Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (47 page)

ing, if remorseful, lover, whose query about where her paramour lies

suggests an anxiety that he has found consolation for her absence:

Ah! where, and ah where, does my gallant Courier lie?

For me does he oft on his downy pillow sigh,

I left him on the Continent, to claim my half-a-Crown

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And I wish to my heart, I could have him here in Town.

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The final set of panes in Lane’s print seems to contain two

rows each of landscape-style engravings, although the b ottom

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row is obscured by the heads of the crowd outside the print shop.

All of the engravings show either processions or set pieces involv-

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ing large crowds. At the center and appearing to fix most of the

viewers’ attention is Cruikshank’s
The Royal Extinguisher, or the

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King of Brobdignag & the Liliputians
. Cruikshank’s engraving is

another reworking of an earlier image: a 1795 print by his father,

Isaac Cruikshank, titled
The Royal Extinguisher or Gulliver Putting

out the Patriots of Lilliput!!!
(BM Satires 8701).17 This was a radi-

cal response to the Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices

Acts of 1795 and pictured Pitt as Gulliver extinguishing a crowd

of Whigs, including Fox and Sheridan. The later print inverts the

politics of the earlier one, showing a triumphant George IV holding

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a paper cone, marked, “Speech from the Throne,” over Caroline,

Wood, and a crowd of Jacobins, who are scattering in a panic. The

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cone references the King’s speech at the opening of Parliament in

January 1821, announcing that a 50,000 pound annuity would be

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paid to Caroline if she would agree to have her name stricken from

the liturgy. Caroline accepted the annuity in early March. She had

refused this same deal when it was first offered, and her supporters

took this about-face as a betrayal. Like the Parliamentary debates,

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the King’s speech was printed in the newspapers and in
Hansard
.

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As Brougham had already pointed out, this was a strategic use of

the print-consuming public as arbiters, and once again the public

had decided, this time on the other side of the question. If earlier

the Queen’s guilt had been overshadowed by the shady means of

establishing it, her ready abandonment of principle for self-interest

now testified to and compounded that guilt.

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174

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

Because the Queen was never actually “upon her trial,” all the tes-

timony collected throughout the fifteen years of the Queen Caroline

affair is recursive. The goal of the depositions collected in the green

b ags and in the Book, the examinations and cross-examinations of

witnesses, is to demonstrate either a guilt or innocence that the ques-

tioners have already accepted. At the same time both investigations

were governed by the belief that information is only meaningful when

understood temporally. The examiners were preoccupied with time,

with the need to estab lish duration and order: How long after the

Princess’s bed sheets were stained did Willy Austin come to live with

her? Was it before or after Pergami’s promotion that she decided to

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sleep without attendants? How long after the Princess dismissed her

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English retinue did Pergami’s family come to live with her? When was

her bed made up, and when was it rumpled? How long did Pergami

remain alone with the Princess while she bathed? While she changed

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her clothes? Humphrey’s pamphlet reflects this desire to establish a

chronology. There is no longer any need to ask the questions: all the

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events appear in their proper order. First Caroline and Pergami got

out of a carriage and danced together; then they attended the theater;

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next he dressed her for a masked ball; after that they ate together

on shipb oard and shared a tent; then she knighted him; then they

groped each other in another carriage; then she left him for England

and Alderman Wood; then she became queen of the radicals; then she

got too ambitious, and regretted it; then she was extinguished; then

she was repentant and alone.

In the print this chronology is shaded and shaped, positioned

in landscape-style arrangements that draw the eye to a triumphant

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point around which other events organize themselves, or grouped

in thematic clusters that allow one event to control the meaning of

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another. In “Honi. Soit.” Lane produces a visual narrative that, like

the testimony, is recursive, reiterating b ut compressing a temporal

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sequence. The prints reproduced in his engraving move forward but

also continually turn b ack on themselves. Repeating the sequences

of 1813 and 1820, in which testimony overshadowed and supplanted

judgment, their arrangement both makes available the damning evi-

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dence and suspends conclusion. Yet the title of the pamphlet reminds

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viewers that the conclusion is already history. Because the Queen is

dead, the question of whether she is Queen has been tabled. In both

print and pamphlet, Caroline is at once Queen and not-Queen. More

particularly, she is
not
“the Queen”; she
is
“the late Queen.” Her sta-

tus no longer matters politically. The pamphlet establishes Caroline’s

guilt in the guise of first presenting and then illustrating the charges

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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 175

against her. This sequence repeats the circularity of the testimony by

obscuring a distinction between charges and evidence: illustration

becomes demonstration. The effect of this wealth of illustration is to

turn the Queen into a keepsake.

With its glossy presentation and colored engravings,
The Attorney-

General’s Charges against the Late Queen
is as much collector’s item as

it is narrative.18 It is a souvenir all at once of the trial, the coronation,

and, because of its timing, the death of the late Queen—a memorial

of the events and their principal actor. As a collection it is reflec-

tive and retrospective in a way no individual print was. Engravings

of the royal family, like all political satire, depended for their success

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on their currency.19 Rowlandson’s
Filial Piety
is dated November 25,

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1788, two days before the Prince of Wales commissioned the first

official inquiry into the state of the King’s health. Gillray published

Wife and No Wife
on March 27, 1786, three months into the public

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speculation on the Prince’s secret marriage and a month before Fox’s

decisive speech in Parliament. When prints referenced events from the

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past, as many of Lane’s did, their focus was on those events as they

had been made current by legal and parliamentary debates. If the

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topics are no longer news, their political meanings are. Even when

engravings quote or parody earlier prints, their intertextuality stresses

their currency. An old issue is made new by its repositioning.

In their original form, Lane’s prints were active representations,

meant to be discussed with the situations they depict, not gazed at

and itemized like prints of Byron.20 which, like the woodcuts that

were sold with (but not in) early modern pornographic texts, could

be “enjoyed separately from the text on their own terms” (Toulalan

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240). The Byron prints pointed to interesting associations between

his poems and his life on which readers could speculate, but they

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did not depict that life. In Toulalan’s phrase, they were mnemonic

devices rather than illustrations. By contrast the earlier “elegant

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Copper-plate” engraving of Mary Robinson (
Rambler’s
187), accom-

panying
The Discovery: A New Comedy Enacted in Hyde Park
in the

Rambler’s Magazine
of May 1783, works as both illustration and

index. The sketch purports to reproduce, with much sexual punning,

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an incident in which Robinson slipped from her horse while riding in

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Hyde Park, temporarily exposing her “sark” (a transparent metonym

for genitalia). In the print, her audience is composed of Banastre

Tarleton, aiming a magnifying glass, another man who holds her

horse’s b ridle, and two others who look on from nearb y, one also

focusing a glass (
Rambler’s
186–87). Whether the incident of
The

Discovery
happened, the racy comments of the men mark the event

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176

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

as a performance, “enacted” for a public whose observation registers

as dialogue. Like the crowd outside Humphrey’s shop, the men both

look and talk, and the sketch ends with the same motto, “
honi soit

qui mal y pense
,” set off in italics at the bottom of the page. Unlike

the crowd in Lane’s engraving, however, these men are only looking

at, and talking about, one thing. Their pornographic gazes focus

narrowly on the woman’s genitalia, exposed by the activity of her

tumbling but static, the sign of her sexuality and their desire. Their

conversation is circular, always returning to the object at which they

stare. Constructed by their collective enjoyment, Robinson becomes

a “posture girl”—the term for a prostitute who assumed poses

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designed to exhibit her genitalia to paying customers.21 Her ability

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to arouse interest and incite conversation lies in stasis rather than

dynamism: the discovery that arrests all motion.

In the collection of prints, what began as illustration morphs into

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both commemoration and index. Lane’s original prints were dynamic

and current in the way of all political satire, but it is a short step from

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currency to obsolescence. Once the Queen has died, it no longer mat-

ters with whom she danced, or ate, or slept.
The Attorney-General’s

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Charges
avoids obsolescence by anthologizing the prints, converting

them into a memorial of the events and of their representation. This

is a different kind of retrospection from the combined nostalgia and

satire of
The Royal Legend
. In that text, the recent past was both

re-imagined as history and invoked as memory. Its retrospection is

tied to genre—to the fantastic as an element of both the gothic and

satire. Restructuring memory as a form of redemptive antiquarian-

ism, the anonymous author projects a fantasized alternative future.

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He redirects the progress of royalty, mixing memory with desire and

correcting, in his scholar-prince, the narcissism that, in Hazlitt’s

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formulation, renders kings imb ecilic madmen.22 For Hazlitt, the

degeneration of monarchs is “but natural” (339), by which he means

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constructed, but inevitably so. Kings are the product of a structure in

which “every thing forces them to concentrate their attention upon

themselves, and to consider their rank and privileges in connexion

with their private advantage, rather than with pub lic good” (339).