Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (36 page)

ferred to the domain of the licit. If the Georgiana story makes Darcy

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more interesting, the Lydia story, in its unruly disruption (Galperin’s

term is irruption [132]) of the courtship narrative, refocuses the lov-

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ers’ attention away from the embarrassing gaffs that had seemed to

impede the progress of their courtship. The plot of Austen’s novel

tracks and partially performs the cultural mode that dominated pub-

lic reception of the royal family during the last years of George III’s

reign and the Regency. Interest in the marriage, behavior, sexual-

ity, and potential criminality of the King’s daughter-in-law, whether

that interest came from conservatives or liberal/radicals, was part of

a cultural management strategy. The illicit energies in the royal fam-

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ily could be consumed, appropriated, and retracked into culturally

normative modes, particularly in the consolidation of bourgeois con-

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sciousness at the start of the nineteenth century. Caroline’s behavior

can be judged; pitied; classed as a mark of a gender that is judged and

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pitied; subsumed under that of a hateful husband; and, finally, traced

to the ill-treatment by that husband, in a negotiation that both asserts

and nostalgically longs for the tory patriarchalism of the husband’s

now permanently incapacitated father.

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Caroline’s tactic won her a temporary increase of access to her

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daughter, but this did not last long. She was not invited to the public

drawing rooms to celebrate Charlotte’s engagement (also temporary)

to Prince William of Orange, and she soon after agreed to accept an

annuity offered to her on the condition that she leave the country

indefinitely. She did not return to England until the deaths of first

Princess Charlotte and then the King once again raised the question

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R o y a l R o m a n c e s

of the succession and her place within the royal family. In the inter-

vening years, print’s response to the royal family had shifted. One

could still read pseudo memoirs offering sympathetic treatments of

Caroline,54 but the public was increasingly likely to get information

about royal scandals from woodcut engravings, which were produced

in greater numbers between 1810 and 1820. Engravings, as they had

in the eighteenth century, offered immediate, aphoristic, and easily

digestible assessments of contemporary events. Prints focused atten-

tion on the bodies of those depicted, usually, although not always,

with damning effects. Their accompanying text, in the form of cap-

tions, mottoes, and verses, subverted this reductive simplicity with

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often-intertextual glosses that entered them into a wider discourse,

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crossing cultural and political lines. The prints of Caroline in 1820

and 1821 once again concentrated evolving domestic ideology in

the bodies of royalty. Both pro- and anti-Caroline engravings also

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intersected with versions of that ideology as they were worked out in

Byron’s poetry, in Austen’s fiction, and in the treatment of both in

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the periodical press.

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C h a p t e r F o u r

B ody D ou bl e s i n

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t h e Ne w Mon a rc h y

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A

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t the height of the Queen Caroline affair, from late summer of 1820

to late summer of 1821, more reproductions of the Queen’s image

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were available for sale than images of Mary Robinson were in the

early 1780s.1 The flood of prints was partly the result of technologi-

cal innovations. In
Radical Satire and Print Culture
, Marcus Wood

recounts that the practices of placarding and bill posting increased

in the second decade of the nineteenth century, in part because of

the introduction of “fat-face” and “Egy ptian” typefaces—larger

and heavier typefaces designed for use in ephemera such as advertis-

ing, pamphlets, and broadsheets (156). The radical press under the

operations of entrepreneurs such as Cobbett and William Hone ben-

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efited from this new technology. Hone’s 1820 pamphlet
The Queen’s

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Matrimonial Ladder
is a case in point. Illustrated by Cruikshank

and accompanied by a children’s toy ladder, the pamphlet chron-

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icled “with fourteen step-scenes” the royal marriage as a series of

wrongs suffered by the Queen.2 The penultimate rung of the ladder,

labeled “CORONATION,” has broken under the weight of the new

King, who lies sprawled on the ground, overlooked by a triumphant

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Caroline, seated at the top of the ladder. A similar toy ladder depict-

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ing the progress of a “discordant marriage,” which Hone apparently

saw in a shop window, provided the inspiration for the pamphlet

(Wood 174). Hone’s use of another text for the purpose of parodic

contrast illustrates the link between radical politics and bourgeois

domestic ideology that Thomas Laqueur and others have suggested

characterized public responses to the Queen Caroline affair.3 Hone

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R o y a l R o m a n c e s

presents Caroline as the victim of a corrupt monarchy, whose claim

to a moral high ground rests more on her vulnerability than on her

rectitude. By spring of 1821, satirical anti-Caroline engravings had

begun to dominate, although the Queen’s death in late summer pro-

duced a temporary resurgence of sympathetic ephemera. Whether

sympathetic or satiric, however, the engravings of 1820 and 1821,

like the written texts of the previous decade, concentrated pub-

lic attention on Caroline’s body as containing a range of political

meanings.

The Unruly Queen in the Popular Press

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In March 1820, Robert Peel, the Tory MP and later Prime Minister,

wrote to John Wilson Croker, then Secretary of the Admiralty:

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Do you not think that the tone of England—of that great compound

of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy,

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and newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion—is more

liberal—to use an odious but intelligible phrase—than the policy of

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the Government? (quoted in Fraser 365)

Although Peel’s rhetoric opposes national character to government

policy, his juxtaposition stresses their interdependence. He asserts that

public opinion, an overdetermined phrase that comprehends—and

collapses—the terms of psychology, moral philosophy, and print, in

being “more liberal” than the policy of the Government, is best con-

stituted to shape that policy. In this perspective, he anticipates both

the power and the manipulation of public opinion that characterized

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the end of the Regency and the beginning of the reign of George IV,

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and in particular, the popular reception of the highly public “royal

squabbles”4 between the new King and his estranged wife.

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In conjunction with his designation of “liberal” (by 1820, and

certainly in Peel’s usage, a code word for “Whig”) as an “odious”

phrase, the ordering of Peel’s list emphasizes his conservative alle-

giance. Despite the insertion of “right feeling” as a rhetorical bal-

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ance to “wrong feeling” the collection of “folly ,” “weakness,” and

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“prejudice” evokes a public hardly capable of sound decisions, equally

informed by wrong feeling as by right, and unable to distinguish

between them. This public is, therefore, vulnerable to manipulation

by “obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs”; in other words, by radi-

cal journalists such as Cobbett, whose
Political Register
had been

until the 1815 Stamp Act one of the most widely read newspapers in

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B o d y D o u b l e s i n t h e N e w M o n a r c h y

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circulation.5 Hence “liberal” is both intelligible and odious to Peel

and Croker, incorporating generosity of feeling and opposition to the

established government—what Peel with deliberate vagueness calls

“a feeling . . . in favour of some undefined change in the mode of gov-

erning the country” (Fraser 565). This connection between feeling

and opposition determined public championship of the “injured”

queen, whose cause anchored popular opinion during the formation

of the new monarchy in ways that were both contradictory and con-

stitutive of the complexity of party politics.

Davidoff and Hall have argued that the public’s response to George

IV’s final attempt to divorce his wife concentrated and extended the

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rhetoric of bourgeois domesticity within the English public imagi-

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nation. Criticism of the new King and sy mpathy for his estranged

wife merged with condemnation of the notorious extra-marital sexu-

ality of both parties (but especially of the King), helping to consoli-

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date nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology. Much of the attention

directed toward the Queen participated in a chivalrous discourse that

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saw her as an icon of wronged womanhood (
Family Fortunes
151–52).

In this understanding, Caroline was a tragic victim, who had been

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systematically excluded from participation not only in the public and

national duties of a queen and consort but in the private and domestic

duties of a wife and mother, and who had been forced to publicize

her wrongs as the only recourse of an un-enfranchised and unpro-

tected woman. In this and other ways her situation anticipated that

of another Caroline, Caroline Norton, whose publicized marital dif-

ficulties some twenty years later marked the beginning of agitation

for the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act.6 Queen Caroline’s slow

and intensely public progress to London in June 1820, to contest her

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husband’s erasure of her name from the liturgy and his intention to

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exclude her from the coronation, produced a kind of counter monar-