Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (3 page)

monarchy in England at the time Austen was writing and the decades

leading up to it. By representations I mean pamphlets and prints,

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newspapers and periodicals, fiction and poetry: the variety of literary

and semi-literary modes through which the English populace learned

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about, responded to, and managed their public world. Representation

also had a political valence during these pre-Reform Bill decades,

especially as literary ephemera engaged calls for political reform.

S elf-identified reformers appear among the authors and engravers

I examine, but for the most part the relationship between political

and textual representation is attenuated; calls for reform are filtered

through anxieties about the relationship between the monarchy and

the nation.

The English national consciousness at this period—the entity that

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Robert Peel in 1820 described as a combination of “folly, weakness,

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prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper

paragraphs”—constructed itself in part through debates about the

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monarchy. Peel was writing at the end of the period I cover in
Royal

Romances
, when King George IV’s attempt to bar his wife from his

coronation once again raised questions about the institutional legiti-

macy of the monarchy, and his anxiety about the political force of

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popular opinion is palpable. He worries that this unregulated cacoph-

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ony will replace “the policy of the Government” in settling questions

about kingship and queenship. This was a possibility—either fright-

ening or exhilarating—for many at this time of intense domestic

unrest following the end of the Napoleonic wars. But questions about

the stability of the monarchy extend back to the first regency crisis

of 1788, when the King’s madness made the royal family available to

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

public speculation. The texts I explore, all published between 1780

and 1821, produce monarchy as a spectacle; challenge its right to

dominion over representation; conscript it for republican aims; and

reduce it to celebrity. They do all this as means of understanding

and managing one of the last stages in monarchy’s gradual shift in

England from sovereignty to notoriety. These texts are part of the

work of reframing the royal family, as monarchy moved from being

an unambiguous sign of the body politic to the public spectacle coex-

isting uneasily with both the government and the nation that it had

become by the reign of George IV.

Following the English Revolution of 1688, the collapse of the

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Stuart dynasty, and the 1701 Act of Settlement, English monarchs—

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first William and Mary and then the Hanoverian Kings—began

rebuilding their credibility and authority. In the 1780s, the period at

which my narrative takes up the story, the credibility of monarchy had

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suffered the setback of the American Revolution. Most regarded the

American war either as one that the English should not have fought,

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or one at least that they should not have lost. The Revolution precipi-

tated a sequence of events that included the resignation of the Prime

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Minister Lord North, the Fox-North coalition, and George III’s dis-

solution of Parliament in 1783. Loyalists sought to restore monarchy’s

stability within the government through appeals to the public based

on the personal values of George III. But two events disrupted these

efforts. The first was the sexual and fiscal misconduct of the Prince of

Wales, particularly in the 1780s and 1790s, and continuing into the

nineteenth century. On the face of it, this set of circumstances should

not have been destabilizing. The spendthrift prince who plagues the

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monarch and his other, more sober elders with worries about the

succession is a staple of stories that aim to establish the stability of

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kingship. These accounts are grounded in the moment of transition

when the prince throws off his loose behavior and becomes the sober

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ruler he has always intended to be. In this instance, however, the

behavior of the madcap prince was bad politics. Coming on the heels

of England’s defeat by the Colonies, it confirmed the American per-

ception of the monarchy. Later in the decade, scandals involving the

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Prince of Wales were complicated and reflected by the King’s bouts of

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dementia, the first of which occurred without warning in 1788.

The King’s inexplicable illness, and the regency crisis it precipi-

tated, raised questions about representation. His various medical

men’s equivocal and cautious accounts of the royal malady occa-

sioned debates about its origin and extent in both public and private

discourse. In stories of the Prince’s romantic exploits earlier in the

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

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decade, ascertainable information—even documents—existed, how-

ever carefully guarded and difficult to access. In the case of the King’s

condition, however, information was slippery and amorphous, hence

malleable. Representation was always at once suspect and potentially

constitutive of reality. Saying something was so, depending on who

said it and to whom, could either compromise the speaker or make it

so. This unstable relationship between private events and their public

representations also governed the investigations into the behavior of

Princess Caroline in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

In this respect, the regency crisis initiates a shift in representations of

the royal family.

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Debates about the monarchy were conducted in Peel’s newspaper

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paragraphs, in pamphlets, prints, and in royal romans à clef such as the

“Florizel and Perdita” novels of the 1780s or the pseudo-memoirs of

the early nineteenth century. But the place of monarchy in romantic-

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era culture was not only a subject for popular texts. The implications

of royal scandals reverberated in texts that were not directly concerned

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with royalty as well. Authors of realistic fiction, a part of whose busi-

ness was the readjustment of domesticity, conducted this business in

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the shadow of the public spectacle of royalty. Their novels reflect its

influence in their structuring. In this book I take Austen’s fiction as

a case in point, looking at three of her novels, all published and two

written during the Regency. If
Emma
registers preoccupations about

regency and hereditary power,
Pride and Prejudice
reflects anxieties

about paternal governance and domestic ideology on the eve of the

Regency—the long-deferred moment of monarchy’s transition from

a stable, if ailing, king to a partying prince. Austen explores connec-

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tions between domestic and political order again in
Mansfield Park
,

written between
Pride and Prejudice
and
Emma
. In this, her first

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novel composed during the Regency,3 the patriarch’s temporary but

extended absence leaves his estate under the (mis)management of an

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idle and spendthrift heir, whose de facto regency upends the house-

hold and licenses the exercise of destabilizing sexual impulses.4

In the first part of
Royal Romances
I look at two versions of errant

royalty, which appeared in public accounts of both the King’s mad-

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ness and his son’s waywardness, and of the moments when they inter-

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sect and begin to resemble and explain one another. The specter of

succession, always implicit in these accounts, reflects a fear that the

nation will be forced to trade the involuntary incompetence of one

monarch for the willful incompetence of another. This unhappy alter-

native recalls the end of the Stuart monarchy, when the “openly dis-

played priapism” (Turner 106) of Charles II, the libertine king, his

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

bullying, and his many scuffles with Parliament made him a symbol

for the irresponsible exercise of royal prerogative. Charles’s failure to

produce a legitimate heir meant that the nation was likely to revert to

Catholicism when his brother, James II, succeeded to the throne. The

end of his reign and the Revolution that followed three years later

ushered in one hundred years of stable Protestant kings and the estab-

lishment of a constitutional monarchy in England. But his rhetorical

force as the last of the absolute monarchs, presiding over a court that

was, in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s terms, “
both
classical and

grotesque, both regal and foolish, high and low” (102), recurs in

the British imagination and provides ready comparisons with both

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George III and his son.

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The conventions of understanding and presenting monarchy used

not only the historical but also the literary past. If the crises of a cen-

tury ago haunted the contemporary moment, explicitly shaping the

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regency debates but implicit in political satire, the pre-Restoration

past of Shakespeare’s plays offered both the comfort and the irony

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of comparison. Commentators on the royal family drew often on the

history of Shakespeare, which is to say that they made use of both

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the history within his plays and his historical status as an artifact of

Englishness. As a literary icon, “Shakespeare” legitimated the author-

ship of texts in which his name or his words appeared. Shakespeare’s

royals—Hamlet, Prince Hal, Henry VIII, Florizel—provided models

against which to set the present royal family, sometimes augment-

ing, sometimes diminishing their stature, but always belonging to a

golden age of literature at a comfortable remove from the prehistory of

contemporary debates. Even when the comparisons are invidious—as

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with Prince Hal or Henry VIII, Othello or Lady Macbeth—the

frequent appearance of Shakespeare’s characters in the writings and

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prints of this period demonstrates that one way royalty maintains its

stature is by being Shakespearean.

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References to Shakespeare’s mad or madcap princes reflect anxiet-

ies about succession and appear often in the years surrounding the

first regency crisis. By 1811, the immediate question of succession

had been tabled; the Regent was, for all practical and most public

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purposes, monarch. His own disastrous marriage reintroduced the

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problem. His attempts to divorce his wife turned on the issue of

her fidelity, which could potentially raise uncomfortable questions

about their daughter’s legitimacy. In the final two chapters of
Royal

Romances,
I look at his two attempts to dissolve the royal marriage, in

1806 and again in 1820–1821. Contemporary reactions to the cou-

ple’s increasingly public domestic disputes, and to the behavior of the

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Princess of Wales, configured the problem of monarchy as one that