Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (29 page)

ily a promise of the ministry and “two of the richest sinecures in

the kingdom” (quoted in Ashe
Memoirs and Confessions
III. 86), in

return for destroying all remaining copies of a document that proved

the Princess’s innocence, her “accuser’s” criminality, and filled the

entire royal family with “ horror, remorse, and dismay” (85). Ashe

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claimed to have acquired for
The Phoenix
one of the purloined copies

of the Book, from which he promised to print excerpts in upcoming

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numbers, “and to investigate the spirit and principles of the proceed-

ing in such a manner as must eventually bring the whole question

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before the public eye” (87). No sooner had the notice appeared than

Perceval convinced the proprietor of the newspaper, a Mr. Swan, not

to print the excerpts and to fire Ashe. Ashe then retired to Brighton

and wrote
The Spirit of “the Book”
in six weeks, with the aim “of

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convincing Mr. Perceval how absurd it was to call himself an upright

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minister or an honest man, before he had burnt my evidence of his

life, and put out the eyes of his judge” (88).16

The Satirist
gives its own version of the blackmail story. The reviewer

quotes from Ashe’s notice in
The Phoenix
, with the story of Perceval’s

supposed machinations softened and condensed. He prefaces this

with the story of “an officer” whom he says Ashe befriended in the

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

summer of 1810. Using the name “Mr. Anville,” Ashe absconded

with a copy of a memoir he hoped would prove damning to the gov-

ernment.17 The officer, suspecting that Anville/Ashe intended “some

sinister purpose” (327), scoured the newspapers until he came upon

the advertisement in
The Phoenix
. The reviewer writes in a footnote

that the advertisement is contained within a clumsy blackmail let-

ter addressed to Lord Erskine (327n).18 The letter in turn contains

the responses of Lord Camden, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and his

undersecretary Edward Cooke to Ashe’s earlier attempts to blackmail

them with the same document. Ashe offers their “publish and be

damned” answers as evidence of the truth of his claims. In the same

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footnote the Satirist promises that, of the three suppressed docu-

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ments Ashe threatened to publish, he had access only to the purloined

memoir; the other two were bluffs.19 Later footnotes refute the claims

on which the Perceval scheme rests, calling the allegation of extortion

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“an impudent and infamous falsehood” (328n).20 This is reviewer as

investigative reporter, looking at both Ashe’s conduct and his book

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and condemning them together: “Our object is merely to shew the

character of the man, that the public may know what confidence

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to place in his imposter book” (321).21 The author’s predatory and

clownish imposture becomes the best means of understanding his

production; both are frauds,—equally dangerous and silly.

Part of the Satirist’s strategy is the continual linking of absurdity

and threat: what is frightening is foolish, and what is foolish is always

also frightening. Ashe is a buffoon because he can’t pass his work

off as either the memoir of a royal princess or a Radcliffe romance.

He is a predator because he nonetheless imposes on an unsuspecting

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public, duping his victims and readers into believing in, and paying

for, something that has no real substance. Yet again he is a buffoon

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because, thanks to the Satirist, he can’t get away with either scam

for long. He is not who he claims to be. For instance, he is not the

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“Secretary of Legation to Lord Strangforth.” The Satirist has done

his background work and reports that “his Lordship, strange to tell,

refused to confirm the appointment which Thomas Ashe,
alias
Anvil,

alias
Anville,
alias
Sidney, had conferred upon
himself
” (320). Lord

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Strangforth, actually Strangford, was a diplomat and occasional poet.

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He was at this time minister plenipotentiary to Portugal, and, like

Ashe, an Irishman. According to his
Memoirs
, Ashe posed as his sec-

retary to gain access to several Portuguese-owned diamond mines,

as part of a scheme to smuggle contraband diamonds from Brazil.

He succeeded for a time, but in the end the plan, like most of Ashe’s

schemes, was a complicated failure. He was forced to sell the handful

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Th e N o v e l , R e g e n c y, D o m e s t i c a t i o n o f R o y a l t y 105

of diamonds he carried away with him, at cost, to cover a portion

of his debts. So much for diplomatic secretary and diamond mer-

chant: Ashe is not to be known by titles he has conferred on himself,

although the Satirist is free to exploit the irony produced by Ashe’s

supposed hubris. “Money smith at St. Michael’s” is a more obscure,

even occult, title, but its vagueness allows the Satirist to tease it out

into a universal symbol for the common imposture that is both author

and book.

According to his
Memoirs
, Ashe stopped at St. Michael’s, actu-

ally the island of São Miguel in the Azores, on his return to Europe

after his diamond scheme collapsed. While there, he agreed to take

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on some freight in his return journey to Spain. He paid for a part of

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the freight in doubloons and in a bank note for seventy-five pounds,

drawn on a bank in Liverpool, and endorsed by a Mr. Charles Harris.

Presumably Ashe had contracted to pay for the rest of the freight after

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he sold it in Spain, but he lost it all when his ship was burned dur-

ing the British retreat from Corunna. He does not explain what he

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intended to do about the lost freight and does not mention the trans-

action again until he is arrested in January 1811 on a fraud charge. He

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clears himself of this charge by demonstrating that he was a victim of

circumstance rather than a deliberate swindler. But he is then charged

with forgery when a witness named Charles Harris testifies that he

never endorsed the seventy-five-pound note. Both forging bank notes

and uttering (trading) forged notes were capital offenses (Byatt 43). A

false endorsement was legally a forgery and hence punishable by death

or transportation.22 Ashe was accused of forging the signature of an

endorser on what amounted to a discounted bill. He was acquitted

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when the prosecution was unable to prove that the Charles Harris

who testified against him was the same Charles Harris whose name

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was on the note.

The Satirist slides over his acquittal as easily as he folds two differ-

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ent types of forgery into one. Ashe the counterfeiter is a more useful

figure than Ashe the inept dupe of others, of circumstances, of his

own ill-conceived schemes:

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Our readers are probably unacquainted with the nature of a
money

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smith’s
profession, money being in England always coined by means

of
a die
. But Mr. Ashe,
alias Anvil, alias
&c. &c. can inform them

that this is not the case in
St. Michael’s
, where it is sometimes, like

horse shoes,
forged
by means of an
Anvil
. A curious illustration of this

fact was exhibited in January last before the Lord Mayor; for a more

particular account of which, vide
The London Packet
and some other

newspapers of the 10th of that month. (320)

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

The Satirist does not provide the “more particular account,” as he

did in the case of Lord Strangford, most likely because it undercuts

his case against Ashe. His real goal is that pun on forges and anvils,

to emphasize which he deliberately misspells Ashe’s “Anville” alias.23

Ashe is a real forger—one who works with his hands and the tools of

his trade to produce fakes and pass them off to an unsuspecting pub-

lic. Never mind that forgery at this time almost always meant work-

ing with paper, forging (the metaphor already lost) watermarks and

stamps on Bank of England notes. Ashe’s putative crime is even less

tactile than this, because he was accused not of altering the note but

of impersonating the endorser’s signature. The Satirist’s insistence

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on the concrete (coining by means of a die, forging by means of an

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anvil) allows him to anchor Ashe’s crime to an older monetary system.

Ashe doesn’t impersonate bank notes (which are impersonations); he

impersonates real money. At a time when the banking crisis was at the

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forefront of the English consciousness, when bank notes were seen as

both signifying nothing and vulnerable to forgery, Ashe’s crime is a

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crime of modernity. His “imposter book” is one instance of a general

imposture that replicates the instability of the English monetary sys-

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tem. Coins were worth what they weighed and were authenticated by

the monarch’s stamp. Ashe’s book, like a bank note, only “promises”

to pay. It is inauthentic because it lacks the true stamp of royalty. The

Satirist’s ability to spot forgeries of all kinds, and his zeal in rooting

them out, recalls the policing gestures in King’s
Letters from Perdita

and
Authentic Memoirs, Memorandums, and Confessions
. The writ-

ers of all three texts establish their literary credentials by exposing

another writer’s fraudulence, always at once literary and financial.

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Ashe’s account of both schemes varies between defensive or self-

aggrandizing fantasy and rogue confession, linked by a strain of

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ironic self-awareness.24 On his return to England after the failure of

his diamond scheme, he “determined on the life of a political writer”

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(
Memoirs and Confessions
III. 40). He began writing as “Albion” for

Blagdon’s Political Register
, where he claims to have earned a reputa-

tion as “the successor of Burke and the conqueror of Cobbett” (55).25

Blagdon did not pay him what he felt he deserved, however, and he

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accepted the job at
The Phoenix
, which he calls “a demi-opposition

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paper” (62), briefly drawing salaries from both papers.26 In Ashe’s

representation,
The Phoenix
is more than “demi” opposed to the

Government. If “Albion” was the conqueror of Cobbett, “Sidney”

is allied with “Sir Francis Burdett, Mr. Whitbread, Lord Folkstone,

&c. &c.” (75), that is, with radicals and with radical-leaning Whigs.27

“ Sidney” is also a more politically local pseudonym than “Albion,”

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Th e N o v e l , R e g e n c y, D o m e s t i c a t i o n o f R o y a l t y 107

especially in conjunction with the name by which Caroline calls her

lover in
The Spirit of “the Book.”
The names together evoke Algernon

Sidney, the seventeenth-century republican political theorist whose

critique of absolutism and the royal prerogative, expressed in
Discourses