Lord Peter Wimsey an unofficial attaché to the British Foreign Office. Harriet Vane contacts him about a problem she has been asked to investigate in her college at Oxford ("Gaudy Night"). At the end of their investigation, Vane finally accepts Wimsey's proposal of marriage. The couple marry on 8 October 1935, at St Cross Church, Oxford, as depicted in the opening collection of letters and diary entries in "Busman's Honeymoon". The Wimseys honeymoon at Talboys, a house in east Hertfordshire near Harriet's childhood home, which Peter has bought for her as a wedding present. There they find the body of the previous owner,
Lord Peter Wimsey went with King Richard the Lionheart on the Third Crusade and took part in the Siege of Acre. This makes the Wimseys an unusually ancient family, since "Very few English noble families go that far in the first creation; rebellions and monarchic head choppings had seen to that", as reviewer Janet Hitchman noted in the introduction to "Striding Folly". The family coat of arms is blazoned as "Sable, 3 mice courant, argent; crest, a domestic cat couched as to spring, proper". The family motto, displayed under its coat of arms, is "As my Whimsy takes me." Lord Peter was the