Read Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy Online
Authors: Kristin Flieger Samuelian
Tags: #Europe, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #England, #0230616305, #18th Century, #2010, #Palgrave Macmillan, #History
ing, if remorseful, lover, whose query about where her paramour lies
suggests an anxiety that he has found consolation for her absence:
Ah! where, and ah where, does my gallant Courier lie?
For me does he oft on his downy pillow sigh,
I left him on the Continent, to claim my half-a-Crown
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And I wish to my heart, I could have him here in Town.
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The final set of panes in Lane’s print seems to contain two
rows each of landscape-style engravings, although the b ottom
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row is obscured by the heads of the crowd outside the print shop.
All of the engravings show either processions or set pieces involv-
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ing large crowds. At the center and appearing to fix most of the
viewers’ attention is Cruikshank’s
The Royal Extinguisher, or the
sitetsbib
King of Brobdignag & the Liliputians
. Cruikshank’s engraving is
another reworking of an earlier image: a 1795 print by his father,
Isaac Cruikshank, titled
The Royal Extinguisher or Gulliver Putting
out the Patriots of Lilliput!!!
(BM Satires 8701).17 This was a radi-
cal response to the Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices
Acts of 1795 and pictured Pitt as Gulliver extinguishing a crowd
of Whigs, including Fox and Sheridan. The later print inverts the
politics of the earlier one, showing a triumphant George IV holding
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a paper cone, marked, “Speech from the Throne,” over Caroline,
Wood, and a crowd of Jacobins, who are scattering in a panic. The
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cone references the King’s speech at the opening of Parliament in
January 1821, announcing that a 50,000 pound annuity would be
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paid to Caroline if she would agree to have her name stricken from
the liturgy. Caroline accepted the annuity in early March. She had
refused this same deal when it was first offered, and her supporters
took this about-face as a betrayal. Like the Parliamentary debates,
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the King’s speech was printed in the newspapers and in
Hansard
.
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As Brougham had already pointed out, this was a strategic use of
the print-consuming public as arbiters, and once again the public
had decided, this time on the other side of the question. If earlier
the Queen’s guilt had been overshadowed by the shady means of
establishing it, her ready abandonment of principle for self-interest
now testified to and compounded that guilt.
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174
R o y a l R o m a n c e s
Because the Queen was never actually “upon her trial,” all the tes-
timony collected throughout the fifteen years of the Queen Caroline
affair is recursive. The goal of the depositions collected in the green
b ags and in the Book, the examinations and cross-examinations of
witnesses, is to demonstrate either a guilt or innocence that the ques-
tioners have already accepted. At the same time both investigations
were governed by the belief that information is only meaningful when
understood temporally. The examiners were preoccupied with time,
with the need to estab lish duration and order: How long after the
Princess’s bed sheets were stained did Willy Austin come to live with
her? Was it before or after Pergami’s promotion that she decided to
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sleep without attendants? How long after the Princess dismissed her
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English retinue did Pergami’s family come to live with her? When was
her bed made up, and when was it rumpled? How long did Pergami
remain alone with the Princess while she bathed? While she changed
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her clothes? Humphrey’s pamphlet reflects this desire to establish a
chronology. There is no longer any need to ask the questions: all the
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events appear in their proper order. First Caroline and Pergami got
out of a carriage and danced together; then they attended the theater;
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next he dressed her for a masked ball; after that they ate together
on shipb oard and shared a tent; then she knighted him; then they
groped each other in another carriage; then she left him for England
and Alderman Wood; then she became queen of the radicals; then she
got too ambitious, and regretted it; then she was extinguished; then
she was repentant and alone.
In the print this chronology is shaded and shaped, positioned
in landscape-style arrangements that draw the eye to a triumphant
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point around which other events organize themselves, or grouped
in thematic clusters that allow one event to control the meaning of
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another. In “Honi. Soit.” Lane produces a visual narrative that, like
the testimony, is recursive, reiterating b ut compressing a temporal
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sequence. The prints reproduced in his engraving move forward but
also continually turn b ack on themselves. Repeating the sequences
of 1813 and 1820, in which testimony overshadowed and supplanted
judgment, their arrangement both makes available the damning evi-
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dence and suspends conclusion. Yet the title of the pamphlet reminds
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viewers that the conclusion is already history. Because the Queen is
dead, the question of whether she is Queen has been tabled. In both
print and pamphlet, Caroline is at once Queen and not-Queen. More
particularly, she is
not
“the Queen”; she
is
“the late Queen.” Her sta-
tus no longer matters politically. The pamphlet establishes Caroline’s
guilt in the guise of first presenting and then illustrating the charges
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T h e L a t e Q u e e n a n d t h e P r o g r e s s o f R o y a l t y 175
against her. This sequence repeats the circularity of the testimony by
obscuring a distinction between charges and evidence: illustration
becomes demonstration. The effect of this wealth of illustration is to
turn the Queen into a keepsake.
With its glossy presentation and colored engravings,
The Attorney-
General’s Charges against the Late Queen
is as much collector’s item as
it is narrative.18 It is a souvenir all at once of the trial, the coronation,
and, because of its timing, the death of the late Queen—a memorial
of the events and their principal actor. As a collection it is reflec-
tive and retrospective in a way no individual print was. Engravings
of the royal family, like all political satire, depended for their success
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on their currency.19 Rowlandson’s
Filial Piety
is dated November 25,
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1788, two days before the Prince of Wales commissioned the first
official inquiry into the state of the King’s health. Gillray published
Wife and No Wife
on March 27, 1786, three months into the public
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speculation on the Prince’s secret marriage and a month before Fox’s
decisive speech in Parliament. When prints referenced events from the
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past, as many of Lane’s did, their focus was on those events as they
had been made current by legal and parliamentary debates. If the
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topics are no longer news, their political meanings are. Even when
engravings quote or parody earlier prints, their intertextuality stresses
their currency. An old issue is made new by its repositioning.
In their original form, Lane’s prints were active representations,
meant to be discussed with the situations they depict, not gazed at
and itemized like prints of Byron.20 which, like the woodcuts that
were sold with (but not in) early modern pornographic texts, could
be “enjoyed separately from the text on their own terms” (Toulalan
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240). The Byron prints pointed to interesting associations between
his poems and his life on which readers could speculate, but they
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did not depict that life. In Toulalan’s phrase, they were mnemonic
devices rather than illustrations. By contrast the earlier “elegant
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Copper-plate” engraving of Mary Robinson (
Rambler’s
187), accom-
panying
The Discovery: A New Comedy Enacted in Hyde Park
in the
Rambler’s Magazine
of May 1783, works as both illustration and
index. The sketch purports to reproduce, with much sexual punning,
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an incident in which Robinson slipped from her horse while riding in
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Hyde Park, temporarily exposing her “sark” (a transparent metonym
for genitalia). In the print, her audience is composed of Banastre
Tarleton, aiming a magnifying glass, another man who holds her
horse’s b ridle, and two others who look on from nearb y, one also
focusing a glass (
Rambler’s
186–87). Whether the incident of
The
Discovery
happened, the racy comments of the men mark the event
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176
R o y a l R o m a n c e s
as a performance, “enacted” for a public whose observation registers
as dialogue. Like the crowd outside Humphrey’s shop, the men both
look and talk, and the sketch ends with the same motto, “
honi soit
qui mal y pense
,” set off in italics at the bottom of the page. Unlike
the crowd in Lane’s engraving, however, these men are only looking
at, and talking about, one thing. Their pornographic gazes focus
narrowly on the woman’s genitalia, exposed by the activity of her
tumbling but static, the sign of her sexuality and their desire. Their
conversation is circular, always returning to the object at which they
stare. Constructed by their collective enjoyment, Robinson becomes
a “posture girl”—the term for a prostitute who assumed poses
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designed to exhibit her genitalia to paying customers.21 Her ability
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to arouse interest and incite conversation lies in stasis rather than
dynamism: the discovery that arrests all motion.
In the collection of prints, what began as illustration morphs into
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both commemoration and index. Lane’s original prints were dynamic
and current in the way of all political satire, but it is a short step from
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currency to obsolescence. Once the Queen has died, it no longer mat-
ters with whom she danced, or ate, or slept.
The Attorney-General’s
sitetsbib
Charges
avoids obsolescence by anthologizing the prints, converting
them into a memorial of the events and of their representation. This
is a different kind of retrospection from the combined nostalgia and
satire of
The Royal Legend
. In that text, the recent past was both
re-imagined as history and invoked as memory. Its retrospection is
tied to genre—to the fantastic as an element of both the gothic and
satire. Restructuring memory as a form of redemptive antiquarian-
ism, the anonymous author projects a fantasized alternative future.
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He redirects the progress of royalty, mixing memory with desire and
correcting, in his scholar-prince, the narcissism that, in Hazlitt’s
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formulation, renders kings imb ecilic madmen.22 For Hazlitt, the
degeneration of monarchs is “but natural” (339), by which he means
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constructed, but inevitably so. Kings are the product of a structure in
which “every thing forces them to concentrate their attention upon
themselves, and to consider their rank and privileges in connexion
with their private advantage, rather than with pub lic good” (339).