Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (27 page)

worth.
Pride and Prejudice
was published a month before the com-

mission report and Austen’s letter to her friend, Martha Lloyd. Its

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domestic realism is far removed from Ashe’s sentimental roman à clef.

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Nonetheless, both novels reflect similar assumptions: responsibility

for female bad behavior rests with husbands and fathers. This notion

was part of the bourgeois reframing of monarchy that Davidoff and

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Hall identify in later responses to the Queen Caroline affair.6

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Rendering the Spirit of Royalty:

Caroline, Ashe, and the Satirist

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Thomas Ashe, also known as Captain Ashe (1770–1835), was an

Irish Army officer, newspaper writer, travel writer, and occasional

blackmailer. He is probably best known for
The Spirit of “the Book”

and for his 1815 picaresque autobiography,
Memoirs and Confessions

of Captain Ashe
. He wrote
The Spirit of “the Book”; or, Memoirs of

Caroline Princess of Hasburgh, a Political and Amatory Romance

in Three Volumes
as a series of letters from Caroline to her daugh-

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ter Princess Charlotte. Ashe’s book is part political tract, part novel

of sentiment; it is not a satire on the royal family. Later supporters

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of Caroline used her cause as an argument for the abolition of the

monarchy, often representing her husband as a bloated tyrant. Ashe,

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on the other hand, struggles to portray the Princess sympathetically

while not offending any members of the royal family. He markets his

book as a thinly disguised representation of actual events, a work not

of fiction but of fact. The title promises to provide the essence—the

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“ spirit”—of the story that Ashe claims is given in the commission

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report, the details changed just enough to satisfy legality without

offsetting authenticity.

The Spirit of “the Book”
offers itself as an adequate, and more engag-

ing, substitute for the commission report. Its transparency is a part

of its packaging. Like the authors/editors of the Florizel and Perdita

novels, Ashe offers readers a novelization—not a fictionalization—of

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Th e N o v e l , R e g e n c y, D o m e s t i c a t i o n o f R o y a l t y

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the events they have been reading and hearing about for the past five

years. The politics of such a project in 1811 are complex. The origi-

nal commission was instituted under the auspices of the short-lived

Ministry of All the Talents, in the interests and at the insistence of

the Prince of Wales. During the years covered in the report, most of

the Princess’s companions were Tories; George Canning, who was to

become an important figure in George IV’s ministry, rising to Prime

Minister, was rumored to be one of her lovers.7 Perceval’s suppres-

sion of the Book was thus an act of political expediency cooperat-

ing with chivalrousness. By 1811, however, the Prince of Wales, now

Prince Regent, had abandoned his former companions, retained his

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father’s government, and signaled his Tory allegiance. It was now the

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Princess who partied with the Whigs. Staunch defenders of her repu-

tation, as Ashe styles himself, might reasonably expect to be aligned

with the opposition.
The Spirit of “the Book”
ought therefore to be a

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whig publication. But the trajectory of the narrative seems intended

to provide benign explanations for everything that appears suspect in

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the Princess’s public identity, including her estrangement from the

royal family, officially the occasion for the letters in the first place.

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Ashe’s slender narrative (most of the book is a hodgepodge of sen-

timental fiction and free-ranging social commentary) concentrates

on Caroline’s imagined youth and the circumstances and early years

of her marriage. In this narrative structuring, the Princess is both a

heroine of sensibility and the reader’s intimate friend. If the epistolary

novels of the Florizel and Perdita era offered readers plausible repro-

ductions of an actual correspondence, the epistolarity in Ashe’s novel

is discursive—favoring intimacy over authenticity, the spirit over the

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letter.

Ashe’s Caroline is a serious young woman, reclusive, studious, and

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devoted to family. Her gentleness and noble features make up for her

lack of conventional beauty. While still in Brunswick (“Hasburgh”),

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she falls in love with “ Algernon,” a young Irish soldier of infinite

sensibility but no pretensions to birth.8 Possibly she sleeps with him.

Her father, who is both lovingly paternalistic and tyrannically self-

interested, objects to the match. He forces her to marry the “Marquis

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of Albion,” son and heir of the “Duke of Edinburgh” and a man at

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once dissipated and honorable.9 When he learns that she has come to

him with her heart if not her person already engaged, the Marquis

nobly forgives her and offers her his friendship. But his former mis-

tress, “the Countess” (identifiable as the Prince’s lover, Lady Jersey),

through a combination of scandal-mongering and deliberately bad

sartorial advice, sullies her reputation and drives the pair apart just

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98

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

when Caroline discovers that she is pregnant with their daughter. The

couple nearly reconciles when the Marquis happens upon mother and

daughter after a several years’ absence and is overwhelmed with famil-

ial affection, but the machinations of the Countess again intervene

and lead to the opening of the delicate investigation.

Upon the closing of the commission report the entire royal family

is prepared to forgive Caroline, if she can account for the presence of

a mysterious stranger in her neighborhood, a search of whose cottage

reveals her miniature and a collection of poems written to her. The

stranger turns out to be Algernon. He has taken up residence near

Caroline, “ to enjoy the melancholy bliss of sometimes seeing, at a

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reverential distance, the object of [his] early love” (362). His second

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goal is to put in her way Willy Austin and restore the family romance

of his parentage. The child turns out to be the (legitimate) son not of

Caroline but of her childhood friends Melina and “the brave Prince

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L – – s” (362), whose own star-crossed love ended with their early

deaths. In the face of such conclusive proof of her innocence, the

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Marquis consents to a permanent, entirely amicable separation from

Caroline, and the story ends—without ever explaining why Caroline

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must continue to write to a daughter with whom she has apparently

been reunited.

Despite this and other irregularities,
The Spirit of “the Book”
was

quite popular. It was published in three duodecimo volumes and sold

for between fifteen and twenty-five shillings.10 Ashe’s novel went into

three editions in the first year, enough to make Ashe, who sold the

copyright for 250 pounds, regret having thrown away such a money

maker (
Memoirs and Confessions
III. 128–29). A fourth English edi-

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tion was published in 1812, as was a one-volume American edition,

published in Philadelphia. It was translated into French and German

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the following year. Although
The Spirit of “the Book”
is listed among

new publications in the
Edinburgh
and
Quarterly
reviews in autumn

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of 1811, the only full-length review appeared in
The Satirist, or

Monthly Meteor
in October 1811.11 The aim of this review is polemic.

The reviewer is not interested in discussing the book’s merits as a

novel but in uncovering its flaws as an exposé, most of which origi-

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nate in its author’s fraudulence. The Satirist focuses on the sentimen-

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tality in Ashe’s depiction of Caroline: the bereft and doting mother

of Brougham’s letter. Unlike Ashe, however, he divides sentimental-

ity from radicalism. According to the Satirist, when Ashe connects

Caroline’s devotion to her daughter with her advocacy for what looks

like free love, he infuses her story with a radicalism that discredits him

as an author. His heroine’s sexuality cancels out the domestic ideology

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that, for Brougham and Caroline, anchored her defense. The true

Princess could never contain both impulses; therefore, this must not

be the true Princess. The Satirist’s ad hominem attack against Ashe is

his way of entering into debates on the royal marriage. The radicalism

of his book, which must be inauthentic, is an import. It originates in

Ashe’s unscrupulousness, which comprehends his authorship as well

as his business dealings.

According to the review,
The Spirit of “the Book”
is both fraudu-

lent and libelous. It is fraudulent, first, because it contains no new

information:

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We did think it probable that Mr. Ashe might have procured a sight of

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a few loose sheets of “The Book,” through the assistance of a printer’s

devil or some similar agent; but having now read the whole of his three

paltry volumes we take upon ourselves to assert that he has never seen

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one line thereof
; for “The Spirit of the Book” does not contain a single

fact that has not appeared long ago, in all the newspapers. (“Review of

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New Publications” 325)

If the facts are nothing new, the portions of the book not grounded

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in verifiable fact are equally inauthentic. They are either derivative

or plagiarized. When he is inventing, Ashe writes “in language bor-

rowed . . . from Mesdames Radcliffe, [Charlotte] Smith, [Sydney]

Owenson, and other Romance writers and ‘disfigured to make it pass

for his own’ ” (323).12 The reviewer is no kinder to Ashe’s more direct

interpolations. Ashe devotes two pages to a paraphrase from Josephus’

Antiquities of the Jews
describing the dedication of Solomon’s temple.

The relevance of this digression is unclear. The occasion is a compari-

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son to a public gathering of the royal family. Most likely it is filler,

although it does support his image of Caroline as a serious-minded

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scholar. Ashe (or “Caroline”) supplies the sources for this account:

“Josephus tells us” (364–65) and, later, “or to tell it you in the more

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emphatical words of holy writ” (365). Nonetheless, the Satirist treats

this as another instance of rogue borrowing, the more egregious

because the sources are more elevated:

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Letter 51 is so truly ridiculous that we really felt amused at its contents;

but it was that sort of amusement which we experience at beholding

the finest characters of Shakespeare enacted by such a performer as

Mr. Coates of stage and
cockadoodle
notoriety. It commences with a

description of the court at Windsor, on a public thanksgiving day; then

gives the Princess Charlotte an elaborate account of
King Solomon’s