Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (49 page)

only the difference between the actuarial value of the King’s life-

interest and the successor’s reversion. This difference automatically

diminished as the value of the life-interest fell with the increasing

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age of the reigning monarch, while the political promissory notes

and post-obits of the heir-apparent, issued at a discount, redeemable

on accession, and taken up for capital appreciation, correspondingly

improved” (xi–xii).

5.
Pamela
, Hunt points out, is “[a] novel of many hundreds of pages”

that “could bring out a character over time and do so, moreover,

from the perspective of inside the self” (45). Citing correspondence

quoted in Richardson’s biography, Hunt points to the heightened

emotional identification readers reported upon reading the letters of

Pamela and Clarissa, which registered in fits of sleeplessness and pas-

sionate bursts of crying (45–46).

6. The affair itself was farcical. The Duke sometimes arrived at assigna-

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tions not only disguised but pretending to be deranged, so that he

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became known as “the Fool” (
Genuine Copies
51). The testimony at

the trial includes an account of the discovery of the couple, partly

undressed, sitting on the edge of a bed in an inn where they had been

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secretly meeting. Lady Grosvenor tried to escape into the next room,

but tripped and fell. When a servant went to her assistance, leaving

the front door unguarded, the Duke, who had, until this point stood

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“very much confused” in the middle of the room without speaking,

ran out the door. He then called observers to witness that he was not

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in the room, although at least one witness pointed out that he had

just seen him inside (52, 57).

7. A fair example of the absence of spelling, syntax, and sense is this

from Lady Grosvenor to Cumberland: “indeed my dear soul you

are very prudent in intending to go a little in publick before I came

to town, it wou’d really look much too particular just to come out

then & might cause remarks which possibly might be conveyed to my

Ld & every thing of that sort might rouze him & make him more

and more observant to prevent our Meetings, and the best thing we

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can possibly do now is to make him beleive [sic] all is over between

us, and we have really I beleive blinded him for some time at least he

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has no proof about us, & I hope to God that by degrees his suspicions

will be lull’d & then we may form some plans for our meeting happily

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we must not dispair but look forwards that is the only way to support

ourselves under our present unhappy situation & there is probability

of many things happening to mend the present, so we think like phi-

losophers & believe every thing is for the best & hope we may enjoy

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better days soon, & indeed I think it very probable my dearest & dear

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Soul with this idea be happy . . . .” (34–35).

8. In contrast,
The Budget of Love
contains the following, doubly ironic,

plea from Florizel: “Pray, my dearest PERDITA! keep a lock upon

my letters, lest the world should get hold of them; and then they

may transform them, as they did my Uncle’s and Lady G – –’s, into

nonsense, to render them ridiculous, and to make us the laughing-

stock of fools” (53). The fact that we read this demonstrates Perdita’s

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inability to keep a lock upon his letters, but it is left to us to decide

whether the world has transformed them or whether they were always

nonsense and their writers laughing-stocks—or, indeed, whether

what we are reading
is
nonsense or is coherent and eloquent, whether

the novel’s primary mode is satire or sentiment.

9. His language echoes the King’s own attempts to rein in his way-

ward son at around this time. In August of 1780 the King had writ-

ten, “you must acknowledge the truth of the position that every one

in this world has his peculiar duties to perform, and that the good

or bad example set by those in the higher stations must have some

effect on the general conduct of those in inferior ones” (Aspinall,

Correspondence
34). In December he elaborated on this point: “My

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inclination is to grant you all the rational amusement I can, and keep

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you out of what is improper, and so to steer you, that when arrived at

the full stage of manhood, you may thank me for having made you

escape evils that ill become a young man of rank, but in your exalted

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situation are criminal: for Princes must serve as examples to others,

and though not perhaps always so much copied in their virtues as

might be wished, yet if they deserve praise it will in some degree check

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the improper career of others” (37). The counsel for Lord Grosvenor

made this same argument against the Duke of Cumberland ten years

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earlier, arguing in his opening statement that “no given sum could

be punishment sufficient” for the Duke, “as the elevated rank and

situation of life he sustained, should the more deter him from setting

a bad example to the subordinate classes of society” (53).

10. Mellor gives as an example the 1784 engraving,
The Adventure of

Prince Pretty-Man
, in which the Prince, awkwardly straddling a

Falstaffian Fox, steals the Great Seal, while Robinson and Elizabeth

Armistead look on (242–43).

11. Russett observes that, “by limning the generic rules of authorial

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paratexts and by exaggerating the fantasy investments of literary-his-

torical narrative, forgery points toward the romantic understanding

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of literature as the continuous rediscovery of its own origins” (19).

Stories about (re)discovering “lost” manuscripts, of which, she points

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out, there were many versions throughout the Romantic period,

“can be seen as a transitional point on the way toward the Shelleyan

account of creativity as the recovery of a buried inspiration” (29).

12. In the line of descent, all the principals in the story are ultimately

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this man’s dupes. Florizel is foolish enough to write the letters in

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the first place; Perdita unaccountably keeps copies of both his letters

and her answers, reads them to her maid and entrusts her with the

originals, who, in turn, copies them and then gives them over to her

lover. The “instrumental caution” of the story ought to be as much

“never trust a lover” as “never trust a ‘favourite servant.’ ” That the

editor represents the broken bond as being between mistress and

servant signals the potential for radicalism behind satires of the royal

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family. His recovery of the story as a cautionary tale for his readers

establishes a literate, middle-class community, from which the naive

literacy of the maid and the unscrupulous literacy of her lover are

equally excluded.

13. Pierce Egan rejuvenated the letters as found documents when he

reprinted the
Effusions
letters in 1814 as
The Mistress of Royalty; Or, the

Loves of Florizel and Perdita: Portrayed in the Amatory Epistles
. Egan

concludes with an account of Robinson’s life after the affair with the

Prince and until her death, most of which has been lifted from her

Memoirs
. Like the editor of
Effusions
, he simultaneously evokes and

obscures the process of recovery, this time through use of the passive

voice: “That no
vacuum
may remain in the ‘LOVER’S CABINET’,

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the AMATORY EPISTLES of FLORIZEL and PERDITA have, for

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the information of the curious, been rescued from oblivion” (7).

14. Anne Mellor calls this the ‘starcrossed’ lovers account, in which

“both Perdita and Florizel are deeply in love” and are driven apart

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by the machinations of family members opposed to the inequality

of their union (244). Byrne discusses the Robinson/Northington

connection in her biography of Robinson (15). Adriana Craciun

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calls the “precariousness” of Robinson’s class position—some-

where between the bourgeois and the aristocratic and never quite

sitetsbib

either—a kind of “family romance.” She suggests that this pre-

cariousness allowed Robinson a feminist perspective unique to her

time, “from which she could find value in aristocratic femininity

and all it represented” (83).

15. As Mellor points out, both lovers in this account are novices—he by

virtue of age, she as the result of an unhappy marriage: “For Florizel,

it is his first and most passionate love; for Perdita, it is her first true

love (since she claimed never to have loved her husband)” (244).

Robinson promoted this account in her
Memoirs
, partly through

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emphasizing her extreme youth when she married Robinson, “only

three months” after she had stopped playing with dolls. “My heart,

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even when I knelt at the altar, was as free from any tender impression

as it had been at the moment of my birth. I knew not the sensation of

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any sentiment beyond that of esteem; love was still a stranger to my

bosom. I had never, then, seen the being who was destined to inspire

a thought which might influence my fancy, or excite an interest in

my mind” (I. 69). The qualification “then” is meant to suggest that

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she did later meet this “being”—not her husband (although whether

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he is the Prince or her longtime partner Banastre Tarleton she does

not make clear). Alix Nathan points out that Robinson altered her

birth date in her
Memoirs
, claiming to have been born in 1758 (the

year of her baptism) rather than 1756, the actual year of her birth,

to foster this image of the “innocent child-bride persuaded into mar-

riage” (Nathan 141). She was sixteen and a half when she married

Robinson, not between fourteen and fifteen, as she claimed.

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16. In her
Memoirs
Robinson lists this gift from the Prince as the only

one she did not return, “This picture is now in my possession. Within

the case was a small heart cut in paper, which I also have; on one side

was written, ‘
Je ne change qu’en mourant’
. On the other, ‘
Unalterable

to my Perdita through life
’ ” (II. 47).

17. In his essay on Robinson in
Romanticism and Celebrity Culture,

1750–1850
, Mole points out that, as a writer (he reminds us that

her stage career was “only an interlude in her twenty-five-year pub-

lishing career”), Robinson “inhabited a burgeoning print culture, in

which advances in printing technology, increased literacy, improved

distribution infrastructure and rapid urbanisation contributed to

a sharp increase in the total amount of printed matter in circula-

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tion” (188–89). He quotes Robinson’s 1800 declaration that “[t]here

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never were so many monthly and diurnal publications as at the pres-

ent period; and to the perpetual novelty which issues from the press

may in a great measure, be attributed the expansion of mind, which