Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (52 page)

discussions of the Fox-North coalition as salacious descriptions of

famous courtesans like Robinson (see for examples
The Rambler’s

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Magazine
I [1783]: April 152–53; May 198; August 305).

54. Peep shows—boxes fitted with one or more lenses through which

viewers could see a variety of scenes printed on cards—flourished

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throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth.

Eighteenth-century peep shows were manipulated by an itinerant

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“peep show man,” who changed the cards, keeping up a running

recitation or patter. Many offered views of exotic places or histori-

cal events, but some peep shows were erotic or even pornographic:

depicting racier scenes from classical mythology or throwing the lit-

erary justification out and simply depicting images of bodies in sexu-

ally suggestive postures. Amy Ogata discusses the history of peep

shows in “Viewing Souvenirs” (70). For a discussion of peep shows’

erotic content and role in the privatization of sexual pleasure, see

Toulalan 165.

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55. Perdita’s capacity for sexually intimidating her partner, which appears

only in this episode, suggests a likeness between
Memoirs of Perdita

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and popular whore biographies of the eighteenth century. Julie

Peakman points out that by mid-century “whore biographies had

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been honed into pornographic novels,” like Cleland’s
Memoirs of a

Woman of Pleasure
(1748–49). They tended to portray protagonists

“in a positive, sympathetic light . . . not only depicted as radiantly

beautiful or saucily attractive but as possessing forceful personalities,

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their suitors frequently finding them too willful to control” (x).

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56. Scrofula, or tuberculosis of the lymph nodes, was commonly referred

to as the “King’s Evil” and was thought to be cured by the monarch’s

touch.

57. Macalpine and Hunter describe skin eruptions in James I and his

descendents, including George IV (208).

58. When Prince George’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, died giving birth

to a stillborn son in late 1817, Edward, Duke of Kent, the King’s

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fourth son and next in line for the throne after the Regent, hastily

married Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Their daughter,

Alexandrina Victoria, was born on May 24, 1819.

2 Wandering

Royals

1. Critics often see the
Memoirs
as a deliberate act of recovery,

Robinson’s effort to reclaim her reputation from famous courte-

san to beleaguered—but essentially virtuous—woman, intellectual,

and artist. Laura Runge makes this point in “Mary Robinson’s

Memoirs
,” cited in the previous chapter (563–64). Anne Mellor sug-

gests that the
Memoirs
oscillate between the “star-crossed lover”

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and the ‘unprotected’ and abused wife” (231) versions of her affair

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with the Prince. She points to the radical potential in this second

version, which implicitly denounces “a monarchy or
ancien regime

that has abused its constitutionally limited powers” (244). Similarly,

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Runge observes that the memoir “repeatedly demonstrates the fail-

ure of gallant codes of behavior. They fail to protect women from

unbridled male sexuality, and they fail as a behavioral substitute for

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male violence” (576). Elizabeth Fay notes the implicit feminism in

Robinson’s sentimental rendering of herself in the
Memoirs
as one

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whose romance was “deliberately unraveled . . . by the animosity that

inhabits the corridors of sentimental realist fiction, thus exposing the

female personage as a vulnerable body” (“Framing Romantic Dress:

Mary Robinson, Princess Caroline and the Sex/Text”). Recently,

Tom Mole, Michael Gamer, and Terry F. Robinson have suggested

that Robinson’s
Memoirs
are one part of an ongoing process of calcu-

lated self-marketing that incorporated her identities as actress, cour-

tesan, and woman of letters (Mole, “Mary Robinson’s Conflicted

Celebrity”; Gamer and Robinson 220).

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2. Paula Byrne points out that Robinson left the theater much later than

she needed to, given that she was not performing in the afterpiece.

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She may have timed her walk across the stage to coincide with the

Prince’s exit (99). The Prince too seems to have known what he was

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doing more than it appears in this version. Particularly, he seems to

have known Robinson. In a letter written the next morning to Mary

Hamilton, whom he was throwing over for Robinson, he mentions

that he had seen her “on or off the stage” and that his “passion” for

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her had “laid dormant . . . for some time” (quoted in Byrne 101).

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3. Why Palemon and not Ferdinand, or, for that matter, why Miranda

and not Emily? Apparently he liked to mix and match his heroes and

heroines, or perhaps he just preferred the sounds of the names.

4. These lines appear both in the original and in Garrick’s adaptation.

In
The Winter’s Tale
, she speaks them in 4. 4. 9–10. In
Florizel and

Perdita
they appear in 2. 1. 9–10.

5.
The Winter’s Tale
4. 4. 373–74;
Florizel and Perdita
2. 1. 398–99.

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6. The motto on the title page of
The Budget of Love
stresses the theme

of royalty in disguise, with a possible reference to the threat to suc-

cession that would become a theme of later satires: “ ‘Should I now

see my Father,/He would not call me Son.’ ” The attribution reads,

“WINTER’S TALE, A. iv. S. 2. Flo.” Because these lines do not

appear in
Florizel and Perdita
, the quote is most likely from one

of the many collected editions printed throughout the century. The

editors seem to have expected readers to call up both the pastoral

romance and its longer, tragicomic context.

7. Newcomb notes that “Perdita’s discussion of cross-breeding, Nature,

and Art with Polixines, which might seem an ideal pastoral set-piece,

is notably absent from both Morgan and Garrick” (184). The adap-

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tations obscure the implicit criticism of Perdita’s family romance in

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her refusal to allow that “a bark of a baser kind” might be conceived

“By bud of nobler race” (4. 4. 94–95), opting instead for a “Perdita

devoid of economic sense or class complaint” (Newcomb 186).

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8. Leontes declares the infant, as yet unnamed, Perdita’s illegitimacy

ten times in Acts 2 and 3; he uses the word “bastard” in eight of

those speeches (
The Winter’s Tale
2. 3. 74, 76, 140, 155, 161, 175; 3.

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2. 81).

9. As Newcomb points out, even in the remaining acts, both Morgan

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and Garrick “sanitize” the rustics’ dialogue and “invent cheerful new

ballads for Autolycus, replacing his more salacious songs” (187).

10. “Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore./Be sure of it. Give me

the ocular proof” (
Othello
3. 3. 365–66).

11. Newcomb calls this scene “a double scene of consumption that stages

both the buying of popular print commodities by a newly literate

‘clown’ and their eager consumption by an audience of female ser-

vants in husbandry” (117–18). Ballads, as a form of popular “mimetic

narrative,” are presented “as feeding fantastic desires and threatening

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social hierarchies” (118).

12. Natascha Wurzbach discusses
The Winter’s Tale
’s participation in

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what she calls the “literary-sociological” (249) critiq ue of street

ballads. The ballad-seller scene “portrays the reaction of a ballad

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audience from the lowest social class who know and appreciate the

entertainment value of this kind of literature: (apparent) factuality

and news value, sensational excitement and merriment are expected”

(
The Rise of the English Street Ballad
247).

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13. In Garrick’s text, the line reads, “I love a ballad in print,/Or a life;

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for then we are sure they are true” (2. 1. 277–78). All editions fol-

lowing Pope’s use this.

14. In the end, Röhl, Warren, and Hunt exclude only one of the King’s

offspring, his seventh son Adolphus. And even here they point out

that “the medical information available to us on him is so thin that

the absence of evidence should not be equated with absence of the

illness” (103).

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15. In the 1920s, Sir Archibald Garrod first identified a series of inherited

metabolic defects that could cause damage to the nervous system. Of

these, “the porphyrias”—so named because an overproduction of por-

phyrin can cause the urine to take on a dark red or purple color—are

particularly rare but can be inherited by up to fifty percent of the off-

spring of an affected patient (Macalpine and Hunter 173). Röhl, Warren,

and Hunt provide a more comprehensive history of porphyrin studies,

from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth century (248–50).

16. Röhl, Warren, and Hunt have suggested that George IV, who suf-

fered most of his life from bouts of ill health that closely resembled

his father’s, might also have experienced periods of derangement.

They point to one particular attack in 1811, coincidentally during the

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second regency crisis, when observers worried briefly that both the

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King and his successor might be going mad (71).

17. The King had to endure what Stanley Ayling calls “the whole debili-

tating hit-or-miss routine of current medical practice” (330). He was

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bled and blistered, given emetics and purgatives, and put on restric-

tive diets, most of which treatments, Macalpine and Hunter point

out, would have exacerbated his symptoms and possibly retarded

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recovery (174). His one recognized “mad-doctor,” Francis Willis,

used even harsher methods to treat the King’s mind diseased, con-

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fining him in a straitjacket or bolting him into a specially made chair

whenever he became delusional or recalcitrant (Ayling 339–40, 342).

Of this “system of government of the King by intimidation, coercion

and restraint,” Macalpine and Hunter claim that, “[n]o account of

the illness from this point on can disregard the King’s treatment,

and to what extent the turbulence he displayed was provoked by the

repressive and punitive methods by which he was ruled” (54).

18. The first bulletin, issued on November 18, read, “His Majesty had

a good night, but as yet is not perfectly free from fever” (quoted in

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Macalpine and Hunter 39).

19. “The term ‘fever’ . . . before the clinical thermometer came into gen-

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eral use in the nineteenth century, implied no more than malaise and

a rapid pulse which, it is known today, occurs also in the absence

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of fever and in porphyria is indeed a leading symptom in attacks”

(Macalpine and Hunter 199).

20. The doctors quarreled regularly about the wording of the bulletins,

each wanting to frame them according to his prognosis. Moreover,

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the Queen, who suspected the doctors of reporting directly to the