Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (4 page)

resonated with issues of domesticity, the family, and the body. The

questions raised by these royal squabbles recurred so regularly from

as early as 1795 on that they can be understood as one event that, like

the King’s madness, was subject to periodic outbreaks.

Taken together, these events highlight a shift not so much in

modes of representation as in what gets represented. Although sub-

ject to variants throughout the period, the modes remain largely the

same. The focus of representation, however, shifts from events that

were known—that is, acknowledged as public—through those that

were unknown (but verifiable), to rest eventually in a teasing preoccu-

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pation with what is unknowable. The behavior of the Prince of Wales

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falls into the categories of what is known or at least knowable: the

romantic exploits of “Florizel” and “Perdita”; the extravagances of

Carlton House; and the Prince’s enormous debts were public events.

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And while the factuality of his secret marriage to the Catholic widow

Maria Fitzherbert was subject to debate, it was still presumably know-

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able: witnesses could lie; rumors could be deliberately stirred up or

suppressed, but there was in theory an ascertainable event or non-

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event behind the speculation.

The King’s madness was a different matter. Doctors’ reports,

newspaper reports, gossip, and ephemera regularly represented his

malady in 1788 and early 1789. But its origin, extent, and progno-

sis remained mysteries, endlessly debated but referential to no facts

that could explain them and settle the crucial questions they raised.

There was plenty of misrepresentation—information suppressed or

shaded, rumors circulated, official stories offered and then under-

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cut. But information and misinformation alike pointed back to no

ascertainable facts. Was the King mad or simply ill? Was his condition

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permanent or an episode? Moreover, how was the dementia to be

interpreted? Was it, in the language of contemporary medical dis-

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course, the result of an overtaxed system—a stamp of kingship, per-

haps, but to that extent treatable? Or was it rather hereditary lunacy, a

family malady, equally significant of royalty but intractable? In either

case, was it to be understood as transformative, occasioning an abrupt

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change of government during a period of increasing national and

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international upheaval? Or did it simply indicate a corrupt, vitiated,

or defunct system—a diseased body politic?

The regency crisis was tabled when the King recovered almost as

suddenly as he had fallen ill, and the episode remained resistant to

definitive interpretation. When the dementia recurred in the first

decade of the nineteenth century, it was understood and resolved

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

through the repetition of precedent, an implicit recognition of its

inexplicability. As a public enactment of a domestic catastrophe whose

consequences would shape ideology as well as policy, the first regency

crisis was a precursor to the events that came to be known collectively

as the Queen Caroline affair.5 Like the King’s madness, the behavior

of Princes Caroline, through her husband’s two attempts to divorce

her, resisted proof and allowed multiple and conflicting representa-

tions. In part this was because the case depended on such malleable

indicators as soiled bed linens and suborned testimony. Although the

new King no doubt hoped, in 1820, that repetition would once again

function as precedent, both iterations of the Queen Caroline affair

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proved that reputation was not evidence. If George III talked non-

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stop for twenty-four hours, sweated excessively, and was prone to sud-

den and violent attacks on members of his family, whatever this might

mean medically, it meant that he was not fit to govern. If the Princess

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of Wales dressed revealingly, held raucous and unchaperoned parties,

or bathed in the presence of her manservant, these behaviors were

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not, per se, indications that she was an unfaithful wife and therefore

guilty of treason. There was no way to provide documentation of infi-

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delity, short of illegitimate children, and these were not forthcoming.

Discursively, however, reputation constituted, if not evidence, then

imputation, and imputation could be appropriated and circulated.

Reputation was the unknowable, construed as the already known,

and was in this sense more useful than evidence because it rested on

behaviors that were open to multiple interpretations.

How much an event could be known structured how it was

represented. Caroline’s sexuality existed only in various modes of

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literary and semi-literary representation: in ephemera and in fic-

tionalized accounts. One of these was Thomas Ashe’s 1811
The

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Spirit of “the Book”; or, Memoirs of Caroline, Princess of Hasburgh:

A Political and Amatory Romance in one Volumes
, which Ashe mar-

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keted as an epistolary roman à clef that would provide the “true”

account of the royal marriage. The title comes from the report

of the 1806 royal commission set up to investigate allegations of

sexual misconduct by the Princess, and popularly known as the

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Book. Ashe’s claim in the title is that the territory of the novel lies

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in essence rather than in form: his novel, he promises, renders the

“spirit” behind the facts of the Book. This claim and its rambling

structure distinguish Ashe’s novel from the realistic fiction that

Austen was beginning to publish. Yet Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
,

printed in the same month as the commission report,
takes up the

same questions of female sexual misbehavior and especially whether

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

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and when misbehavior signals actual sex.
Pride and Prejudice
is not

self-consciously allusive, but its preoccupations are historically local

in a way that Ashe’s are not, and it implicitly critiques both Ashe’s

representation of history and his presuppositions about the formal

structure of the novel.

These three different books—the commission report, Ashe’s novel,

and Austen’s—and the intersections among them, demonstrate that

Caroline’s reputation was constructed and managed through texts.

And these texts were explicable through their relation to other texts.

Woodcut engravings, which figured in public discourse throughout

the period and dominated the later decades, depended for their mean-

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ings on mottoes derived from other sources—from ballads, poems,

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and other engravings. Later prints evoked or imitated earlier ones, as

in Theodore Lane’s reworking of Gillray’s famous
Dido, in Despair!

Novelistic renderings such as Ashe’s depended on generic expecta-

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tions and on a system of allusion that both invoked and clouded

representation. Events like the secret marriage, on the other hand,

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or the King’s madness, established different representational strate-

gies. These events were documentable, and documentation is a privi-

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leged form of representation. Because of this, they set up a contest

between the “actual” or primary texts—letters, physicians’ reports,

registry records (documents that could of course always be shaded or

falsified)—and the popular or fictionalized texts on which their pub-

lic meanings depended. These events established a hierarchy in which

private renderings are seen to have a more stable relationship to the

truth than public renderings.

Popular writers and engravers rarely depicted the King’s madness

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directly, although they often focused on the extraordinary interest

with which his heir allegedly followed every step in the progression of

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his father’s illness. And, of course, the Prince’s various mistresses, his

relationship with Mrs. Fitzherbert, and his association with notorious

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Whigs like Charles James Fox were all fodder for pamphleteers and

printmakers. These texts relied for their authenticity on competing

claims of knowledge: was Fox lying when he declared in the House

of Commons that Mrs. Fitzherbert was not the Prince’s wife? Did

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he know himself whether he was lying? Unlike Ashe’s book, which

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claims to get to the heart of disputed events, but which exists pre-

cisely because there is no getting to the heart of them, these texts

presuppose that there is an accurate rendering of events, and position

themselves relative to that account. They are to this extent doing—

and claiming to do—the work of interpretation, not the work of

representation.

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10

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

History and Criticism

In recent years the figure of Caroline has been the focal point of

discussions about monarchy in public discourse, which have concen-

trated on how her shifting representations reflect struggles among

competing political interests. Caroline was equally available as an icon

of decadent royalty and wronged womanhood, making her, at varying

moments, a cause célèbre for radical anti-monarchists and the darling

of loyalists and tory radicals alike. For some, Caroline was a loutish

and louche foreigner, the poster child, or print child, for the unequal

distribution of privilege (unlike the Prince of Wales, whose detractors

accused him throughout his life of abusing his privilege, the anti-

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Caroline camp often saw her as someone who simply didn’t deserve

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to be royal, or even English). For others—and at other times—she

was a defrauded wife and mother, the idealized image of bourgeois

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femininity that cast into distasteful relief the excesses of her husband’s

court. S tudies such as Thomas Laqueur’s “The Queen Caroline

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Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV”; Leonore Davidoff

and Catherine Hall’s
Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English

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Middle Class, 1780–1850
, and Anna Clark’s “Queen Caroline and the

Sexual Politics of Popular Culture” identify in the latter understand-

ing of Caroline the defining moment for an emerging class conscious-

ness. In popular responses to the Queen Caroline affair, both the

bourgeoisie and the working class came into their own as social and

political forces by identifying with a domestic ideology defined both

through and against monarchy.

The Queen Caroline affair framed Waterloo and Peterloo and

dominated the 1810s. For this reason it is often seen to inaugurate

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the nineteenth century as the moment when, as Davidoff and Hall

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put it, “the domestic had been imprinted on the monarchical” (152),

and thus to set the stage for the obsession with domestic monar-

chicalism that characterized the reign of Queen Victoria. But in

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1806 and again in 1820, no one knew that the monarchy in Britain

was going to stabilize middle-class domesticity, at least not in the