Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (13 page)

tor never claims that the original incidents
are
true, only that they

should be. The hope that these stories contain verities guarantees the

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accuracy of the others.

What are the incidents alluded to in
Poetic Epistle
? The letters are

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an extension of the argument of the
Preliminary Discourse
, which

prefaces them. Both the discourse and the letters anticipate the con-

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servatism implicit in the traditional comic plot.
Poetic Epistle
suggests

that the two young lovers, if left to their own devices, would happily

conform to the wills of their elders and the government: “let the

young folks act as they will, as long as the old folks are content and

agreed” (20). In their account of the affair Florizel was first capti-

vated by Perdita when he saw her cross-dressed as Viola. This desire

was directed and whetted by “Lord Pandar,” identifiable as Lord

Malden. “Lord Pandar” is now trying to undermine the relationship,

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however, because Perdita has been giving her lover “admonitions”

(18) designed to break his connection to the Whigs and cement a rela-

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tionship with the King and Government. Perdita’s “political system”

is “intirely [sic] ministerial” (17), and “notwithstanding the mani-

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fest bias which she perceived in Florizel’s mind to adopt the party of

opposition, when he came to figure in public, yet under pain of his

displeasure she continued steady to the ministerial cause” (18–19).

In consequence, the Whigs, headed by Cumberland and Malden, are

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trying various means of parting the couple, including suggesting that

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Perdita has reunited with her husband, who had willingly prostituted

her. Perdita, on the other hand, practices her politics with her body,

refusing “to bestow a favor even in the way of her occupation upon

a single member of the minority.” As long as she continues in this

practice, “she is sure of one powerful friend at least at court, and

the world will continue to see a justification of the sentiment that

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

they have nothing to do with the affair” (20). The powerful friend at

court is either the Queen who, along with Perdita’s mother, promotes

the affair or the King who deliberately looks the other way. In her

“Answer,” Perdita assures Florizel that his fears of her inconstancy are

groundless; her desires—both erotic and pecuniary—guarantee her

fidelity and accord with the best interests of “the nation”:

Our two mammas have courteously agreed,

If we’re content the nation need not heed.

Your royal Father winks at all, no doubt,

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. . . .

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If then such honours to my lot have come,

What cuckold spouse could make my house his home?

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. . . .

Leave not the object of your choice to fall

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Promiscuous sacrifice to lustful call!

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The grave should sooner open to my arms

Than wretches taste appropriated charms. (39)

The suggestion that the parents control the children, whose affair

furthers, rather than impedes, their design, politicizes the voyeurism

offered by the letters. Their secret is now neither sex nor filial impiety;

it is the inner workings at the heart of government. More specifically,

it is the absolute power of monarchy, which orchestrates even suppos-

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edly illicit behaviors. This text makes explicit the exchange of political

secrets for sexual secrets that was implicit in the pseudo-discoveries

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of the earlier novels. Although the editor assures his readers, disin-

genuously, that the real truth about Florizel’s love affairs “has not

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been discovered,” he defends the people’s “right to know every thing,

more particularly the most secret actions of a Prince who is their

future King” (11). The real secret actions in
Poetic Epistle
, however,

are those of the current King. More Prospero than Leontes, this King

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is “not only sole contriver but sole minister, the source and spring of

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all we have seen and felt for these twenty years back; he is himself the

man behind the curtain, the secret influence upon the cabinet, the

Alpha and Omega of the last peace and the present war36” (16).

What begins as a flimsy justification for mass-marketing the secrets

of the rich and famous as the public’s right to transparency in govern-

ment ends by declaring that we know least where we should know

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C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a

43

best: “There is not a more mistaken character in the kingdom than

that which ought to be the best-known” (11–12). Although the King

“would rather take up with the character of an idiot than a tyrant”

(14), we should not be deceived by this persona. We know nothing

about him, while he knows everything about us. Mole’s asymmetri-

cal relationship between celebrities and celebrity watchers is reversed

here. The monarch’s celebrity—that is, his reputation for “establish-

ing academies, collecting curiosities or fabricating nick-nackeries”

(14)—is a front to disguise his absolute power. He is the one who

comes to know without being known, although his knowledge is

acquired through surveillance rather than voyeurism. The real trans-

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parency is not in the government but in the speech and actions of

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the people: “The tittle-tattle of every private family in the kingdom

is at the tongue’s end at St. James’s” (13). It is the public who are not

allowed to be private, the King whose omniscience is the best kept of

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state secrets.

The politics of the pamphlet draw from Bolingbroke’s 1749
Idea

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of a Patriot King
, suggesting that its author is an older style Tory

rather than a radical, for whom the King has betrayed the principles

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of a constitutional monarch.37 In a moment of Swiftian satire, he

outlines by inversion the multiple evils occasioned by the present

administration:

Some vain theorists might rather have wished that the first and last

idea of his education had been that of a Patriot King. Romantic non-

sense. A monster, a chimaera in politics, what never did and never

will exist. Such a character would produce so complete a revolution

in government as would overturn the whole system of human affairs.

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Luxury would diminish with the loss of corruption, and with the loss

of luxury would perish half the arts and manufactures of the coun-

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try. Idleness unsupported by taxes upon others must be turned into

industry. . . . Red coats would disappear at home, because a standing

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army would be no longer necessary. Even black coats would be much

diminished; for besides the retrenchment of the idle dignitaries of the

church, with a reform of the law the lawyers would all be ruined. Such

would be some of the blessed mischiefs of a Patriot King, of which

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fortunately there is very little danger. . . . (14–15)

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This King is “[d]etermined . . . that no dangerous innovations shall

be admitted in this country, no reforms adopted, for no one knows

where reforms will end.” He has therefore ensured that no “hope

shall be entertained” (22) of any of his offspring, particularly of his

first and second sons.

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

The editor of
Poetic Epistle
reserves his harshest criticism for the King’s

combination of public ineffectuality and domestic tyranny, crystallized

in the recent loss of the American colonies and in the Royal Marriages

Act. He is a poor monarch and a worse parent to the same degree that

he is an expert in “science”—or, rather, his science is despotism:

No art, no science unversed in, unless it were that of governing; . . . Neither

is that ignorance chargeable except in such distant concerns as those

of the colonies; for the science of domestic government is perfectly

conned at home. Resistance here is all in vain; and absolute power is

within the Sovereign’s reach without a cloak whenever he pleases to

exert it. The same under a disguise is already exerted every day before

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our eyes. (13)

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Meanwhile, “the legislature of great Britain” has become an arm of

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“the Sovereign,” at whose “beck” they “have repealed the law of god

from marriage to concubinage, and . . . stampt an honor upon intrigue

beyond the preacher’s power to remove” (23).

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Evoking a government under the hidden command of a monarch

whose power ought more properly to be checked than abetted and

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camouflaged by his ministers,
Poetic Epistle
echoes Bolingbroke in

its sympathy for the separation of powers.38 The notion that the royal

family have secrets that they don’t want the public to know and that

affect both government and succession anticipates the paranoia sur-

rounding the regency crisis of 1788, when the nature and extent of

the King’s malady was both an unsolvable mystery and a carefully

guarded secret. The author of
Poetic Epistle
is not concerned about

offering evidence for his claims about the royal family. He suggests

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instead that what is knowable, i.e., the facts about the Robinson affair,

“has not been discovered.” The rest of his pamphlet is filled with

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rumors of hidden plots whose very secrecy allows him to evade the

question of proof. As with any conspiracy theory, less is more: the less

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there is that can be proven, the deeper and more extensive the plot.

He has already discredited the testimony of the epistles themselves by

calling attention to the artificiality of their form and content and by

satirizing the discovery and authentication narratives of the epistolary

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convention. His allegations about the royal family invert the expecta-

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tions contained in notions of monarchy as a performance by offering

a king whose performed celebrity is a cover. The secret of the royal

family is that there is no power behind the throne: the throne is the

power behind the government.

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C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a

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Pornogr aphic Satire and

the Private Parts of Royalty

Poetic Epistle
depends on the absence of verification for its political

force. Its private letters, which are neither private nor letters, are not

proof of anything except anxiety. By contrast,
Letters from Perdita to

a certain Israelite, and His Answers to them
, also published in 1781,

claim to be letters written by Robinson in 1773 to John King, a

self-made banker and radical writer.39 In them, King pieces together

a narrative out of the emerging dialogue between Robinson’s mer-

cenary hypocrisy and his eloquent and high-minded credulity that is

meant both to forecast and to disarm her public image in 1781. It is