Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (5 page)

sense that later scholars of the period knew it. Rather, as historians

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of British radicalism such as Iain McCalman (
Radical Underworld
),

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James Epstein (
Radical Expression
), and Marcus Wood (
Radical

Satire and Print Culture
) have pointed out, the revolutionary pos-

sibilities in the Queen’s cause were always a part of the public con-

sciousness. Caroline returned from Europe to challenge her husband

and claim her crown less than a year after the Peterloo massacre, and

her supporters then ranged from nostalgic royalists to republicans.

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

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Her subsequent arraignment produced a sentimentalist rhetoric more

aligned with gendered domesticity than with radicalism, but that is

only one of her political meanings, given greater teleological force by

her death. The context through which Caroline, and the monarchy

with which she is uneasily connected, is to be understood is larger

than this historical moment. The King as ideal bourgeois husband

and father provided one way to understand the spectacularly bad

marriage of his son and daughter-in-law. The King as incapacitated

through a variety of factors, of which dementia was both a metonym

and the most visible instance—Shelley’s “old, mad, blind, despised,

and dying king”—was another. As Clark points out, scandals involv-

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ing the royal family throughout the later eighteenth and early nine-

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teenth centuries “were neither anachronistic nor trivial.” They were

constitutive of ideology inasmuch as they “turned on the relation of

virtue to power” (47).

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Anxiety about the relationship of virtue and power is central to

questions about the stability and legitimacy of the monarchy during

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this period, although “virtue” takes on a different—and narrower—

significance when the focus shifts from the King to the Prince to

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the Regent. Fear and criticism alike are based on the supposition

that the power of the monarch stands in inverse ratio to his virtue.

But when these fears were applied to the reign of George III, vir-

tue was likely to signify capacity—fortitude, strength, soundness of

mind, fitness to rule—reflecting its Latin root,
virtus
. When fears

were applied to the Prince of Wales or to the Regent, virtue more

often signified the absence of vices. In both instances, a monarch

who ruled without virtue was an alarming prospect. A number of

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critical and historical discourses less local than Clark’s or my own

address this kind of anxiety. The work of Lynn Hunt on the rela-

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tionship between the public display of sexuality and the construction

of monarchy provides a framework for my discussions of the sexual-

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ized and sexualizing bodies of various members of the English royal

family—not only Caroline’s but the Prince’s and the King’s as well,

although Hunt’s focus is early modern and enlightenment France.

She points out that “[T]he establishment of a legitimate government

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under the hereditary monarchical form of government depended on

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the erotic functioning of the king’s body—and on the predictable

functioning of the queen’s body” (
Eroticism and the Body Politic
1).

Anxieties about both surfaced at particular moments throughout the

Regency, fueled largely by the Prince’s unstable hold on legitimate

paternity. That these worries predate the Prince’s marriage, however,

is clear from the place the King’s madness held in the imagination

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12

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

of the British people. George III’s ability to fulfill his monarchical

duty by coupling only and often with his legitimate wife was never

in question. Nonetheless, his dementia was available to a variety of

constructions that suggested the ungovernable sexuality of his heir,

an association that brought home the fragility of the monarchy and

counteracted the safety promised by the King’s famous monogamy.6

The King’s madness and its variety of public and private mean-

ings offer a critical instance of anxiety about the “Protean” character

of madness and other relatively new pathologies that, as Roy Porter

has shown, “were matters for continuous renegotiaton” throughout

the eighteenth century (
Mind Forg’d Manacles
16–17). George III’s

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malady points to the special place that madness holds for scholars,

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needing to be treated “like heart-failure or buboes, as a physical fact”

while at the same time understood “like witchcraft or possession,

principally as a socially-constructed fact” (Porter 15). Porter suggests

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that the events of 1788 and following should be understood in the

context of a growing perception that madness and other so-called

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nervous disorders were “on the increase” in England (160), a percep-

tion to which the regency crisis contributed, as did the two assassi-

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nation attempts on the King, in 1786 and 1800. The history of the

1800 attempt in particular is an instance of the blurring of the physi-

ological and the spiritual in understandings of madness and echoes

the disputes about the King’s dementia. The would-be assassin, James

Hadfield, was apparently a religious maniac whose delusions, the

defense argued, “cancelled
mens rea
” (Porter 116), the legal term for

the state of mind appropriate to a given crime, in this case the intent

to kill the King. But the insanity argument might not have sufficed to

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acquit him, had not the defense provided evidence of an earlier head

wound and brain damage. Like the King’s, his madness was a mark of

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his profession (a former soldier, Hadfield had contracted the wound

while in the King’s service), a sign of his place in the world, as well as

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a sign of his incapacity.

In
Royal Romances
I examine the nexus of these two categories:

place in the world and capacity or incapacity to occupy that place. In

each chapter I explore a different aspect of the evolving understandings

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of the monarch’s place in the world during a time of repeated political

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readjustment, the post-revolutionary period no less than the revolu-

tionary. Leo Braudy locates the genesis of the modern belief that a

monarch may have a private life distinct from his public life in the end

of the eighteenth century, with “the influence of a Protestant empha-

sis on the possibility of an individual relation to God without earthly

intermediaries” (
The Frenzy of Renown
392). The revolutionary period

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

13

produced, in France, England, and America, an increasing “audience

for the actions of the famous” (393) at a time when interest in the

actions of the famous begin first to merge with and then to replace

reverence for monarchs. In
Romanticism and Celebrity Culture
Tom

Mole suggests that George III was “arguably the first monarch to

have also been a celebrity.” His status as an object of “public fascina-

tion” was tied not just to “the spectacular performance of monarchical

power” but also to “his existence as an embodied and all-too-fallible

individual” (6–7). Kings and queens have always been famous. But in

stable monarchies, or in the bullying absolutism of the Restoration

court, the fame of the monarch is celebrity—the condition of being

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famous for being famous—disguised by and cooperating with power.

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As that power weakens, the monarch becomes simply a celebrity. His

private life becomes public again as the subject of gossip, scandal, and

as part of what Mole calls the hermeneutic of intimacy.7 The texts I

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explore in the chapters that follow reflect a growing belief that the

public has ownership of that private life, and the right to understand

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and make meaning of it through representation.

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C h a p t e r O n e

C h ron ic l e s of F l or i z e l

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a n d P e r di ta

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O

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n December 3, 1779, members of the British royal family, includ-

ing the King, Queen, and Prince of Wales, attended a command per-

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formance at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. The play was
Florizel and

Perdita
, a 1756 adaptation by David Garrick of Shakespeare’s
The

Winter’s Tale
. Mary Robinson played the title role.1 The Prince sat

in his own box, opposite his parents’, and according to Robinson’s

Memoirs
, spent most of the evening staring at her (Robinson
Memoirs

II. 38). He had probably seen Robinson before, but they both claim

this evening marked the beginning of his infatuation.2 He began to

woo her “almost daily” (II. 46) in letters, addressing her as “Perdita”

and signing himself “Florizel.” Their romance lasted slightly less than

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one year. They became lovers in June 1780, after the Prince gave

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Robinson a promissory note for 20,000 pounds, to be paid when he

came of age at twenty-one. They met frequently throughout the sum-

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mer and early fall. Sometime in December 1780, the Prince ended

the affair, possibly out of jealousy at Robinson’s reputed liaison with

his friend and go-between Lord Malden. It is more likely the affair

ended because the Prince was already involved with another actress,

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