food, right, And usually it's like a friendly Yeah, the
kids are out tonight, they're doing their Montum thing, We'll
give them some treats. Sometimes people fuck up, or the
kids are drunk and so they start shit, or sometimes
the locals are drunk and they start so things can
get very violent. Sometimes Montum turns into something that is
like a really ugly riot, but it is supposed to

(55:27):
be this like ritualized sort of blowing off of steam thing.
And like every other aspect of eating, Montum has a
rigorously enforced class system. So the higher up you get,
the more insane your costume, which fits in, you know,
the costumes that montum fit in with the fancy dress
of the day, which emphasizes men are wearing these powdered
wigs that we're all familiar with from like Revolutionary War

(55:50):
era media, right, and they wear these incredible multipiece outfits
that would be considered like a bit much at the
met Gala today, and you give a little more detail
about this. I want to quote from an article I
found published by the Jane Austin Society, written by Jeffrey
Nigro and William Phillips. By seventeen seventy five, Yeah, this
is good. We got a fun picture coming up for you.

(56:10):
By seventeen seventy five, it was still acceptable for men
to wear silk, satin, or velvet in bright or pastel colors,
with lace, cravats and cuffs, powdered hair, and perfume. The
most extreme fashion victims of the moment were the Macaronis.
These Foppish men supposedly derived their fame from the Macaroni Club,
an organization of fashionable young Englishman who had returned from
the Grand Tour with a love for continental fashions, culture,

(56:33):
and cuisine. The Macaroni style was an extreme form of appearance,
exaggerated in costumes, cosmetics, and hair styles. And these people,
I'm going to show you. Sovie's going to pull up
a picture to look at how this is a This
is a macaroni, like a man dressed in this style,
and it's like.

Speaker 3 (56:49):
Oh my god, he has the dune worm on his
fucking headdog, what's you talking about?

Speaker 4 (57:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
He's got like Marge Simpson hair. I would describe the
look on his face is like what if there was
a pedophile for pedophiles, Like it is a creepy smile.
He's got like a joker smile. It's exacerbated by his
insane makeup.

Speaker 3 (57:17):
Oh my god, they should be thanking this man like
it looks like he's his hair sounds about to ejaculate,
Like I really, it's gaping at me.

Speaker 4 (57:27):
It's really, it's very so gross. I love it, but
I'm glad it's gone.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
Yeah, yeah, I'm glad it died out. I'm glad it
existed when we can look at this picture now and
you can see how elaborate and heavy that dress is, right,
and this is not that hair piece is not a
normal day to day where for someone that is masquerade
where that I just showed you, but it shows you,
like the during festivals, how outrageous the costumes were, and
the normal social costumes are less insane, but there's still

(57:56):
really elaborate. There's a lot of gold and gilding and
silver on them, a lot of jewelry, a lot of makeup,
a lot of powder, and the hair pieces people wore
at the time are not light or comfortable. Outfits like this,
which are in outfits that are more elaborate than this,
are common among upper classmen during montam but one group
of boys who make up the majority of the Mountum crowd,

(58:16):
the younger boys, are pullmen, and they wear a simpler
outfit because they're kind of the grunts the soldiers of
the older boys who are wearing these elaborate outfits, and
they wear dark blue jackets with two rows of buttons
and pale, tight writing breeches. George comes to prefer this
outfit as a matter of daily wear as opposed to
the more elaborate, fancy dress of the time, and when

(58:39):
he goes gets out of Eton, he continues to dress
like a pullman, like this is like a costume, but
it's one that he really digs and he just starts
wearing it every day. And it's important to note this outfit,
what he is wearing, the pullman's outfit that becomes he
is going to eventually kind of streamline this into the
precursor of the modern suit. This is a quasi Milliet

(59:00):
Tarry outfit. It is made in part and imitation of
some of the military outfits of the day. It's also
ath leisure, right, most popular dress clothing is very restrictive,
but because of the weight and the materials used to
make it. The outfits George favored take after the jackets
and stuff to and the waistcoats take after military uniforms.
So you have to be able to move into some extent.

(59:21):
And the breeches are writing pants. They're not quite modern trousers,
but you're meant to be able to move in them. Right.

Speaker 3 (59:28):
So well, you're telling me is that not only was
he the precursor of the suit and tie, he was
a precursor of wearing leggings as pants.

Speaker 2 (59:35):
Yes, yes, these are literally legs. These are so tight.
One of the jokes will let you day make is
that once breeches start being like common and the more
common fashionble pants, one of the jokes men where women
will make is that, like, oh, these are great. You
can always tell what your man is thinking, right because
you can you can see his dick through the fucking
it's so tight, right, Like, because these are skin tight pants,

(59:57):
you're almost poured into them. As a man. These are
yoga pants. Yeah, and older people will attack this outfit
for the same reason that they attack yoga pants. Where
was like, it's obscene. The kids are dressing this way.
He's tight, braches failthy.

Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
Yeah, they're just cutting off the circulation.

Speaker 4 (01:00:15):
They're going to end the bloodline.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
Right, right, right, So influenced by the central role of
fashion that Eton, by the time George Brummel left the school,
he had developed a reputation for fastidiousness.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
He is noted to be almost obsessively like focused on
his personal hygiene and the fit of his clothes. He's
already spending a significant time every day getting ready to dress.
He's always focused on how he looks. And he might
have had what we would describe as like dysmorphia or
even you know, some sort of It's impossible to know,

(01:00:48):
but I'm gonna read you a quote from Ian Kelly's biography.
It may speak partly of an uncomfortable relationship with his body.
This may be attributed to his position in the male
gaze at Eton, a supremely homosexual environment, and may also
be related to growing up in a highly sexualized society
that it was at the same time, violently and empathetic
to the direct outlet of adolescent male energy. Right, everyone

(01:01:12):
is a lot. There's a lot of these boys are
fucking each other. Right. There's not a small amount of
older men, particularly at the school, who are also abusing boys.
And everyone's dressing, it's very common. A lot of these
dresses are especially like the outfits that he prefers. These
tight leggings are extremely revealing. And he's always conscious of
how he looks because he's always conscious that he's being sexualized, right,

(01:01:36):
and that influences him a lot. And the evidence that
he suggests that we have, I think suggests that the
fact that he adopts this outfit for himself and he's
going to make everyone else adopt it as a result
of how much they want to be like him, because
he is the cool guy. Everyone wants to be like. Bo.
I see this suit he starts to create as a

(01:01:57):
suit of armor, right, to protect himself from his fellow men. Right,
And he's so good at this that they come to
admire him. He is rare, if not singular, in this
period for being a man of his social class who
had a lot of close female friends and one of
the first is Julius Storer. This is his first love.
He describes it as he follows falls violently in love
with her when he's like fourteen or fifteen, but he

(01:02:19):
ultimately loses out to the guy who wins her. You know,
in the parlance at the time is they are both
for Julius fourteen or fifteen. Bo is fourteen or fifteen.
The guy who uh you know she winds up going
with is thirty years from colonel. Yeah, yeah, age, Yeah,

(01:02:40):
he is a He is a colonel in the army.

Speaker 4 (01:02:42):
Colonel and yeah, sorry, I was like.

Speaker 3 (01:02:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
He is seen as being very handsome of his day,
although bo will repeatedly note as an adult that he's stank,
he smelled terrible. Bo is obsessed with his hygi. Bo
is the at least in this period. Eventually he's going
to make this this again. People will all follow him
in this. But he is like the first man of
his social class to make daily hot baths a part
of his life, right, kon.

Speaker 4 (01:03:12):
Honestly, I'm like, we love it, both like to see it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
He's unique because like he doesn't wear perfume. He refuses
to because he's like, you only wear perfume if you're
fucking gross, right like, because because that's why people wear
perfume in this period of time. I'm not going to
just take a fucking bath and ed you're clothes washed
every day, you know. And I think some of that
is a reaction to this colonel who he thinks is
nasty and who also who also wins. Again, we are

(01:03:39):
talking about a pedophilic relationship. But the way he looks
at it in the time is this is another man
who is one, you know, who's beaten him in this contest. Right.
I'm not saying that because I think that's a good
way to look at it, but that's how it's looked
at at the time, and you have to you have
to know that, right you know. Again, this is a
thirty year old and a fourteen year old or something.
Julia and George are both teenagers. The colonel is a creepy.

(01:04:00):
He is also married, so this is not his Thirty
year olds can court fifteen year olds in this period
and there be a degree of legitimacy to it. This
is not that kind of case. He is married, He
is not supposed to be doing this his wife. To
make this fucking colonel Cotton his wife has postpartum depression,
and after she has like, I forget I think it's

(01:04:21):
that first or second kid. She's like, I'm never going
to sleep in the same bed with you again because
I don't want any more kids. This is awful, and
so he's like, well, I guess I'm going to go
fuck a child.

Speaker 3 (01:04:32):
Cool, there you go. I mean, rational decision. It's like,
what do you want to want me to leave you?
Would you either not get blown? I don't understand the question.

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
Yeah, it's fine, I will ruin the life of a
teenage girl, which he does, so he has extramarital sex
with a child. This devastates young George, and it's much
much worse for Julia because she gets pregnant. Now at
that time, she is in high society woman. She is
a member of the aristocracy, and being having sex out

(01:05:05):
of wedlock with a married man, it means you're worthless
now you can't get married, and that's all your your
future social capitals, your ability to get married. She is
going to become an un person because of this right,
lacking better options. Thus, she hides her pregnancy in the
outlandish outfits of the upper class, which it gives you
an idea of how ridiculous the dresses during this period.

(01:05:27):
No one right, right. She is able to hide that
she's pregnant until her water breaks during an audience with
the Queen, which is the worst.

Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
For baby baby dude, what the fuck that is an hop?

Speaker 5 (01:05:45):
Yeah, So, like her water breaks at like a party
and it's the queen and all of the Queen's friends
and this her whole family is almost wiped out as
like influential members of society.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
Because of the shame from this, her brother challenges Colonel
Cotton to a duel. Colonel Cotton, by the way, is fine.
This is not the end of his social life. Of course,
she gets thrown out of her home, and since she's married,
she can't go to Colonel Cotton's home, so she winds
up sneaking into an empty room at the palace because
there are a lot of empty rooms and she has

(01:06:19):
to deliver her own baby at age fifteen.

Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
She loves no fucking I hate everything now that's kill Cotton.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
George stops talking to her for a while, not because
of this, because like she breaks up with him, right,
and he's broken hearted, But we know at the time
he writes about because he's aware of what happens to her,
and he thinks it's awful. He's like upset about how
cool this is, Like this fucking thirty year old molests
her and now she's an un person that's like like

(01:06:52):
fuck my culture, right, Like he's very much angry about this.
She is going to have four more kids with the
colonel because basically she winds up living in sin with
him in a country house. Thankfully, she is rich, She's
a lot luckier than most women in this situation, and
that she does have family money, so she doesn't wind
up desperate. She will eventually become one of the most
famous courtisans of her era. She becomes a famous and

(01:07:15):
successful high end sex worker for the aristocracy and actually
kind of earns her way to a degree, back into
high society because if you are a high end courtisan,
there are certain high society gatherings that you're allowed in,
and she does eventually. It's part she's a very powerful
woman in that way. And it's from her memoirs that
we know some of what we know about George, because

(01:07:35):
as adults they become friends and lovers again, and we
don't know the full details of their relationship. It speaks
well to bo that like, he does not care that
she has a love child, which is how he describes it.
That's the parlance at the times with this soldier. He
doesn't care that she's disgraced. He thinks the society is wrong.
And he actually one of the beautiful hints that we

(01:07:56):
get about, like what the kind of decency of his
heart is that he writes a poem for her child,
for this baby, because he views what happens to this
baby and his mom as an evil. Right, and again
he does describe this as a love child. We think
that's gross. That's how people talked about this at the time, right,
And here is here is the poem he writes for

(01:08:17):
her child, unhappy child of indiscretion, poor slumberer on a breast,
forlorn pledge in reproof of past transgression. Dear, though unwelcome
to be born, unless the injurious world upbraid thee for
mine or for thy mother's ill, a nameless father still
shall aid thee, a hand unseen protect thee. Still. Meanwhile,

(01:08:38):
in these sequestered valleys, still thou shalt rest in calm,
content for innocence, may smile at malice and thou oh,
thou art innocent, and this is because he helps her out,
he helps protect her and her kids. As an adult,
he's like, that's a decent man, aware of the evil
of his time. And that's actually a pretty good poem too.

(01:08:58):
He's a good writer.

Speaker 3 (01:09:00):
Yeah, he's a good man, Savannah. You know, like that's
all very solid for him.

Speaker 2 (01:09:05):
Yeah, yeah, solid dude for the seventeen eighties, I know.

Speaker 4 (01:09:11):
Yeah, the Hunter Biden of his time, true.

Speaker 2 (01:09:14):
Excellent, strong hunter vibes. The George Brummel who writes this
would be at age sixteen, is going to make his
first decision as an independent adult, which is going to
be to purchase a commission as an officer in the army,
specifically in the very regiment where the Colonel Cotton disgraced
Colonel Cotton had once held his command. Right, He's going

(01:09:36):
to choose to not just join the army again. He's
obsessed with smelling good. This smells bad. He joins the
same regiment that this guy had once helped to run,
and it was at this regiment that he's going to
meet the man who's going to make him into a star.
The future King and current Prince of Wales, and we're
going to talk about all that in part two. Princess,

(01:09:57):
how are you feeling about h BO so far? Hero
or a villain?

Speaker 4 (01:10:02):
I mean, I'm really ruined for the guy. I like rich.

Speaker 3 (01:10:08):
I feel like he got cut out there by rich
white people, which who has it? So I really I'm
waiting for something bad to happen, so I can see
why they hate him, But I'm.

Speaker 4 (01:10:17):
Rooted for the guy.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
Yeah, yeah, there'll be there's a couple of la He's
not a perfect man, but so far I see a
guy who's just tried to do his best in a
really fucking dog shit society, and who amongst us doesn't
feel like that? Sometimes?

Speaker 4 (01:10:33):
So true?

Speaker 3 (01:10:34):
And also I like the I like the Regency era
men attire. I like those tight ass breaches.

Speaker 2 (01:10:38):
So oh yeah, yeah, yeah, our yoga pants entrepreneur. Yeah
all right, Well, I'm going to go put on some
yoga pants. I'm actually going to put on much looser pants,
and we'll be back and well, for you and I
will be like seven minutes, but for the audience it'll
be like a day or so.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
Princess, do you have anything you want to plug at
the end here?

Speaker 3 (01:11:00):
M h yeah, I just My YouTube channel is Princess Weeks.

Speaker 4 (01:11:05):
I have fun videos out.

Speaker 3 (01:11:07):
By the time this comes out, I should have some
new fun stuff and I'm really excited to learn more
about bo Uh yeah that's me.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
Yeah yeah. Check out Princess and uh well, I'm not
going to tell you to go buy a suit because
you know who can't afford to do that. A lot
of people. Uh but I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:11:27):
Get some yoga, get some yoga pants. Thanks.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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