Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (38 page)

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the image of the people, reflected in the periodicals. Its “unanimous

verdict” becomes a metonym for the justice that is in the purview of

the Lords, yet now escapes their control.

In a series of anti-Caroline engravings published in 1821, the

caricaturist Theodore Lane chronicled what was publicly known of

the affair, drawn from these same newspaper reports. Lane’s carica-

tures were published after Parliamentary debate on the Bill had been

prorogued and the wave of pro-Caroline sentiment that produced

Brougham’s unanimous verdict had begun to subside.11 Many of his

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engravings depict scenes described in the testimony before the Lords,

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and they function as a kind of summing up of the Crown’s case. Their

often complex and layered relationship of image to text interprets both

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testimony and rumor for a public who were already beginning to sour

on Caroline. In
A Pas de Deux, or Love at First Sight
, a still-liveried

Pergami dances with a corpulent and décolleté Caroline—the whip

he cracks over her head working with the spurred boots and carriage

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in the background to remind viewers of his servant status, while at

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the same time implying his increasing control over her. The extreme

difference in their respective heights reinforces this suggestion. The

accompanying text quotes some of the lyrics from “Over the Hills

and Far Away,” a popular song from Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
: “How

I’d love y ou all the day/Every Night we’d Kiss and Play/If with me

you’d fondly stray/Over the Hills and far away.”12
The Modern Genius

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of History at her Toilet
alludes to allegations that Pergami chose the

Princess’s clothes and dressed her himself, and that her increasing

indecency was a yardstick to measure his influence over her. The

title suggests that this is the second of three successive costumes the

Princess wore to a masquerade ball.13 In
A Parting Hug at St. Omer
,

she flings herself into Pergami’s arms before boarding the packet for

Dover, with Alderman Wood, radical Lord May or of London and

supporter of the Queen, looking on approvingly. Brougham stands

nearby, in military dress, holding a sack with “50,000” printed on

it, a reference to the annuity he was deputized to offer the Princess,

in exchange for her agreement to remain abroad and give up her title

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and right to be crowned. Although the Queen’s legs in this picture

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(unlike in the first two) are modestly together, Pergami’s waist-high

grasp, one hand on her bottom, might evoke the evidence of a for-

mer cook, given just after debate on the Bill had been suspended

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in November. His testimony, that in 1816 he had surprised Pergami

with his back to the door, his britches down, and one of the Princess’s

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thighs in either arm, was the only one that claimed to show the lovers

“in the very act” (quoted in Fraser 446). If this story could have been

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entered as evidence and withstood cross-examination, it would not

only have provided proof of infidelity ; it would have demonstrated

the nature of the proof required to convict the Queen—the image

of her body, sexually engaged—while also arguing, de facto, that her

infidelity was not a threat to the succession.

The death of Princess Charlotte after giving birth to a stillborn

son in November 1817 altered the meaning of Caroline’s identity as

consort, as it related to questions of royal succession, by eliminat-

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ing all legitimate offspring of the future George IV. Not only was

Caroline no longer mother of a queen- and grandmother of a king-

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to-be; she no longer, at fifty, had any role in either guaranteeing

or threatening succession to the throne from her own body. This

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left open to the Prince the possibility of securing the succession

himself by divorcing his current wife, remarry ing, and starting a

new line (he clearly hoped his daughter’s death would give him an

advantage in pressing his case for divorce before the Government).

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But it also erased the only legitimate way in which Caroline’s body

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could have any reputable public meaning by foreclosing the politi-

cal value of her maternity: she no longer had any opportunity to

participate in the political life of the nation through reproduction.

An 1820 etching by J. Lewis Marks captures the conf licting public

understanding of Caroline and her body’s signification at the time

of the divorce proceedings (figure 4.1). Titled
King Henry VIII
,

it pictures a suspiciously round Caroline as Catherine of Aragon

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Figure 4.1
Lewis Mark’s
King Henry VIII
(1820) depicts Queen Caroline as

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Catherine of Aragon addressing George IV as Henry VIII.

addressing George IV as Henry VIII, with a speech from Act 2,

scene 4 of Shakespeare’s play . With one hand cupped under her

belly , as if to suggest advancing pregnancy , she pleads with the

King not to abandon her:

Sir, I desire you do me right and justice

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And to bestow your pity on me, for

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I am a most poor woman, and a stranger

Born out of your dominions;

. . . If, in the course

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And process of this time, you can report,

And prove it too, against mine honour aught,

My bond to wedlock or my Love and duty

Against your Sacred Person; in God’s name,

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Turn me away; . . . and so give me up

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To the sharpest kind of justice. (14–45; the ellipses indicate Marks’s

cuts)

While this print sentimentalizes Caroline’s vulnerability as non-repro-

ducing consort by comparing her with Catherine (the lines in which

she claims to have got many children by the King in their twenty

y ears of marriage have been elided in the engraving), her belly, her

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

hand, and the gaping cardinals allude to the familiar use of her body

for public and rhetorical display. Like the overdisplayed legs, breasts,

and arms of Lane’s prints, her protruding abdomen announces her

body’s sexualizing potential. But the relative modesty of her dress

itself—especially in the context of Lane’s more fleshly depictions—

her diminutive size in comparison with the grossly corpulent King,

and his shifting and uncomfortable glance away (contrasting with the

stares of the other men in the scene), pairs revealed maternity with

vain supplication.14 The picture evokes a gender politics more familiar

to the discourse of sentiment and melodrama than to stories about

the Queen’s depravity.

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Like Marks and Hone, Lane uses intertext to frame and resolve the

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political debate in which his engraving engages. Lane’s appropriations,

however, are drawn often from popular literature; sometimes they are

even made up, so that associations intended to look accidental and

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fortuitous are deliberately fabricated. They offer a more complex and

politically nuanced way of understanding his texts.
Installation of a

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Knight Companion of the Bath
references the allegation that Pergami

visited Caroline while she bathed on shipboard. In the picture, a near-

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naked Pergami, straddling the edge of a bathtub in which Caroline

sits, bathes her with water that splashes suggestively upward from his

lower abdomen. Two figures peer from behind a half-open door in

the background. The title refers to the Royal Order of the Bath, insti-

tuted by George I in 1725 and redefined by the Regent in 1815. The

text, apparently composed by Lane, reads:

While she received the copious shower,

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He got a step in Honour’s Path,

And grew, from that auspicious hour

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A Knight Companion of the Bath

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The sexually shaded language (“received the copious shower”

and “grew”—“copious” echoing “copulate”) and the pun on “night

companion” suggest once again the possibility of sexual activ-

ity without actual penetration that formed the subtext of specula-

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tion about Caroline’s sexuality between 1806 and 1813. Showing

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voy euristic peering figures was a common device used by Lane

(they appear also in
The Genius of History
). The watchers here are

most likely Caroline’s maid, Louise Demont, and her manservant,

Teodoro Majocchi, both of whom testified before the Milan com-

mission and faced allegations of subornation. Their peeping refer-

ences the fragility of claims that rest only on second-hand allegations

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and reinforces the positioning of the print and of Caroline as objects

for prurient display. They implicate the consumer of the engraving

as well in the complex relationship among testimony , condemna-

tion, and voyeuristic pleasure.

Tent-ation
, which refers to the testimony that Caroline had

a tent erected on ship-board for herself and Pergami, pictures the

two of them half-reclining side-by-side. Pergami, handing a lit can-

dle through an opening in the tent to a manservant outside, says,

“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul—/Put out the light, and

then ______.” The single attribution, “Othello,” is presumably unnec-

essary, although its terseness reflects the expediency with which Lane

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has mixed and matched the lines. The casting implicit in the quote,

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in which Caroline is the innocent victim of a demonically foreign and

usurping other, is more sympathetic than most of Lane’s engravings

and reflects the way in which xenophobic depictions of Pergami were

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ty pical of both pro- and anti-Caroline responses. Caroline is also

dressed more modestly here than she is in most of Lane’s engravings.