Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (28 page)

feast from
Josephus
and the
Bible
! (324)

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

The reviewer here draws a contrast between form and content that

demonstrates the ineptitude of Ashe’s chicanery, while still condemn-

ing him as a fraud. Robert, or “Romeo” or “Cockadoodle,” Coates

was famous partly for his appallingly bad acting and partly for his

public display of wealth. He was known as “ Cockadoodle” Coates

because of his practice of driving around Bath in a curricle shaped

like a kettledrum and emblazoned with the motto, “Whilst I live I’ll

crow.” The nickname “Romeo” came from a performance as Romeo

in
Romeo and Juliet
, in which he was laughed off the stage before

the end of the play. Reading Ashe, the comparison suggests, is like

watching a bad actor, in whose hands great characters look ridiculous,

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and tragedy descends into farce. Ashe’s inability to do justice to the

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words of Josephus and the Old Testament suggests his inability to

write, sympathetically or otherwise, about the royal family. As with

Romeo Coates, the contrast between the practitioner and his subject

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matter is too great.

Both the intensity and focus of the
Satirist
attack suggest what

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Margaret Russett calls the “ prosecutorial style of literary criticism”

that developed throughout the later eighteenth century and into the

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romantic period. This “legalistic” approach to criticism (
Fictions and

Fakes
16) coincided with the rash of literary forgeries from Chatterton

to Hogg.13
The Spirit of “the Book”
is not a forgery in the sense that

Chatterton’s Rowley poems or Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries are. It

shares enough of the features of these literary fakes, however, to allow

the Satirist to assume a juridical stance designed as much to elevate

his status as reviewer as to discredit Ashe. Like Chatterton, Ireland,

Ossian
’s MacPherson, or Hogg, Ashe claims to have stumbled upon a

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manuscript whose rarity and value only he can adequately gauge. His

discernment rewrites happenstance as privilege. “This information

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was not cast away upon me” (
Memoirs and Confessions
III. 83), as it

might have been on a less discriminating and less enterprising reader.

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Prevented by the machinations of a corrupt government from pub-

lishing the information in its original form, he publishes its “spirit”

instead.

Russett observes that “found manuscript” stories like Ashe’s and

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others’ “
fictionalized
literary production—turned writing in on

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itself—by making the interest of the text depend on how it came into

being” (25). Ashe’s discovery narrative differs from either the pseudo-

antiquarianism of
The Royal Legend
or the satire of the Florizel and

Perdita novels in making the discoverer/editor a central character.

If he had carried out his threat to publish his alleged excerpts from

the actual Book, he would have been closer to literary forgers like

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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 101

Chatterton and Ireland than he was. His claim of access to the origi-

nal document was flimsy, and he would have had to work, as they

did, to produce a plausible reproduction of style and, in this case, sub-

stance (even more elusive). His decision to render instead the “spirit”

of the original document makes him a different kind of impersonator.

His claim of privileged possession depends on his ability to imitate

not the style of the writer but the voice of the central character. His

is not the ear that identifies the idiosyncratic style of Shakespeare or

foundational English or Gaelic lyric; it is the ear into which a princess

pours her confessions. The fantasy of identification is not a family

romance of noble literary progenitors but an imagined intimacy with

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royalty.14

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Ashe is not entitled to claim this intimacy, the Satirist suggests,

because his clumsiness as an imitator of his own intertexts reiterates

his social unfitness to the task of reproducing royalty. Like an ama-

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teur or a barnyard animal squawking Shakespeare, he utterly lacks

the discrimination or the inside knowledge that would enable him

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to render the intimate thoughts of a princess. The reviewer’s empha-

sis in the above passage deriding Ashe’s plagiarisms—italics as well

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as punctuation—indicates his courtroom stance. With a flourish

he will reveal the truth that Ashe’s sleights of hand are intended to

obscure. It does not matter that Ashe named both his sources. This

reviewer often identifies as clumsy duplicity something that is more

complicated. He meticulously provides the real names behind Ashe’s

slender disguises for characters and locations: “We cannot imagine

why Mr.
Ashe
always dashes the names of all his English places and

towns; even England is always printed E – – -d” (324). He declares

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in a parenthesis, “we purposely divest the characters of the borrowed

names by which the author foolishly hopes to defend himself against

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the outraged laws of his country” (323). This claim is spurious, first

because the reviewer follows the same transparent convention (“the

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P. of W –” [323]) that he lampoons in Ashe. Further, the cryptonyms

Ashe gives his characters are most likely not intended to protect him

from the outraged laws of his country, which wouldn’t have been

outraged in any case. False names, partial names (such as “Caroline”

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or “Charlotte”), or names with missing letters replaced by dashes pro-

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vided no protection from prosecution for libel, if the writing itself was

intentionally defamatory. The reviewer tries to suggest that Ashe’s is

by punning on the subtitle of the novel, listing it, in the heading of

his review as
Memoirs of Caroline, Princess of Hasburgh; a Political

and Amatory
(
q.
Defamatory)
Romance
. But it is a stretch to call
The

Spirit of “the B ook”
defamatory. Ashe is careful not to impugn the

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

character or fitness for office of any member of the royal family. His

borrowed or partially elided names are transparent, and he assumes

his readers will easily identify the real names behind the false ones.

His aim is to give them the pleasant sense of being winked at, of

being in the know. His book contains no facts not already printed in

newspapers because he wants his readers’ general and public knowl-

edge to feel like particular and intimate knowledge.

The Satirist’s aim is to show Ashe’s unworthiness to trade on—and

market—this intimacy. He is unsuited for the role, not only because of

what he is
not
(in the know himself; a good writer; even an adequate

imitator of other writers), but also because of what he
is
. Half of the

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Satirist
article is devoted to exposing Ashe as a buffoon and petty crim-

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inal, in language that moves between exaggerated contempt and moral

indignation. Like Coates, whose nicknames included “Diamond,” for

his habit of displaying the large collection of diamonds he inherited

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from his planter father, Ashe had a variety of soubriquets. Some of

these were publishing pseudonyms used for periodical articles, in the

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same vein as “ Cantab.” and “A Briton,” both among
The Satirist
’s

collection of recurring disguises. But the reviewer makes no distinc-

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tion between these and Ashe’s less legitimate aliases, lumping them all

together as signs of his disreputability. And—again the Coates refer-

ence is apt—disreputability consists in equal and overlapping parts of

fraudulence and an absurdly inflated ego:

In our last Number we only mentioned Mr. Ashe as having assumed

three titles
. Now a
three titled
author, like a
three tailed
bashaw, must

be a very distinguished character; but as
three titles
are not, like three

tails, indicative of the
most exalted
station which their bearer can

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acquire, we feel ourselves extremely culpable for having neglected to

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enumerate
all the honours
of the gentleman, whose conduct and whose

book are now the objects of our examination. Be it therefore known

to all whom it may concern (among whom every
tradesman
in the

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kingdom is included), that Thomas Ashe,
alias
Anvil,
alias
Anville,

alias
Sidney, in addition to his titles of Captain, Esquire, Author, and

Envoy, has assumed and
exercised
the character of
Secretary of Legation

to Lord Strangforth! Diamond merchant
!
Money smith
at St. Michael’s,

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and editor of a Sunday newspaper in London. (319–20)

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The titles, like the aliases, are blinds that, when listed cumulatively

reveal rather than conceal the dishonor of the man. The Satirist

claims that the new titles come by way of one of Ashe’s “d – – d good-

natured friends” (319), apparently offended at the first half of the

review. This “friend” is meant to be taken by the Satirist’s readers as

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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 103

Ashe himself; more likely the reviewer supplied the titles, especially as

they gave him an opportunity to provide several unsavory back-stories

at once. The length of the list—the crescendo effect produced by

the repetition (“alias . . . alias . . . alias”) and the increasing italics and

exclamation points—suggests an accumulation of misdeeds, a com-

plex of lies and false identities.15 The final title, “editor of a Sunday

newspaper in London,” is the only one Ashe legitimately held. Its

placement at the end of this catalogue of vices has the effect of mak-

ing it seem the most disreputable of all. This final crime unites and

explains the others. What looks like a picaresque summary is a single

story. The newspaper editor is Sidney; Sidney is Anville, and Anville

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is Ashe, the rogue who posed as Lord Strangford’s secretary, and traf-

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ficked, equally unsuccessfully, in contraband diamonds, counterfeit

bank notes, and information.

Ashe was a committed blackmailer, although not, it appears, a very

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good one. According to his own account, his goals in writing
The

Spirit of “the Book”
were extortion and revenge. In August 1810, Ashe

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published a notice in
The Phoenix
, the Sunday newspaper mentioned

in
The Satirist
, which he edited under the pseudonym “Sidney.” The

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advertisement gave a history of the Book’s printing and suppression,

and claimed that the latter was in return for Perceval’s elevation to

Prime Minister. Perceval, Ashe said, had extorted from the royal fam-