that 'have you ever been punished as a child?' line Pen drops hits different when you realize that in the books, Colin was horsewhipped by his father the morning before he died and then went to Eton where they literally had something called 'flogging Fridays' during the time he attended
like Julia, Miss. Quinn, what do you mean you just threw that information in as a random throwaway line that is never mentioned again? do you not realize how WILD that makes Colin's background?
He was twelve years old??? His dad saw him hitting Eloise and then horsewhipped him, and after horsewhipping his twelve. year. old. son. he then goes to comfort Eloise by taking a walk with her and the bee stings him and he fucking dies
Colin would be out here blaming himself for that death forever are you kidding me???? Wondering if he didn't hit his sister (when they're children playing together), would his Dad still be alive? Would he still have gone on that walk? Would he still have passed away as Colin sat sobbing in the stables, hurt by his hand?
And then he goes to Eton where the only time he had off was 3 weeks around Christmas, but still has to stay there, and 3 weeks in the summer when he can finally go home to Aubrey Hall?
This timeline is BONKERS. Like. . .we know Edmund dies not too long before Hyacinth is born, and she's born May/June. Colin's birthday? Yeah, it's in March. So you mean to tell me, the order of events of all this mess could be as followed: Edmund horsewhips Colin when he's 12 years old (sometime before March), he DIES that same day, Colin turns 13 (in March), Hyacinth is born (in June), and not a few months later Colin has to go to Eton (after the summer break. Social season is Spring and Summer, and ends either July or August, so let's be merciful here and say he leaves in August) and doesn't come back for an entire year?
You mean to tell me this boy has had what? Half a year to get over his father's death after he whipped him for a minor infraction and then he's waltzing into an institution where canings and whippings and floggings and bullying are the norm when he's a teeny tiny little boy?
How is this man not filled to the GILLS with trauma???? No wonder he's so close to his mum and listens to the women around him more than the men and never talks about his dad. And he still turns out so nice and empathetic and kindhearted? He still listens so much to Pen and is so gentle with her and has a good sense of humor and cares so deeply?
That man is never raising a hand to their children. He probably won't even raise his voice at their children. Oh my god.
This post came across my dash and I wanted to offer some gentle clarification on the canon vs. fanon for folks that may not be as familiar with the books:
It’s not actually canon that Edmund horsewhipped Colin the same day he died or that Edmund’s walk with Eloise where he was stung by the bee and went into anaphylactic shock resulted from Colin smacking Eloise. (In fact, the smacking isn’t mentioned in Eloise’s book at all.)
It is a heartbreaking possibility that can fit in the explicit facts and silences of the canon, which I wrote about in a Colin character study/Polin fic started pre-show and posted back in 2021 called an excellent father (and have written explicitly or implicitly into some other things). I think it may have become headcanon/fanon for some other folks over time and maybe spread a bit further than I knew to people who may or may not have read the underlying story – which is pretty neat (!) but I thought it’d be helpful to separate out the canon facts for those who might be interested.
(In case you're wondering, the starting premise for an excellent father is that, when they're expecting their first child, Penelope wonders - not for the first time - why Colin never talks about Edmund and in fact seems uncomfortable when Edmund is brought up by others and her trying to figure out why that is. It also addresses the arm grabbing moment from RMB.)
Below are copied the relevant notes from an excellent father detailing the bits that are explicitly in canon and my own extrapolation:
“1) in Romancing Mister Bridgerton, Colin remembers that he was horsewhipped when he was twelve for smacking Eloise: “Dear God, he wanted to smack her. He hadn’t done that since he was twelve. And he’d been horsewhipped for it. The only time he could recall his father laying a hand on him.”
2) Colin was twelve when Edmund died (besides doing the math, in The Viscount Who Loved Me, Anthony notes that his brothers were sixteen, twelve, and two at the time);
3) to the best of my recollection, there is no other mention of Edmund in Romancing Mister Bridgerton, which in itself is noteworthy;
4) per To Sir Phillip With Love, Eloise was walking alone with Edmund when he was stung by a bee and died;
5) in To Sir Phillip With Love, Eloise states that she doesn’t believe in striking children;
6) in Violet in Bloom, after Violet comes running when she hears Eloise screaming, Violet slaps Eloise when Eloise can’t manage to say anything but “Papa” and it’s noted that “that would be the only time [Violet] would ever strike a child;”
7) in An Offer from a Gentleman and Violet in Bloom especially (but also, I would argue, in The Viscount Who Loved Me and To Sir Phillip With Love), Edmund is described in ways that make him sound rather similar to Colin but no one ever comments on it in the Bridgerton series;
8) I’d drawn the conclusion described in #7 long before First Comes Scandal debuted, but that book really deliberately drove home the parallels between Edmund and Colin; and
9) in Romancing Mister Bridgerton, it takes more than half the book for Colin to acknowledge to himself that he’d known for years that Penelope had feelings for him. Even though the knowledge colored the way he treated her, he’d pushed it out of his mind because it made him uncomfortable. He avoids thinking of – allowing himself to think of, I think – the incident on the steps of Number Five that he clearly felt badly about in the moment. But if he knew that Penelope had feelings for him, he must also have known that it would not have been just embarrassing for her to hear herself singled out for such a vehement declaration that he would never marry her, but truly hurtful. If he could be in such denial about something merely uncomfortable for so many years, about a situation in which he behaved badly but not catastrophically, how then, would he deal with something truly painful to him personally, to the point of being traumatic, rather than just uncomfortable? How long could he avoid thinking about it? What would make him confront it? And how would he deal with it when forced to do so?
TLDR: once I realized Colin had smacked Eloise and been horsewhipped as a consequence the same year Edmund died, those facts combined with the fact that Eloise was having one-on-one time with Edmund when he died and that Edmund is only mentioned once, when referring to that incident, in Romancing Mister Bridgerton, coalesced into . . . this.
To be fair to Edmund, he did genuinely sound like a wonderful father and the punishment of choice seemed both 1) not well-aligned with his general approach to parenting and 2) period-typical.
Given that Edmund appears in every other instance to have been a good parent, I take the approach that the principal reason this was highly traumatic in this story was due to the timing of the incident as I’m depicting it. If, for example, it had happened a few months before Edmund died rather than that day or had happened then but Edmund hadn’t died until later and they’d had time to talk and spend other time together after it, it wouldn’t have had the same impact at all. It would’ve been something that happened once. But instead, it happened this way – as Colin’s last interaction with Edmund – and it’s not something he worked through because nobody ever talked to him about it. I think it would have impacted his ability to (and his feeling that he deserved to) grieve, even if he was not emotionally mature enough to understand or articulate that feeling at that age.”
I should also probably note that I wrote an “Edmund Lives AU” vignette where his best friend confronts him about the whipping and we see how he subsequently feels about it that may also be of interest: wrong
