Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (16 page)

ever, rather than claiming privileged information about what hap-

pened and when, the editor assumes we know what was happening

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and that our knowledge licenses him to go one step further and
show

us. Robinson was a famous courtesan. This meant she had lots of

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expensive trinkets, a compelling public presence, and the protection

of powerful men. It also meant that she had sex—probably a lot—

and that she was, however high the price, for sale.52 One goal of the

pornographic texts was to damage her political credibility—and by

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extension the credibility of the men she campaigned for—by repre-

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senting her as a whore.53 An equally compelling goal, however, was

to trade on her public identity as “the lost one” (already lost, take

note, before her affair with the Prince) to license a peep show framed

as voyeurism. In the earlier epistolary novels, readers are offered the

opportunity to peer into the bedrooms of the rich and famous—or

at least, if not into their bedrooms, then over their shoulders as they

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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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write about what happened in their bedrooms. In the pornographic

texts, we only pretend to be peering into Robinson’s bedroom—or

her garden, or her carriage, or the “convent” where she rents rooms

for the night. In reality we’re paying customers watching performed

sex, which the whore herself has produced and arranged for our con-

sumption and to enrich her coffers. Robinson here exchanges places

with the chambermaid who sold her mistress’s letters “for the grati-

fication of the public and her own emolument.” Both King and the

author of
Memoirs of Perdita
suggest that it is now Robinson who is

making money off the relics of her dalliances. Public exposure is all

part of the plan. This whore is her own pimp, this peep show stripper

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her own patter man.54

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Robinson’s affair with the Prince occupies a relatively small space

in
Memoirs of Perdita
. As with much of the background material

in the novel, the author borrows this episode from another source,

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although he spices it up for the later text. The original source is a

pair of letters that were printed in
The Rambler’s Magazine
in 1783.

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The full title of this periodical, which ran from 1783 to 1788, is “
The

Rambler’s Magazine; or, the Annals of Gallantry, Glee, Pleasure, and

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the Bon Ton; Calc ulated for the Entertainment of The Polite World;

and to Furnish The Man of Pleasure with a Most Delic ious Banquet

of Amorous, Bacchanalian, Whimsical, Humorous, Theatrical and

Polite Entertainment
.” Much of the first volume is devoted to satiri-

cal and semi-salacious anecdotes about Robinson and her circle,

including the Prince, Tarleton, Fox, Elizabeth Armistead, and Grace

Dalrymple Elliott, another royal mistress usually referred to as Dally

the Tall. In its opening address,
The Rambler’s
invites contributions

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from “such Gentlemen and Ladies as are able and willing to contrib-

ute,” and in late 1783 printed two letters, supposedly from Florizel

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to Perdita, and submitted by “A Constant Reader.” Constant Reader

claims to have found a part of the first, undated letter “wrapped

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about some fresh butter, from a cheesemonger’s,” to have recognized

“the
arms on the seal,
” and sent his servant back for more dairy prod-

ucts in hopes of finding the rest of the letter, “in which I was lucky

enough to succeed” (361). Harking back to
The Budget of Love
’s dis-

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covery narrative, he tells us that this letter “among other papers, had

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been sold by the maid servant of a
well-known Fair One
,” although

he does not explain how it came to be “sadly torn and greased” at the

cheesemonger’s instead of printed with the others (361). His story

retains the standard elements of found manuscript narratives—a

fragment of a “tattered collection” (493) that “caused me some dif-

ficulty to make it out” and that “seems to hint at some mysterious

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

or uncommon circumstance” (361), but turns these elements into

parody. The obscurity of the document is caused by its demotion as

an instrument of commercial exchange, from commodity to pack-

age, and from literary commodity to mundane grocer’s packaging.

The mystery of the circumstance is only mystery in that the writer

uses such recognizable soft-core euphemisms that all his readers will

immediately understand.

The letter and its companion, published in the supplement to

volume 1, chronicle the first and second sexual encounters between

Florizel and Perdita. In the first, Florizel bemoans his impotence

when “having overcome all difficulties . . . nay all the loose and silken

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counterscarps that guard the sacred fort, and nothing left to stop

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my pursuit,—that then, by an over transport, I should fail fainting

before the surrendering gates, unable to receive the yielding treasure”

(361). In the second he celebrates his ability to finally consummate

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the affair and the “heaven of joy” he feels when her “wondrous love”

“increase[s]” his “to that vast height” (493).55
Memoirs of Perdita

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reproduces these letters almost verbatim, although the author sexes

them up a bit with the addition of an unsuccessful hand-job in the

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first encounter, “not even the application of Perdita’s soft hand could

possibly rouse the languid godhead; his mad desires remained, but

all inactive, as age or death itself; as feeble, and unfit for joy, as if his

youthful fire had long been past” (99). In the
Rambler’s
letters this

spicy detail is missing, although the comparison of Florizel’s impo-

tence with the feebleness of age is still there, with only the pronouns

changed: “
my
mad desires remained . . . as if
my
youthful fire had long

been past” (361–62; italics added). He goes on, in
Rambler’s
but not

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in
Memoirs
, “Curse on my youth!—give me, ye powers, old age; for

that has some excuse, but youth has none:—‘tis dulness [sic], stupid

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insensibility” (362).

The reason for the mysterious absence of these two letters from

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the otherwise complete collection in the published volumes is now

clear; they were suppressed—by an unspecified agent whose relation

to the earlier transactions involving the letters is obscure—because

they depict a Prince of W ales who falls something below the ideal

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of manly royalty. This prince is one for two; on an off day he is

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closer to—even identifies with—an enfeebled old man than a vir-

ile teenager. Constant Reader introduces the second letter with an

extended sexual joke, “With some difficulty I have made out a sec-

ond letter, from the tattered collection I mentioned . . . and which

seems relative to the
completion
of the business alluded to in the

former.—You must make proper allowances for want of connection,

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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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as the original was tattered, and soiled in many places” (493). The

letters are a metonym for their writer, for whose inability to connect

we must make proper allowances—after all, he was able to complete

the business eventually. Tattered and soiled but still recognizable,

they represent the shabby underside of monarchy. More alarmingly,

the letters are a reminder that one of the risks of a royal libertine is

impotence. The Prince’s frequent bouts of ill health were already

common knowledge, as was the belief that he induced or exacerbated

them by excessive partying. Horace Walpole identified this family

malady as originating with George III’s mother, Princess Augusta,

and claimed that the King was only able to contain the illness “by

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the most rigorous and systematical abstinence” but that the Prince’s

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“habit of private drinking” made him particularly susceptible (
Last

Journals
II. 349–50).

Walpole calls this illness a “scrofulous humour” (349) and points

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to the “blotches all over” the face of the Prince as evidence (350).

His armchair diagnosis, however regal in its associations, is probably

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incorrect; scrofula typically presents on the neck of the patient rather

than on the face.56 His history is probably closer to the mark, how-

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ever. Skin blotches are a common feature of chronic or cutaneous

porphyria, and can also be present in patients with variegate porphy-

ria. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter first suggested, in their 1969

George III and the Mad-business
, that the King’s bouts of dementia

were caused by porphyria, and that the illness extended backward as

far as the Stuarts and forward to several of his children, including

the Prince of Wales.57 Porphyria is not syphilis or—a more immedi-

ate cause of impotence—gonorrhea, and there is no suggestion that

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Walpole took these blotches to be signs of the pox. Nonetheless,

his analysis concentrates the twin evils of hereditary debility and a

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habit of irresponsible partying. Abstinence can mean foregoing other

pleasures than those of the bottle. This is a worrying combination,

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especially given that the King had already suffered one episode of

inexplicable ill health in 1765, shortly after assuming the throne.

Libertinism in the royal heir highlighted the dangers of precarious

health in the monarch. The Prince’s bad habits can also be seen as the

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underside of his father’s debility, presenting the risk that excess might

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leave one permanently spent.

Writing about Charles II, James Grantham Turner observes that

“Royal libertinism could be interpreted both as an ‘effeminate’ slack-

ness and as a masculine declaration of power and privilege, an implicit

but unmistakable equation of sovereign authority with phallic vigor”

(“Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy” 108). With his dozen

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illegitimate children and no heir, Charles II represented the potential

dangers of that equation. The Restoration king, he was also the king

whose profligacy and untimely death plunged the nation back tem-

porarily into Catholicism and precipitated the Glorious Revolution.

His numerous skirmishes with Parliament and the “arbitrary mix

of hedonism and repression” (Turner 104) that characterized his

reign made him available as a symbol of irresponsible absolute mon-

archy. The atavistic force of that symbol is clear in the
Preliminary

Discourse
to
Poetic Epistle
. Even a firmly Protestant monarch who

reversed Charles’ paternal record (over a dozen legitimate children

and no illegitimate) could revive fears of pre-Revolutionary abuses