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sion of the Privy Council examination published in December 1788,

Warren’s testimony is the longest, occupying roughly three and a half

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pages. It is longer by only half a page than Willis’s, however, and

the transcript does not reflect the ninety minutes it reportedly took

him to answer the question of whether he thought the King was

likely to recover.28 Nor does the transcript reflect that Warren’s use

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of “disorder” to describe what was wrong with the King was prob-

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ably a substitution for “insanity,” his chosen term. Macalpine and

Hunter quote from the diary of Lord Ailesbury, who records that

Warren first used the word “insane; and when he was advised not to,

and another expression was dictated to him, he answered it was the

same thing” (quoted in Macalpine and Hunter 55). Without deviat-

ing from the opinions of his more optimistic colleagues, Warren’s

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testimony allowed readers—and listeners—to infer that the King was

incurably insane.

An engraving by Thomas Rowlandson titled
Filial Piety
(BM

Satires 7378) illustrates the uncertainty generated by equivocations

like Warren’s and stresses the political power of information. The

only known depiction of the King during his illness (Baker 68),
Filial

Piety
was published on November 25, 1788, about a week before the

opening of the regency debates. The engraving shows the Prince of

Wales, accompanied by Sheridan and Hanger, bursting into the royal

bedchamber. The three of them look toward the ailing King, as the

Prince says, “Damme, come along. I’ll see if the Old Fellow’s—or

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not.” The King, looking ill but not insane, turns his face away from

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the door, one hand on his bowed head, the other stretched out

toward the Prince and his companions, who, in their boisterousness,

have knocked over a table, spilling a goblet, perhaps of communion

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wine. Between the bed and the door sits a cleric, who has been inter-

rupted in his reading of a paper titled “A Prayer for the Restoration

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of Health.” He seems appalled at the intrusion, although he faces

directly out, looking at neither the King nor the Prince. Above his

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head is a painting of “The Prodigal Son.” None of the three intrud-

ers stands upright: the Prince totters on one leg, either overset by

the sudden giving way of the door or pushed from behind by his

companions, who are capering. Sheridan is tipping his hat. Hanger

holds a bottle and has a cudgel under one arm.29 The Prince looks

younger than his twenty-six years, stressing the gap between him and

his companions, both a decade older than he.

The picture settles the question of the King’s malady but leaves

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open the question of whether there is a monarch. This king, an object

of sympathy, is clearly not mad; anxieties about his sanity are moti-

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vated by self-interest. The source of these anxieties in the picture, the

Prince who interrupts his evening carouse to barge into his father’s

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sickroom, is a disastrous choice to replace this dignified and pious

monarch. Nor is he a worthy repository for the truth of the King’s

condition, despite, or because of, his eagerness to “see” for himself.

Beneath the satire of its manifest unruliness,
Filial Piety
is an image

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of control. It is about containing, not disseminating information.

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In the picture, the figures of Sheridan, Hanger, and the Prince all

look in the same direction as the King: they are staring at him; he is

turning away from them. His modesty reinforces the outrage of their

intrusion. The cleric alone looks out of the engraving toward us. The

direction of his gaze reinforces not only our outrage but also our

omniscience and our impotence. Our perspective allows us the same

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ocular proof the Prince seeks, while our presumptive sobriety allows

us a clearer vision. We don’t see what he sees, distorted, perhaps, by

alcohol and avarice, as Leontes’s and Othello’s vision is by jealousy.

We see both what is really happening and that the Prince’s vision is

distorted. Outside the frame as we are, however, we cannot make use

of the information, while the Prince and his friends can reinterpret

and manipulate it as they like.

The intertextuality of the engraving is directed toward ironic com-

mentary. Contemporary satires made use of comparisons between

the Prince of Wales and Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, often depicting

Prince George under the spell of a Falstaffian Fox.30 This picture

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echoes a scene from
2 Henry IV
, in which the Prince visits his dying

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father, asleep with the crown on a pillow next to his head. Believing

the King is already dead, he takes the crown with him into another

room, where he apostrophizes it as a metonym for the heavy weight of

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monarchy that will soon descend on him. When the King awakens to

find both crown and heir gone, the Prince is able to redeem himself

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from the charge of unfilial ambition and parricidal greed by the evi-

dence that he has been weeping.31 Like the prince in the engraving,

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Shakespeare’s prince has been partying with his “continual followers”

(
2 Henry IV
4. 3. 53) before returning to the quiet of the sick room.

This prince, in contrast, does not leave the party behind, a presage

of when he will, “in the perfectness of time / Cast off his followers”

(
2 Henry IV
4. 3. 74–75). Instead, he brings the party with him and

rejoices, rather than grieving, at the prospect of his father’s demise

and his succession. Like the prodigal son pictured on the wall in the

center of the engraving, the other principal intertext for the engrav-

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ing, he has squandered his patrimony. Unlike the prodigal son, how-

ever, he is not repentant. The penitent in the picture faces toward

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the Prince. The mirroring in their imagined confrontation stresses

their differences: one comes to, the other from a celebration; one is

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returning, the other intruding; one penitent, the other triumphant.

“For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is

found” (Luke 15: 24). In Rowlandson’s reworking of this parable of

contrition and forgiveness, both King and Prince are “found”—that

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is, discovered in their true characters. But, while the Prince is found

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out to be the unfilial profligate most people believed him to be, the

King is discovered to be not “lost” after all. He does not wander; he

is in his perfect mind; the illness is confined to his frame.32

The picture is a morality tale of the reversionary interest, con-

trasting the heir’s loose behavior with his father’s piety and sobriety.

Inasmuch as the King’s infirmity signals his martyr-like virtue, the

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Prince’s youth, good looks, and glowing health become standards

for his profligacy. The one is in motion, his face animated; the other

is motionless, with head and eyes cast down. Such an insistence on

difference, however, belies the similarities between father and son,

in particular the fact that both had already begun to show signs of

the “humour to which [the] whole family is subject” (J. Crawford

to Duchess of Devonshire, November 7, 1788. In
Georgiana
138).

If, as Walpole suggested, father and son took opposite approaches to

controlling the family malady, the King’s method was not working

any better than the Prince’s. The father’s asceticism did not protect

him from attacks. His son’s partying invited them. What reason had

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Parliament to trust the monarchy to either?

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The Prince’s habits of excess had already forced an association with

debility. The satires of the earlier part of the decade connected his

heavy drinking with his sexuality in ways that both highlight and

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undercut differences between father and son. A case in point is the

story of the drinking party at the home of Lord Chesterfield that

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took place sometime in the spring of 1781, and that appears both

in
Effusions of Love
and in
Memoirs of Perdita
. Walpole writes about

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this escapade in his
Journals
, calling it “a scene that divulged all that

till now had been only whispered.” One evening, the Prince and

some of his boon companions “went to Blackheath to sup with Lord

Chesterfield, who, being married, would not consent to send for the

company the Prince required.” Despite or because of this deficiency,

they “all got immediately drunk, and the Prince was forced to lie

down on a bed for some time.” When he recovered, he and his friends

got into a fight with “a large fierce house-dog,” in which one man

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tried “to tear out [the dog’s] tongue” and two others were injured,

one seriously. Sometime after this, they all fell asleep again, and the

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party broke up early the next day:

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At six in the morning, when the Prince was to return, Lord Chesterfield

took up a candle to light him, but was so drunk that he fell down the

steps into the area, and, it was thought, had fractured his skull. That

accident spread the whole history of the debauch, and the King was so

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shocked that he fell ill on it, and told the Duke of Gloucester that he

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had not slept for ten nights, and that whenever he fretted the bile fell

on his breast. As he was not ill on any of the disgraces of the war, he

showed how little he had taken them to heart. (Walpole II. 361)

In
Effusions of Love
, the story appears in two segments, both of

which explain Florizel’s absences from Perdita, as if the two kinds

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of licentiousness are interchangeable and make up the whole of his

recreations: when he isn’t whoring, he’s drinking. When Perdita

complains at not having seen him or received a letter from him in

“three whole days—three whole nights” (15), he responds with the

story of having gotten “damnably d – –” at Lord Chesterfield’s (16).

In another letter, he reveals “the secret” of why he has been absent

“since Saturday”: “We have had another
batch
with C – – d” (20). In

this second escapade, it is the Prince who suffers the near-fatal fall

down the stairs:

As to my part, I own to you, I was d – – y cut, and made a mistake that

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had like to have proved fatal to me. I rose early in the morning, to get

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back to W – – r in time; and turning to the wrong stair-case, tumbled

over the balustrades, but have escaped with no other detriment than

that of tearing my coat. (20)

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Memoirs of Perdita
maintains this association of drinking and dalli-

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ance. After repeating the story from
Effusions
, collapsed once again