Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (12 page)

ish—for their imagined prurient content. Sex replaces filial impiety as

the top selling point. In
Effusions of Love
, the Prince is a roustabout

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who parties with prominent Whigs, especially his uncle Cumberland,

but the author seems to include this information, like the miniatures

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and carriages, as a local referent rather than as an airing of dirty linen.

Referencing a known escapade at the home of Lord Chesterfield,

Florizel writes, “I got damnably d– –, the night before last, with those

bucks D– – t and C– – d, and my head has not been clear since.—I

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narrowly escaped being demolished by a bull-dog that was let loose in

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C– – ’s yard, and have some marks of his claws upon me yet” (16).31

Passages like this assure readers that this is the real Prince of Wales

and offer them the added satisfaction of being able to identify the

episode and the owners of all the initials. Petulant or snide confi-

dences, such as the one Walpole describes, do not appear. If Robinson

did repeat gossip, in her
Memoirs
she is predictably circumspect. She

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writes of advising him against doing anything “that might incur the

displeasure of his Royal Highness’s family” (II. 47). This is first of all

a warning to enter cautiously into an illicit affair, but it might also be

a (whitewashed) response to unfamilial complaints her correspondent

has made, especially given that she has much greater need of caution

in the affair than he: “I entreated him to recollect that he was young,

and led on by the impetuosity of passion” (47–48).

The Florizel in
Effusions
, though impetuous in love, is otherwise

a pattern of correctness. Instead of making nasty remarks about his

family and being gently rebuked by his older, wiser female correspon-

dent, he appeals to her wisdom as a critic: “As I know you are a com-

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plete judge of acting, I should be glad to have your private opinion

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of Mrs. Siddons’s performances.” Here Perdita has the insider knowl-

edge, and Florizel seeks the truth behind the public image. Relying

on her ability to answer “these questions with your usual judgment,”

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he asks, “[i]s she that Phoenix that the prints and the public voice in

general pronounce her?” (30). After a perfunctory demurral, Perdita

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damns Siddons with faint praise and initiates Florizel into the theater

cognoscenti: Although she has “a fine stage figure” and “a happy

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countenance for expressing the passions, and depicting the various

emotions of the soul,” she “substitutes stage trick” for real acting,

“which is seen through by the connoisseurs” (who include Perdita,

then Florizel, and now the readers), “though it astonishes the galler-

ies, and extorts from them those shouts of ill-judged applause, which

have stamped her character with the idea of perfection” (31).32 This

exchange offers an intimacy with the writers through the reification

of taste rather than sex or family discord. Thanks to Perdita’s mea-

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sured judgment, Florizel and the readers are invited into her inner

circle and flatteringly identified as those who can discriminate “stage

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trick” from the “fine pathos” of a real actress. We know nothing fur-

ther about the Prince’s feelings, but we don’t need to know, because

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now we can think like him.

The royal family does appear in
The Budget of Love
, although in

such flattering terms as once again to trouble a distinction between

irony and sentiment. Florizel describes his father as “the pattern of

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a man,” ideally balanced between “Religion” and “Mortality” (58).

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“Strictly good” rather than strict (58), this king is the source of his

son’s worldly knowledge. When Perdita expresses astonishment at

how “one of your years, cooped up from the world, should be so con-

versant with its wiles” (55), Florizel explains that he has until recently

“stood behind seeing and unseen,” taking “as it were, a literary view”

of the world, “aided by the best of monitors, and the first of fathers.”

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C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a

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Now, however, “the curtain has been some time undrawn, and all the

secrets long disclosed” (58). He does not make it clear whether it was

by the King’s hand that the curtain was withdrawn. Given that he has

monitored his son’s literary acquaintance with the world, however, we

can assume that the King at least condones, if not orchestrates, the

more direct congress he now enjoys. This is monarch as puppet mas-

ter, a royal father whose omniscience amounts to omnipotence. This

image of the King would be a hard sell to a public already familiar

with his glaring failure at controlling his sons and brothers, the most

notorious example of which was probably the 1772 Royal Marriages

Act. Introduced in response to the Duke of Cumberland’s marriage

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to a commoner, this law mandated that no descendant of George II

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under the age of twenty-five could marry without the consent of the

King, and that members of the royal family over twenty-five who

did not have the King’s consent must give formal notice to the Privy

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Council and wait a year before marrying. The Act was widely seen as

tyrannical and wrong-headed, so severely limiting the marital choices

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of the royal family as to threaten the succession. Such a very public

(and, in the event, catastrophic33) gesture of restraint is at odds with

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the image of a king wisely and methodically introducing his eldest

son to “the world.”

Rather than being vehicles for the expression of domestic conflict,

these letters raise familial love to the level of the erotic, evoking their

own kind of family romance. Not only does sex substitute for filial

impiety; filial and sexual “adulation” share space. After enumerating

his father’s virtues, Florizel goes on:

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You will say, my dear PERDITA! that I have got out of my
place
too;—

that I am bestowing so much adulation on a Father that I shall have

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none left for the object of my Love.—Yes, my dearest creature! I have

enough for both:—but, it being composed of different kinds, they will

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not interfere with one another. (59)

No one is out of place in this royal romance, which positions all

the principal characters where they are best calculated to serve the

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country through guaranteeing a wise and seamless succession. Once

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again the reader has the choice whether to see this depiction of the

royal father and son as satire or as new information. Either this text

provokes laughter at the difference between what is known of these

people and how they are presented, or it is a text that, like the Siddons

discussion in
Effusions
, invites readers in on secrets that connect them

with the royal family in ways no “public” text has been able to do.

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The readers’ choice rests on their decision whether to believe in the

authenticity, and the privacy, of the letters.

These novels partake of what Ian Duncan calls “the ambiguous

subjectivity of a work of fiction, which takes possession of the imagina-

tion while the reader goes on knowing that it is just a fiction” (
Scott’s

Shadow
8).
Budget
and
Effusions
push this ambiguity further, persuad-

ing readers that what takes possession of their imaginations is a fiction-

alized representation of factual events: “real life” shaped into novels.

Their satire is in inverse relation to their fictiveness. In the 1781
Poetic

Epistle from Florizel to Perdita: with Perdita’s Answer
fictiveness is the

source of satire, rather than its opposite. The author/editor of
Poetic

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Epistle
positions its letters as artifice rather than artifacts, at the same

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time claiming that their content is more political than amatory. He

prefaces the two verse epistles, Florizel’s to Perdita and her answer,

with a
Preliminary Discourse upon the Education of Princes
, and the

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letters illustrate the prefatory arguments. He takes as a given that his

readers are more interested in representation than in authentication.

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This editor mocks his own claim that the letters are real selections from

among the ninety-seven he says the Prince wrote to Robinson, “one of

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which is as long as from London to the Land’s end” (17). The Duke

of Cumberland has been trying to recover these letters, because “with

reason he apprehends they may be as well spelt as his own, which is

exactly the case, for it cannot be expected that any great personage

should be able to spell common words” (17).34 Unaccountably, how-

ever, the editor has been successful where the Duke has not. The two

letters he reproduces indicate that, not only can this great personage

spell common words; he can shape them into heroic couplets. Like the

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editor of
Effusions
invoking the Cumberland letters, this editor asserts

a literary ancestry that both legitimizes and merges with his letters, a

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transaction in which fantasized discourse replaces documentation:

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[T]he Poetical Lines here given to the Public . . . may be suffer’d to

grace the same shelf with Ovid’s Epistles. That those celebrated Epistles

are fictitious has never yet been matter of complaint. It imports not

whether they are genuine. The incidents alluded to should be true and

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so they are both in Florizel’s Epistle and Perdita’s Answer. (8)

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Shifting from the indicative to the subjunctive mood and back again,

the editor obliterates a distinction between what ought to be and what

is. The celebrated epistles he refers to are probably those in Dryden’s

collected translations of Ovid’s
Heroides
or
Epistolae Heroidium
,

first published in 1680 as
Ovid’s Epistles, Translated by Many Hands

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C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a

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and republished frequently throughout the eighteenth century. The

Heroides
were imagined letters in verse from famous heroines to their

faithless or otherwise absent lovers. The “incidents alluded to” include

Sappho’s suicide by drowning after her desertion by her lover Phaon,

Dido’s suicide after her desertion by Aeneas, and Medea’s revenge on

her husband Jason and his lover Creusa.35 Because these and other

stories of forsaken and revengeful women
should be
true, the stories

contained in the letters between Florizel and Perdita
are
. This logic

not only mixes moods; it also rests on different usages of the adjective

“true.” The stories in the original letters contain mythic “truths,”

universal and eternal verities, which explains the continuing relevance

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of these later translations. It follows, somehow, that the incidents in

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the two poetic epistles are accurate and verifiable, although the edi-