Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (57 page)

George IV,” Laq ueur suggests that the “radical parable” of the

events of 1820 was eventually, and inevitably, recovered by and for

conservatism: “deluged by royalist melodrama and romance—a

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queen saved from the evil ministers of the king, a woman’s honor

restored. The underlying issue of monarchy’s legitimacy was swept

away in a tidal wave of gossip and bathos” (439). His reading has

informed later treatments of the event, most notably Davidoff and

Hall’s
Family Fortunes
. In her 1991 article, “Morality and Monarchy

in the Queen Caroline Affair,” Tamara Hunt calls the agitation on

behalf of Caroline in 1820 “the first wide-spread popular expression

of the moral standards that have come to be labelled ‘Victorian’ ”

(698). Anna Clark refines upon this argument by suggesting that

the political agitation on behalf of Caroline represented an uneasy

joining of the older plebian radical modes of satire and melodrama to

the claims of “Whigs interested in promoting parliamentary reform

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and embarrassing the government” (“Queen Caroline” 50). The

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resulting mixture was “the last spectacular eruption of transgressive,

unruly plebeian radicalism, soon to be replaced by the new sobriety

of working-class politics” (63).

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4. The term is Lord Holland’s. He wrote in 1820 to John Lambton,

another prominent Whig, “For the life of me I can feel no inter-

est and little curiosity about these royal sq uabbles, degrading no

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doubt to all concerned, and disgusting and tiresome I think to

the bystanders” (quoted in Aspinall,
Lord Brougham and the Whig

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Party
111).

5. Cobbett’s decision to reissue the
Political
Register in1816 as a

two-penny pamphlet rejuvenated circulation and fixed its position

and influence as part of the radical press. Zachary Leader and Ian

Hayward refer to Cobbett’s “loophole” as “an ingenious new form

of cheap publishing.” “By printing only his leading article on an

unfolded broadsheet . . . Cobbett could avoid the stamp tax and pub-

lish the slimmed-down
Political Register
for only 2d. . . . This ‘two-

penny trash’, a term Cobbett adopted from his enemies, sold in huge

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numbers: Cobbett claimed 200,000 copies were sold in two months”

(Introduction,
Romantic Period Writings
7–8).

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6. Mary Poovey discusses the relationship between the Caroline Norton

case and the 1857 Act in
Uneven Developments
(62–88).

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7. Clark points out that the classist rhetoric that depicted Caroline as

the female victim of “a wicked aristocratic libertine” has its roots

in a melodramatic mode more in key with loyalism than with “the

rougher political tradition of republicanism, infidelism, and sexual

yright material fr

freedom” from which satire is drawn (52).

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8. Laqueur remarks on the “extraordinary waves of xenophobia” (453)

that characterized both pro- and anti- (but most often pro-) Caroline

sentiment: “Expressions of Englishness in 1820 and 1821 were far

more prominent than expressions of class solidarity or republican

virtues” (453).

9. Historians of the affair translate the rhetoric of such statements into

fact. E. A. Smith titles his study
A Queen on Trial: The Affair of

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Queen Caroline
, while Laqueur regularly refers to the proceedings as

a trial (“The Queen Caroline Affair” 447, 448, 452).

10. Laqueur points out that “Caroline’s cause became self-consciously

the cause of ‘outdoor politics’, of ‘public opinion’ against the coterie

politics of court and parliament” (430–31).

11. Parliament suspended debate on the Bill on November 10 after the

third reading produced a majority of only nine. It was not taken up

again when Parliament reconvened in 1821. As Fraser puts it, “The

proceedings, which had so mesmerized the nation and beset the

peers, were finally at an end. The Queen, though widely believed to

be guilty, was ‘acquitted’ ” (443).

12. The picture loosely echoes an anonymous 1783 engraving of Mary

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Robinson dancing a bacchanal with Fox (BM Satires 6320). The ear-

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lier print does not suggest control, however, so much as mutual aban-

don. Robinson and Fox look at one another with similar expressions

and are of equal height, if not size (Fox’s squat body and large head

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contrast with Robinson’s graceful slenderness, as if to suggest that

these are creatures of different types, Bacchus and a nymph).

13. According to testimony, she dressed first as a Neapolitan peas-

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ant, then as the genius of history, and finally as a Turkish peasant

(
Hansard
2
.
2, August 30, 1820).

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14. Clark observes that this mix of sexualizing and sentimentalizing is

typical of pro-Caroline literature: “Because the images and litera-

ture of Carolinite propaganda often conveyed their politics through

allusion and metaphor, they could carry varied and even contradic-

tory meanings—a useful quality in a controversy characterized by

unlikely alliances across class, ideological, and cultural lines” (49).

15. Excerpts from Shakespeare were used liberally by both camps:

the anonymous
Ghost as Seen in the
Hamlet
of St. Stephens Chapel

(BM Satires 13825) quotes both
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
in order to

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depict Caroline as a horrified and belatedly repentant Gertrude/

Lady Macbeth. Caroline as Lady Macbeth appears also in Lane’s

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The Whole Truth, or John Bull with His Eyes Opened
(De Vinck

10419).

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16. The verse continues:

But to my guts if you give no heeding,

And cruel Fate dis boon denies,

In kind compassion unto my pleading,

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Return, and let me feast mine eyes!

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The entire text is printed in J. Nichols,
Biographical Anecdotes

of William Hogarth; With a Catalogue of His Works
. 2nd ed.

292–93 (London: 1782). Timothy Erwin writes on the relation-

ship among all three works (Fielding’s, Hogarth’s, and Forest’s)

in “William Hogarth and the Aesthetics of Nationalism,” as

do David A. Brewer in “Making Hogarth Heritage” and Mary

F. Klinger in “Music and Theater in Hogarth.”

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17. “The honourable officer who commanded the Clorinde, and who had

previously seen Bergami [sic] in the low situation I have described,

felt that it even would degrade the English service and himself, if

after having witnessed that, he consented or permitted himself to sit

at the table with her majesty in company with this person “ (
Hansard

2
.
2, August 19, 1820).

18. Sometimes the sartorial evidence seems designed only to give an

added thrill—a semi-pornographic detail that convinces the audi-

ence without detracting from the more damning testimony, most of

which has to do with access to the Princess’s body itself. In discuss-

ing the incident that Lane depicts in
The Genius of History
, Copley

dwells on the vulgarity and scantiness of Caroline’s costume only

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after establishing that she was alone with Pergami while undressed,

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and that they were closeted together long enough to accomplish

more than just the changing of the Princess’s costume:

Did she change her dress entirely for that purpose? Yes.

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Did you assist her in changing her dress? I did not.

Who assisted her in changing her dress? Pergami went into her

dressing room;. . . .

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How long did the princess remain in the dressing-room before

she came out with her dress entirely changed? I do not remem-

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ber precisely.

Can you tell about how long? About three q uarters of an

hour.

When she came out, did she come out alone, or did any person

come with her? Pergami came out first, and her royal highness

came out after.

How long before her royal highness came out did Pergami

come out? A very little time.

When you say a very little time, was it one, two, three, or four,

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or five minutes, or what? Two or three minutes. (
Hansard 2.
2,

August 30, 1820)

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19. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes offer this history in

their Introduction to
Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities
(3).

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Katherine A. Park and Lorraine T. Daston also discuss the medi-

eval origins of early modern discussions of monsters and mon-

strosity in their essay “Unnatural Conceptions,” as do Andrew

Curran and Patrick Graille in “The Faces of Eighteenth-Century

yright material fr

Monstrosity.”

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20. In “Foucault’s Monsters, the Abnormal Individual and the Challenge

of English Law” Andrew Sharpe cites Blackstone’s as only the last

in a history of legal definitions of monsters that stretches back to

Roman law. Like his predecessors in the ancient and medieval worlds,

Blackstone “understood the monster exclusively in terms of the vis-

ibility of human/animal hybridity” (395). Although Sharpe points

out that “the hermaphrodite was never considered a monster within

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English law” (389), “any degree of animality proved sufficient to

label a human creature a legal monster” (396).

21. Sharpe suggests that “an assumption of bestiality as cause of mon-

strosity appears to underpin and typify English legal understandings

of the monster category” (388).

22. This translation is offered by Knoppers and Landes in their

Introduction. The original French reads, “Elle était monstre, sans

difficulté, quand elle laissait voir sa gorge, et femme de mise quand

elle la cachait” (Voltaire, “Monstres” 109).

23. Laqueur has written about the theatricality that dominated both the

debates and popular responses: “the trial of the queen was an elabo-

rate and all-absorbing theater in its own right” (457). Part melo-

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drama, part farce the event “took on an aesthetic life of its own,

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overshadowing the substantial political issues” (448). Sometimes, as

with the bed stains, the drama hinges on a single word. The day

after the testimony just q uoted, Demont testified about a portrait

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that the Princess sat for in the character of “a penitent Magdalen.”

After establishing that “the upper part of the person” of the Princess

was “uncovered” in the picture, the Attorney General presses for

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clarification: “How was the breast, was that covered or uncovered?”

“Uncovered.” Here the testimony is interrupted so that the two

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interpreters can establish whether the term used refers to the actual

breasts of the Princess. Caroline’s interpreter objects that the word

“
gorge
,” used by the interpreter for the Crown, usually “means the