Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (40 page)

play the locus of culpability.

Like most of the witnesses called before the Lords, Demont spoke

no English, and her testimony was given through a translator. This

extra step required occasional halts to the proceedings until a transla-

tion could be agreed upon, as when a German housemaid used a word

to describe Caroline’s bed sheets that could mean either “disordered”

or “stained.” In that instance, the maid finally made it clear that the

sheets were stained, a much more satisfactory outcome for the pros-

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ecution, who were then able to establish not only that the maid was

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a married woman capable of identifying bed stains, but that these

stains were “white” and “wet” (
Hansard
2.2, August 26, 1820). A

bed that might only have been slept in becomes, in the process of

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fixing a translation, one in which sex has taken place (although, as

before, it is not clear what type of sex). In the case of Demont’s testi-

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mony, however, no one makes any attempt to clarify her terminology.

On a “gloomy” rainy night, Caroline, Demont, and Pergami went in

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a hired carriage to the theater, going first into the upper saloon, or

lobby. Here is the testimony that follows, in its entirety:

In what way was her royal highness dressed? Her royal highness was

dressed in a red cloak; a very large cloak.

In what way was Pergami dressed? As far as I can remember, he was

dressed in a red domino.

What had he on his head? A large hat.

Of what description? Large.

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When you got into the saloon, what took place? Nothing happened

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to us.

Did you afterwards go into any other part of the house? We

descended into the pit.

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When you got into the pit, what happened? Many ugly masks sur-

rounded us, and began to make a great noise and hissed us.

Describe all which took place? Those masks surrounded us, and we

had great difficulty to withdraw, at last we went into a small room.

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Was there any thing particular in the dress which her royal highness

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wore? Her dress was very ugly, monstrous. (
Hansard
2.2, August 30,

1820)

The sequence of this testimony is as effective at implying guilt as

it is absurd. By introducing dress as a key element early in the ques-

tioning, the Solicitor General, Sir John Singleton Copley, establishes

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a connection between Caroline’s appearance and the non-specific

insult she receives in the pit. Presumably the large red cloak she wears

into the theater is, like Pergami’s domino and hat, for the purposes of

incognito and is not the same as the “monstrous” dress she wears once

inside. But the difference becomes immaterial. The sequence—from

outlandish clothing to insult to even more outlandish clothing—is

not so much illogical as a-logical. It is as likely that they were hissed

because they were in the pit with the rabble as that Caroline’s dress

offends the masked figures. Copley wants to stress a connection to

other testimony—including some earlier in the same day—in which

irregularities in Croline’s dress intimate her guilt.18 For his purposes,

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Demont’s adjective is perfect in its vagueness. The monstrosity of the

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dress transfers itself to its wearer in an inversion of the metonymical

transaction Demont has used to describe the crowd in the pit. While

the men become no more than their masks, Caroline’s dress becomes

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Caroline.

But what makes the dress—and the Queen—monstrous? It is likely

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that Demont used the French word
monstreux
, although the substan-

tive,
monstre
, literally, “monster,” was also available. “Monstrous”

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and “monster” share the same complex etymology, derived both from

the Latin
monere
, meaning “to warn” and
monstrare
, meaning “to

show.” The link, which Augustine first described, lies in an under-

standing of monsters as portents, signs of something out of order in

nature.19 But the derivation is awkward, and Virginia Jewiss argues

that this awkwardness inheres in the concept of the monstrous: “By

their very nature monsters escape classification, frustrate the possibil-

ity of linguistic precision” (180). “Monstrous” is precisely the term to

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suit Copley, however, because a monster is that which is seen. What is

monstrous about Caroline’s dress is that she is wearing it in public; it

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is display that shocks and horrifies first the masks in the pit and then

the Lords in the chamber.

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In Lane’s rendering of the scene, Caroline and Pergami are seated

in the box, with the crowd of men looking up at them, and Caroline’s

dress is not in itself outlandish. She is dressed the same as she is in

Dignity!,
unlike Pergami, whose livery is both more elaborate and

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more disheveled in
Modesty!
(Caroline’s tassels are swaying in this pic-

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ture, as if to suggest that she has been jostled; otherwise her clothes

are not disordered). The only remarkable feature of the dress is how

much it reveals of Caroline’s neck, arms, and breasts: this disclosure

makes the dress, and its wearer, monstrous. If a monster is by defini-

tion a thing looked at, its anatomy is the principal register of its mon-

strosity. In the early modern literature on monsters, both theological

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and scientific, monsters tend to be hybrid creatures, composites of

human and animal features or hermaphrodites.20 An emphasis on

sexuality is written into the discourse on even non-hermaphroditic

monsters, because most were believed to be the products of human

and animal couplings.21 But monsters were also often those in which

sexuality was revealed through body parts that were misplaced from

one creature to another. Voltaire writes in his essay “Monstres” about

seeing a woman at a fair who had four breasts and what looked like

the tail of a cow hanging below them. For Voltaire her monstrosity

consists in her display of them rather than in the fact of her multiple

breasts: “She was a monster, certainly , when she let her bosom be

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seen, and a respectable enough woman when she did not.”22 Like

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Voltaire’s four-breasted woman, Caroline is a monster in unusual or

inappropriate exhibitions of her body and a respectable “enough”

woman otherwise. Her penchant for low-cut dresses, or for any occa-

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sion that allows the display of breasts, forms a significant part of the

testimony, and the prosecution’s anxiety to establish just how much

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breast emphasizes the theatricality of the debates.23

In both
Dignity!
and
Modesty!
the mottoes illuminate the pic-

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tures through the irony of blunt contrast.
Modesty!
is accompanied

by a couplet from Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village”: “Her modest

looks a Cottage might adorn/Sweet as the Primrose peeps beneath

the thorn.”24 Both the prosecution and Lane are making the familiar

case against Caroline: immodesty —or impropriety —is such a pow-

erful marker of unchastity that it becomes unchastity. To be sexy is

to be engaging in sex. To be knowing is to be known. Both quotes

are snapshots of women whose subsequent falls cast into relief the

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unspoiled beauty they describe.25 Their innocence is opposed to their

later—and to Caroline’s willfully carnal—knowledge.

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Looking at/in the Prints: Byron,

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Lockhart, and Austen Again

In Lane’s
A Parting Hug at St. Omer
, the gender disruption in casting

Caroline as the departing soldier and Pergami as the distraught wife

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plays to fears of the effeminate Italian fop as well as of the Queen’s too

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robust sexuality, instances of a dangerous fluidity of rank and gender.

This masculinized Caroline recalls the preoccupations with excess that

characterized the testimony to the first royal commission, where her

overconsumption of food and drink, illiteracy, poor English, slatternli-

ness, and sexual assertiveness marked her as un-feminine, un-English,

and un-royal. The motto accompanying
A Parting Hug
comes from

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two sources. One of these is Charles Dibdin’s ballad, “The Soldier’s

Adieu,” originally published in 1790. The first four lines, in Dibdin,

read “Adieu, adieu, my only life,/ My honour calls me from thee;/

Remember thou’rt a soldier’s wife,/ Those tears but ill become thee”

(1–4).26 In Lane’s print the lines are “Adieu, Adieu, my dearest Love;

my People
call me from thee./Remember, thou’rt a Q____’s Gallant;

these tears but ill become thee.” The final line in Lane’s engraving is

taken not from Dibdin but from the first two lines of Byron’s already

notorious 1816 “Fare Thee Well!” Byron addressed this poem to his

wife as one of a pair he wrote in response to the breakup of their mar-

riage: “Fare thee well! and if for ever,/Still for ever, fare thee well.”

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The inclusion of a reference to another messy and public marital upset

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is an obvious choice—perhaps the most fitting of any that Lane uses.

By ron’s friendships with both Prince and Princess at various times

were well known (Austen instanced Caroline’s association with his

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sometime lover Lady Oxford as evidence of her impropriety); both his

absence from England and his Whig affiliation would tend to license

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the parodic use of him by the loyalist press.27 Most relevant to my

argument, his separation from Lady Byron—although accomplished

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much more quickly—was, like Caroline’s, marked both by scandal

and by public statements that were transactions in and performances

of a deteriorating or already defunct relationship.

The intertextuality of
A Parting Hug
enters Lane’s engraving into

a complex web of discourses that includes Byron’s poetic recasting

of his marital crisis. Lane uses By ron’s poem as ironic context for

Caroline’s return to England. His parting shot at the wife who left

him becomes her parting hug, as she leaves her lover to return to

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England and force herself on the husband who has bribed her to keep

away . Lane’s inclusion of the line signals his recognition that dis-

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cussions of royalty weave together fictive and public realms. Byron’s

sentimental address, initially printed privately but re-circulated

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widely, functioned as public testimony. In its positioning of the poet

as the wronged but steadfast husband (“Even though unforgiving,

never/’Gainst thee shall my heart rebel”) cruelly separated from his

infant daughter (“When our child’s first accents flow—/ Wilt thou

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teach her to say ‘Father!’/ Though his care she must forego?”), the

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poem echoes radical pro-Caroline sentiment and is part of the series

of claims and counterclaims about who abandoned the marriage first

that continues to engage biographers and critics of Byron.

Lane’s use of Byron here echoes another text, less widely dis-