Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (54 page)

out consulting his father: “Is not your father grown incapable/Of

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reasonable affairs? Is he not stupid/With age and altering rheums?

Can he speak, hear,/Know man from man? Dispute his own estate?/

Lies he not bed-rid, and again does nothing/But what he did being

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childish?” (
The Winter’s Tale
4. 4. 385–99). Only a father’s madness

would justify his son taking such a step without his knowledge or

consent. If the King is not mad, the Prince must be. The catch is that

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Perdita’s family romance, which is written on the face of this “queen

of curds and cream” (4. 4. 161), redeems Florizel’s choice from cul-

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pable—and pathological—rashness. She is not a “lowborn lass” (4. 4.

156) after all, nor a Catholic. The succession and the nation are safe.

Perhaps it would have been better if the Prince had remained unalter-

able to his Perdita through life. She at least wasn’t Catholic, and she

might even have been a nobleman’s daughter.

42. The contrast between the round-faced, youthful prince and his com-

panions, who are all anywhere from ten (Hanger) to over thirty years

(Burke) older than he, suggests that those who ought to be guarding

him from himself are instead abetting his mad behavior.

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43. This last delusion is probably a fabrication, although it is one of the

most often repeated. Christopher Hibbert, in his biography of

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the King, lists it as one of the “ridiculous stories” that “spread about

the town” (
George III
266–67).

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44. In her biography,
Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III
, Flora

Fraser writes that the Prince of Wales started the rumor in retaliation

for his sister’s support of Princess Caroline during their marriage dis-

putes. She adds, however, that the story “was almost certainly true”

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(190). An infant was baptized at Weymouth, where the royal family

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had been staying and where the Princess had been taken ill, in the

late summer of 1800. Three years later the equerry, General Garth,

adopted the little boy and renamed him Thomas Garth. Fraser men-

tions another rumor, possibly started by Caroline, that the father

was Sophia’s brother, the Duke of Cumberland, to whom she had

complained in a letter to Garth, but concludes that Garth is “the

commonsense and probable, if unromantic and not so scandalous,

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answer” to the question of the child’s paternity (193). The author of

The Royal Legend
appears to have Garth in mind, given that the love

of Eliza and Rodolph is forbidden because of social difference, not

consanguinity.

45. At the moment of the Cavalier’s secret marriage to the wicked

“Maria,” the narrator (that the frame story is supposedly a mem-

oir impinges not at all on its generic structuring) recounts that the

Prince “started, sighed, and, for a few moments, was involved in

painful ruminations. Whether it was that the scene he was now read-

ing recalled to his mind some past acts of his youth, or that he pitied

the cavalier for his inconsiderate conduct, is uncertain: he, however,

closed the book, walked about his chamber, and smote his forehead”

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(139–40).

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46. The investigation into the conduct of Princess Caroline took place in

1806 and was tabled in 1807. Readers in 1808 would have been famil-

iar with the allegations, although the testimony in the case was not

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officially made public for another five years. The sentimental treat-

ment of Caroline (“Carlina,” as she is called) in
The Royal Legend

anticipates Thomas Ashe’s 1811
The Spirit of “the Book,”
which I will

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discuss in the next chapter.

47. In her forthcoming book on popular medievalism (Palgrave 2011),

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Clare Simmons offers a precedent to
The
Royal Legend
’s construction

of editorship in Thomas Percy’s eighteenth-century edition of the

romance “Sir Cawline.” Just as the
Royal Legend
editors claim to have

done, Percy added text to a document that was, in his own words, “in

so very defective and mutilated a condition,” in order to “connect and

complete the story in the manner which appeared to him most inter-

esting and affecting” (quoted in Simmons chapter 2). For Percy and

the editors, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder and is determined

by contemporary relevance. If
The Royal Legend
is fully realized only

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when it reads like a nineteenth-century novel, Percy inserts “chivalric

values such as knightly conduct and respect for women and the social

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hierarchy” into a genuinely old text, in an effort “to be true to his

imagined version of the Middle Ages” (Simmons chapter 2).

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48. This is a paraphrase from the “Digression concerning Criticks” in
A

Tale of a Tub
, in which Swift’s famously slippery narrator character-

izes critics as those who “travel thro’ this vast World of Writings: to

pursue and hunt those Monstrous Faults bred within them; to drag

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out the lurking Errors, like
Cacus
from his Den; to multiply them

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like
Hydra
’s Heads, and rake them together like
Augea
’s Dung”

and concludes that a “
True Critick
. . . is a
Discoverer and Collector of

Writer’s Faults
” (78).

49. Like the novel, this prince fits equally in the nineteenth century as in

the fourteenth, favoring “the Protestants equally with the Catholics”

even though such a position is “incompatible with the policy of those

times” (24–25). The actual Henry V was a bit more compatible with

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his era: it was during his reign that Sir John Oldcastle was hanged in

1417 for his involvement in the Lollard movement.

50. Leaving untranslated the suffix
que
(“and”) at the end of
luctu
pro-

vides a way to translate the ablative as “with” instead of “from.”

“Recoil” fuses both
horret
(“honet” is a misprint and occurs only in

The Royal Legend
) and
refugit
. I am grateful to Martin Winkler for

his thoughtful help with this translation.

51. It is tempting to see the royal legend as possibly a person, a legendary

royal—a legend either in his own time or after—but I cannot find

any uses of the word applied this way as far back as 1808. The OED

lists the first as occurring in 1918 (“legend,
n
.”
The Oxford English

Dictionary
. 2nd ed. 1989.
OED Online
. Oxford University Press.

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March 22, 2010
. >).

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52. Much of the text in
The Royal Legend
describing Perdita’s early life,

in which she appears as a gothic heroine of extraordinary sensibility,

is borrowed from Robinson’s
Memoirs
. The opening of “Part the

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Fourth” echoes the opening of Robinson’s text (
The Royal Legend

33–35; Robinson II. 1–4, 11–14).

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3 The Novel, the Regency, and

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the Domestication of Royalty

1. Caroline’s biographer notes that Lady Douglas received an annual

pension of 200 pounds from the Prince of Wales until the end of her

life (Fraser 181).

2. Fraser reports that Perceval and the book’s printer, Richard Edwards,

had both “lent out copies.” She adds that Francis Blagdon, the edi-

tor of the weekly newspaper the
Phoenix
, apparently had a copy and

advertised its “forthcoming publication” in February 1808. Lord

Eldon granted an injunction, and Blagdon “was given in compensa-

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tion Treasury patronage for a new newspaper” (203).

3. Quoted in Fraser 172. The Princess (or her attorney) quotes this in

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her letter to the King that was included in the report when it was

published in 1813 (86, 93).

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4. Literally, “from board and bed”; this would be a separation, rather

than a dissolution of the marriage, and would not affect the legiti-

macy of Princess Charlotte.

5. A prominent Whig attorney and one of the founders of the
Edinburgh

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Review
, Brougham was to become a leader of the Whigs, rising to

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Lord Chancellor under Lord Grey. He also acted on behalf of Lady

Byron during her separation from Lord Byron in 1816, and he would

be Caroline’s attorney again during the 1820 debates on the Bill of

Pains and Penalties.

6. Davidoff and Hall discuss the relationship between the royal mar-

riage and the consolidation of middle-class virtue in
Family Fortunes

(150–55).

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7. Rumors about his involvement with Caroline followed Canning

throughout his political career. Stephen M. Lee points out that he

offered to resign his position as president of the Board of Control

at the start of the 1820 House of Lords debates on the Bill of Pains

and Penalties. Although “Liverpool and George IV arranged a com-

promise whereby Canning would stay in office but take no part in

the proceedings against the queen” (136), he eventually resigned in

December 1820.

8. Caroline identifies this officer as “C****** B*****” but adds,

“I prefer, however, to call him Algernon, and to introduce him, for

the present, to you under that name” (
Spirit
20).

9. There were rumors that Caroline was for a time in love with an Irish

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officer at her father’s court and that she was forbidden to marry him

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(Fraser 26–27). But the coincidence of this affair with her betrothal

to the Prince of Wales, and the idea that one was intended as a check

upon the other, are the creatures of Ashe’s imagination.

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10. Both are probably the price for an unbound copy. The
Edinburgh
and

Quarterly
reviews list the price as fifteen shillings. The first
Edinburgh

notice, in August of 1811, gives the subtitle as “or Memoirs of a

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Great Personage,” and the second gives a price of twenty-five shil-

lings (Garside, et al. 338).
The Satirist
, the only periodical to review

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the novel, lists the price as twenty-five shillings.

11.
The Satirist
was edited by George Manners, although this reviewer

was probably Hewson Clarke, later editor of
The Scourge
, whose

reputation for vitriolic satire Byron had noted in
English Bards and

Scotch Reviewers
. Mark Schoenfield discusses the exchange between

Byron and Clarke in
British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The

“Literary Lower Empire”
(142–47).

12. The phrase is from Sheridan’s
The Critic
(1781), act 1, scene 1. The

entire line, spoken by Sir Fretful Plagiary, reads “Steal!—to be sure

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they may; and, egad, serve your best thoughts as gypsies do stolen

children, disfigure them to make ‘em pass for their own.” The phrase

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was regularly quoted, adapted, paraphrased. The reviewer’s careful

use of quotation marks is probably intended to distinguish his legiti-

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mate incorporation of another’s text from the gypsy borrowings of

Ashe.

13. Russett points to the number of critics during this period who were

lawyers (16); the
Edinburgh’s
Francis Jeffrey is an example. Exploring