Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (46 page)

romso - PT

engraving remaps these signifiers into a spatial organization, placed

in accordance with the panes in the bow window of the print shop.

lioteket i

The panes’ uneven numbers—three rows with seven panes in each

row—allow him to emphasize certain prints by placing them in the

sitetsbib

center of a row. The prints are also sized differently so that some

prints occupy an entire pane, while other rows have two or four prints

in a pane. Across the top row are seven large prints. All are emblem-

atic rather than referencing a particular event, and the tone is of out-

raged loyalism. In the center row, engravings are grouped four to a

pane. Viewed from left to right, the order resembles the trajectory of

The Attorney-General’s Charges
, beginning with images of Caroline

and Pergami, followed by references to the charges, and ending with

images of Caroline in London. This narrative works if one takes this

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

to be two rows of fourteen engravings each, the first dominated by

.palgra

Caroline and Pergami, and the second by Caroline and Matthew

Wood, radical Alderman and former Lord Mayor of London, who

om www

supported the Queen’s cause. Lane depicts Wood as a replacement for

Pergami—another upstart who seduces the Queen for his own ends.

Viewed this way, the two smaller rows trace the progress of two love

affairs, one succeeding the other. In b oth, anti-Caroline sentiment

yright material fr

registers equally in images of the Queen as the dupe of scheming men

Cop

and in images of the Queen as a masculinized voluptuary, a female

Charles II, whose sexuality puts a nation at risk.

The foursquare arrangement of the panes complicates the nar-

rative of the left-to-right organization, offering instead a collection

of themed groupings and highlighting the prints’ intertextuality.

Contiguity shapes meaning in this arrangement, sometimes in ways

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_07_con.indd 169

9780230616301_07_con.indd 169

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

170

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

that replicate or intensify the linear order, sometimes in ways the left-

to-right arrangement does not anticipate. The first two groupings

emphasize Caroline’s vulnerability to Pergami and Wood by position-

ing her next to or between her lanky companions, even more absurdly

foreshortened by contrast. In
A Pas de Deux, or, Love at First Sight

and
Bat, Cat, and Mat
immediately below it, Caroline and her part-

ners dance while attendants wait uncertainly by an empty carriage. In

the lower print, Caroline links arms with both Pergami and Wood.

The pas de deux has become a pas de trois. Wood’s capering step, the

angle of his head, and the expression on his face echo Caroline in the

first print. He looks back at her but gestures forward toward Calais

veConnect - 2011-04-02

with his doffed hat, while Pergami, the only one not in motion, clasps

algra

her other arm, looking anxious, and gestures back toward St. Omer.

Caroline’s knowing simper in the first print has been replaced by

a fixed and vacant smile, directed at neither of the men. The text

romso - PT

beneath the picture reads, “How happy could I be with either,” but

Wood’s leer, Pergami’s worried expression, and Caroline’s vacancy all

lioteket i

suggest that
her
happiness is no longer the point. She is even less an

agent than in the first print. The later print gives a sinister cast to

sitetsbib

the earlier, making Caroline’s easy availab ility a cause for concern:

a queen swayed equally by up-and-coming radical politicians and

shady gigolos. Her mindless contentment and lack of discrimination

emblemize the folly, weakness, wrong feeling, and obstinacy that so

worried Croker in his letter to Peel. Not just the agent of radicalism,

Caroline is the sign of radicalism’s dangerous hold over an unthink-

ing people.

The theme of a woman choosing b etween two men echoes

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

eighteenth-century images of Mary Robinson, like the anonymous

Paradise Regain’d
(1783, BM Satires 6319), which pictures Fox

.palgra

wooing Robinson while the Prince watches from behind a tree. In

depicting transactions in which commodified women are exchanged

om www

between men, both engravings hint at prostitution.7 But Robinson’s

demureness in the earlier print is assumed, a cover for her calculation.

Her self-interest is evident in Fox’s supplicating position8 and in the

Prince’s half-sympathetic, half-gleeful comment, “Ha! Ha! Ha! Poor

yright material fr

Charley.” His satisfaction at having gotten rid of Robinson equals

Cop

his voyeuristic pleasure in watching her take in his companion.9 The

woman’s happiness
is
the point here—the only point, b ecause

the Prince’s happiness depends on her success in capturing his friend.

The paradise that Robinson has regained in the picture consists in

being once again the mistress of a powerful man. If the Prince is

relieved to be rid of her while Fox is eager to win her, their contrasted

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_07_con.indd 170

9780230616301_07_con.indd 170

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

T h e L a t e Q u e e n a n d t h e P r o g r e s s o f R o y a l t y 171

feelings reflect the way in which the cost of maintenance translates to

the value in maintaining her. She is available but is not easily won—

like the Robinson of the tête-à-têtes, “not so easy a conquest as many

imagined.” Her power over the men lies in her being both a liability

and an asset. Not so Caroline, whose precarious posture stresses her

lack of agency; she totters on one leg, only held upright by the clasped

arms of the rival men.

The engravings in the second group of four continue the theme

of grotesque pairings, although the images are more ribald than in

the first panel.
A Wooden Substitute, or Any Port in a Storm
, placed

next to
A Parting Hug
, suggests both that Caroline has made her

veConnect - 2011-04-02

choice and that its expediency makes it not a real choice. She is more

algra

demurely dressed in this print than usual b ut still shows plenty of

bosom. Two miniatures, one of Pergami and one of Wood, hang

suggestively b elow her waist.10 Animal imagery dominates the next

romso - PT

two groupings.
The Como-cal Hobby
depicts Pergami astride a goat

with Caroline’s smiling face. Below this is
The Man of the Woods and

lioteket i

the Cat-o’-mountain
, depicting a monkey with Wood’s head reach-

ing for the paw of a cat-shaped Caroline. Both sit before a fire in

sitetsbib

which a “kettle of fish” is cooking on the hob. Below and next to

it are four chestnuts marked “Privileges”; “Rights”; “Liturgy,” and

“St. Catherine’s.”11 The text reads:

A Cat and Monkey tired of play

Basking before the fire lay

Pug in the fire a chestnut spied.

Puss lend me your paw, he slyly cried!

And we the Booty will divide!!12

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

.palgra

In both engravings, Caroline’s sexuality is grotesque and bestial. The

cat who shyly extends her paw is a more demure image than the goat

om www

who is ridden, but the second picture is glossed with the information

that the two creatures are “tired of play” and “[b]asking b efore the

fire,” suggesting post-coital exhaustion.

Another pane groups
Tent-ation
in the top half with
Dido in Despair

yright material fr

immediately below. In the first, Caroline, in modest night-dress and

Cop

cap, watches coyly from her pallet as Pergami passes a candle to a

servant outside the tent flap. This is paired with an image of a later

Caroline in daytime, night-dress in disarray, tearing at her hair and

tottering on the edge of a rumpled bed as she gazes out a window to

the left. As with the animal engravings, the lower picture glosses the

one above, replacing the smiling, neatly buttoned up Caroline with

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_07_con.indd 171

9780230616301_07_con.indd 171

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

172

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

images suggestive of prostitution. Lane is here reimagining Gillray’s

1801 engraving of Lady Hamilton sitting on the edge of a bed, while

Lord Nelson’s fleet is pictured sailing away in the open window (BM

Satires 9752).

In the Hamilton print, Gillray references an earlier engraving of

his,
The Whore’s Last Shift
(1779, BM Satires 5604), in which a naked

prostitute, her back to the open window, washes out a shift in a broken

chamber pot. The woman in this picture bears no immediate resem-

blance to Lady Hamilton; she is absorbed in a mundane task of her

profession and displays none of the hair-tearing dishabille and anguish

evident in the later engravings by Gillray and Lane. Her nakedness

veConnect - 2011-04-02

is practical and unselfconscious, and her hair is elaborately coifed—

algra

making her lean figure look even more elongated. Nonetheless, she

and Lady Hamilton are figures for each other. Her room is stark in

comparison with the later engravings, but it is similarly arranged. The

romso - PT

bed and window are in the same relation to each other, and to the cen-

tral figure. In the window is tacked a b roadside b allad titled “The

lioteket i

comforts of Single Life,” while on the wall behind her she has fixed a

torn picture titled “
Ariadne Forsaken
.” Gillray uses this intertextual

sitetsbib

gloss again in
Dido, in Despair!
”13 where a book open on the win-

dow seat appears to reproduce a detail from Sebastiano Ricci’s early

eighteenth-century painting,
Bacchus and Ariadne
(NG 851). The

book in Gillray’s engraving is titled “
Studies of Academic Attitudes

taken from the Life
,” but the image on the facing page recalls Ricci’s

painting of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus, lying naked, right arm

extended, beneath billowing red drapery. Gillray’s detail is of Ariadne

only; he eliminates the facing image of Bacchus, but the fact that she

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

was not forsaken for long before being discovered by another lover is

suggested both in the sleeping figure of Sir William Hamilton in the

.palgra

bed behind his wife and in the title of the earlier engraving, preparing

for her last “shift.”14

om www

Lane’s parody, typically, inverts the gender expectations of Gillray’s

original: the book lying open at Caroline’s feet is a “
Catalogue of

Fancy Men
,” suggesting she is the client rather than the whore,15

an idea further stressed by the verses beneath each picture. Gillray’s

yright material fr

engraving adapts the first verse from the popular ballad, “The Blue

Cop

Bells of Scotland,” with the highland laddie replaced by a gallant

sailor and with lines added and altered to fix the identifications of

Nelson and Lady Hamilton:

Ah, where, & ah where, is my gallant Sailor gone?

He’s gone to Fight the Frenchmen, for George upon the Throne,

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_07_con.indd 172

9780230616301_07_con.indd 172

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

T h e L a t e Q u e e n a n d t h e P r o g r e s s o f R o y a l t y 173

He’s gone to Fight ye Frenchmen, t’loose t’other Arm & Eye,

And left me with the old Antiques, to lay me down and cry.16

In Lane’s engraving, the military references have disappeared. The gal-

lant sailor has become a gallant courier, and Caroline is the abandon-