Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (25 page)

volume
British Classics
collection, which was published from 1804

to 1810 and includes both volumes of the short-lived periodical. The

passages are the same in both
The Guardian
and
The Royal Legend
,

although they are neither an exact quote nor an exact translation. The

actual passage is in line twelve from Book Two and reads “
quamquam

animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit / incipiam
” (“
incipiam
”

begins line thirteen). The lines come from the beginning of Aeneas’s

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narration of the fall of Troy and mean, roughly, “Although my mind

shudders to remember and flees from the grief, I will begin.” The

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alterations work more neatly with the satire of
The Royal Legend
than

the original would have. The subordinating conjunction
quamquam

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(“although” or “even if”) is illogical out of context and would be

particularly confusing in an epigraph, especially given the omission of

the main verb
incipiam
, while the referent for
quorum
may be taken

as the text itself. The translation also leaves out a word or two50 and

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collapses
animus
(“mind”) with
meminisse
(“to remember”) into the

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single word “memory.”

Thus discerning readers can learn, even before they begin this

text, that memory, not history, is the vehicle for understanding its

relevance. And memory is traumatic. Aeneas is recalling the collapse

of a state, the end of a long and devastating struggle, and an event in

which he was a principal actor. His speech to Dido emphasizes that

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

the act of remembering is both anticipatory and reflective: I am going

to remember (
incipiam
), and when I do it will cause me grief. For

him, recollection offers no possibility of recovery. Not so the Prince.

The act of remembering recorded within the text of
The Royal Legend

is cathartic and exculpatory. When his life story is retold via a recov-

ered text, the Prince is already halfway to reformation. He first recoils

in horror at the errors he reads, and then resolves to remake him-

self. Such redemption is only possible, however, within the fabulous

realm of the text’s ahistorical past; it is only credible to minds glutted

on luxurious wonders. The anonymous “I” of the translated motto

(whose memory recoils? Aeneas’s? Prince George’s? The author’s?

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The reader’s?) makes telling or reading this tale an act of recollec-

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tion without recovery. The speaker’s anonymity also highlights the

title’s ambiguity as the referent for
quorum
, as
that
at which memory

recoils. What is the royal legend? Is it a tale of royalty, and is the

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speaker who recoils a version of the Prince who starts at reading his

own life in print? Or is royalty, or monarchy, the legend?51 If read-

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ers recognize the passage’s original context, the referent is a state—

Troy—that has already fallen. And if they transfer that significance

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to the current text, the legend they are about to read, the anticipated

memory from which both readers and writer shrink, is the tale of

another state that has already collapsed, this time not as a result of a

siege but under the weight of its rulers’ incapacities. In the pseudo-

antiquarian narrative of the text’s discovery, the found artifact, the

royal legend, has already been ravaged beyond recovery. The novel we

read instead is a fantasy.

The Royal Legend
is a latecomer among novelizations of the Prince

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of Wales’s sexual life. It was written more than twenty-five years

after the Florizel and Perdita novels, the King letters, or the
Memoirs

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of Perdita
, and twenty years after the last issue of
The Rambler’s

Magazine
. In the intervening decades, Robinson had become an

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acclaimed poet and novelist and died just before the publication of

her
Memoirs
.52 The King had suffered at least one more bout of his

mysterious illness; the Prince had acquired numerous additional mis-

tresses and had married and conceived a child with his cousin Caroline

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of Brunswick. He had been estranged from his wife for over ten years

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by 1808. His recent, clumsy attempt to divorce her by accusing her

of having mothered an illegitimate child provoked public outrage

and sympathy for the Princess that continued to erupt periodically

throughout the next decade.

Some of that outrage and sympathy inform the structure of this

novel. Like the eighteenth-century texts,
The Royal Legend
mixes its

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W a n d e r i n g R o y a l s

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political satire with other modes, not puffery or pornography this

time but gothic and sentimental romance. This generic slipperiness

is in part a scattershot marketing technique—offering something for

everyone. The mixed modes also temper critique of monarchy with

popular forms that trade on the royals’ celebrity, and on the relation-

ship between celebrities and fictional characters, a relationship that,

as Tom Mole has pointed out, consists in their common familiarity to

consumers of print. Like the famous courtesan readers feel they know

because they have read her biography in a tête-à-tête, like the beauti-

ful young damsel they feel they know because they have wept over her

familiar letters, royal characters are household names. They are known

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not only as political figures whose actions—making war on America;

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firing a prime minister; promising a mistress 20,000 pounds; marry-

ing a Catholic; talking to trees—affect the nation. They are also part

of the hermeneutic of intimacy, the “commercialised interpenetra-

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tion” (Mole,
Byron’s Romantic Celebrity
5) of the public and private

realms that characterized emerging celebrity culture in the romantic

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period. As “Henry, Prince of Wales,” “the Cavalier,” and “Carlina,”

or, later, in Thomas Ashe’s representation, “The Marquis of Albion”

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and “Caroline,” they are like “Byron”: public figures whose real (that

is, publicly traded private) selves we insist we know.

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C h a p t e r T h r e e

Th e Nov e l , t h e R e ge nc y, a n d

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t h e Dom e st ic at ion of Roya lt y

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n March 1813, Princess Caroline published the proceedings of the

1806 secret commission, known as the “delicate investigation,” that

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examined the accusations of adultery made against her by her former

friend Lady Douglas. Her goal was to embarrass her estranged husband

and pressure him to give her greater access to their daughter, Princess

Charlotte. The decision to publish the royal commission’s report of

the investigation, together with a letter addressed to the Regent from

the Princess, was as much an attack by Whigs on their former sup-

porter and his Tory allies as it was an airing of dirty royal linen. But

as a publication of domestic affairs, it accomplished several mingled

tasks. The report garnered sympathy for the wronged Princess, whose

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choices, although not always wise, had certainly been no worse than

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her husband’s—and he had never treated her as the public believed he

ought to have. The Prince and Princess were first cousins; they mar-

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ried in 1795 as part of an arrangement in which Parliament agreed to

provide an allowance that would cover the Prince’s substantial debts.

They had never seen each other. The Prince brought to the marriage

at least one current mistress and a secret wife, neither of whom he was

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willing to give up on marrying his cousin. The marriage produced

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one child, Princess Charlotte, but the couple separated shortly after

she was born. By the time of the commission report, they had been

living apart for a decade.

The report exonerated Caroline from the linchpin of the Prince’s

case against her: the accusation that she had adulterous affairs

and that her adopted son, Willy Austin, was her illegitimate child.

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The evidence strongly suggested that Lady Douglas’s testimony,

on which the accusation chiefly rested, had been fabricated.1 The

Princess’s advisors, among them Lord Eldon and Spencer Perceval,

concluded that Douglas could not be prosecuted for perjury, how-

ever, because the commission was not a court of law. “The Book,”

as the report of the “delicate investigation” was known, was printed

in limited numbers in early 1807 but suppressed by then Chancellor

of the Exchequer Perceval after the fall of Lord Grenville’s ministry,

before any copies had circulated publicly. Although not published

until 1813, its contents were the subject of widespread rumor and

speculation, most of it sympathetic to the Princess and critical of the

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commissioners’ prosecutorial zeal. Rogue copies were said to be in

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the hands of booksellers, but none was ever made public.2

Though officially exonerating the Princess, the Book
contained

lurid testimony from members of the Princess’s household and

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described a pattern of conduct inconsistent with the public percep-

tion of how a princess, or any lady, should behave. In July 1806 the

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commissioners concluded there was “no foundation” for a belief that