Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (6 page)

Elizabeth Armistead (who later became the mistress and eventually

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wife of Charles James Fox). Robinson was by now heavily in debt, with-

out means of support (she had resigned from Drury Lane in late May

1780). She threatened to publish the Prince’s letters unless he agreed

to assist her financially. She claimed her debts had been incurred as a

result of their relationship—in the expectation of future support and

from a need to match his lavish lifestyle.3 Following lengthy and often

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acrimonious negotiations—and an application by the King to Lord

North—a settlement was reached in September 1781 after Robinson

relinquished the letters in exchange for 5,000 pounds.

The courtship and subsequent settlement negotiations combined

lasted longer than their sexual relationship and garnered at least as much

public attention. The Florizel and Perdita affair (and its aftermath) was

the subject of poems and engravings, newspaper articles, “Tête-à-tête”

columns, and novels ranging from the sentimental to the pornographic.

There are some verifiable facts mentioned in nearly all of these, but none

accurately represents the affair, although most claim to. In the first part

of this chapter, I examine texts that offer epistolarity as a guarantor

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of authenticity, beginning with two novels written nearly concurrent

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with the affair, or at least with its currency in the public imagination:

The Effusions of Love: Being the Amorous Correspondenc e between the

Amiable Florizel and the Enchanting Perdita
(Anon. c. 1780), and
The

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Budget of Love, or, Letters between Florizel and Perdita
(Anon. 1781).

The editors of both novels assert they are offering to the public the

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actual letters between the Prince and Robinson, even though the nov-

els were probably written before Robinson had given the letters to Lord

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North, who promptly destroyed them. In any case, the published let-

ters have little connection to the real ones beyond the names of the

principal characters. They are epistolary
novels
structured by narrative

convention and not collections of genuine letters from which a histori-

cal narrative can be inferred or on which it can be imposed. As novels,

they narrate the course of the relationship, from courtship to consum-

mation, and on to betrayal and dissolution. Set against these texts,

often for the purposes of either contrast or comparison, was a collec-

tion of actual letters from the Prince’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland,

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to his married lover. The Cumberland letters are not narrative; they are

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testimony in a highly public divorce case. As public representations of

a royal scandal, they structure authenticity as intimacy and intimacy as

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banality. They do not, as the Florizel and Perdita novels do, offer read-

ers fictive identification with regal characters. Detailing a laughably

mismanaged adulterous affair, the Cumberland letters offer instead

derision and voyeuristic malice.

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The published intimate correspondence of famous people is por-

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nographic in the sense that it makes public what ought to be hid-

den. Pornography, in Sarah Toulalan’s words, “requires an idea of the

private so that it can be disrupted” (
Imagining Sex
161). The letters

between the Prince and Robinson, like the Cumberland letters, dis-

rupt the privacy of royalty in exposing not their bedroom practices but

their silliness and small-mindedness. Their secrets are political rather

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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

17

than sexual. In the second part of the chapter I examine contempo-

rary accounts of the Robinson affair that are structured as political

satire. Satirical commentary on the royal family that appeared in the

tête-à-tête columns and pamphlets like the
Poetic Epistle from Florizel

to Perdita
focus on its strategies of mystification. Even before the

regency crisis, questions about the fitness to govern of either the cur-

rent or the future George rested in what the public did not know, but

ought to know, about the monarchy. This satire appears also in the

strictly pornographic texts that began to emerge around 1781.
Letters

from Perdita to a Certain Israelite
(1781), the
Rambler’s Magazine

(1783–88), and
Memoirs of Perdita
(1784) sexualize Robinson in

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order to discredit her political affiliations, particularly her association

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with Fox and the Fox-North coalition. Along with the
Poetic Epistle
,

these texts satirize her complex involvement with what was known as

the reversionary interest. Sometimes she is allied with the King and

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Government, sometimes with the opposition Whigs, who wait for con-

trol of the government to revert to them upon the death of the King

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and curry favor with his heir in the meantime.4 Always she exploits her

intimacy with the Prince in the interests of one or the other.

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These texts attempt to contradict familiar allegations of discord

between King and heir by suggesting lines of connection that are

sometimes affective, sometimes political, and increasingly, as the

decade advances, physiological. In the Florizel and Perdita novels and

in
Poetic Epistle
love letters provide a vision of family and political

harmony that can be either reassuring or satiric depending on how

they are read. The pornographic satires, by contrast, do not offer this

flexibility of interpretation. In their focus on the Prince of Wales’s

incapacity, the authors of these texts anticipate the discourse sur-

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rounding the two events that dominated the second half of the 1780s.

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The Prince’s marriage to Maria Fitzherbert in 1785 and the apparent

descent into insanity of his father three years later were secret catas-

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trophes that, particularly in their relation to one another, put the suc-

cession and the constitution at risk. Representations of these events

in the popular press follow the line of the pornographic satires of the

early 1780s in suggesting that debility is the link between father and

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son and the ill-kept secret of monarchy.

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Royal Correspondence: Epistolarity,

Authenticity, Intimacy

Lynn Hunt suggests that the epistolary novels of the second half

of the eighteenth century made possible “a heightened sense of

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

identification, as if the characters were real, not fictional” (
Inventing

Human Rights
42). The letters in the Florizel and Perdita novels ref-

erence a putative reality; their characters are fictions, not real. Neither

“Mary Robinson” nor “the Prince of Wales” appears in these texts.

They are the referents for the codes “Perdita” and “Florizel,” but they

are themselves simulacra. Neither they nor their pseudonymous cor-

relatives are fictional characters in the way that Richardson’s Pamela

is. Hunt observes that epistolary characters like Pamela offer both

fictive identification and detached observation, allowing a reader

to become Pamela, “even while imagining him-/herself as a friend

of hers and an outside observer” (45).5 Florizel and Perdita, as the

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Prince and Robinson, occupy a position in the reader’s imagination

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somewhere between the space occupied by Pamela or Clarissa and

that occupied by the Duke of Cumberland, whose authentic love

letters were published some ten years earlier. In 1769, the Duke of

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Cumberland began an affair with the married Lady Grosvenor. The

two went to great lengths to arrange their meetings: they sometimes

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met at the home of a friend who was out of town; sometimes the Duke

disguised himself as a farmer and appeared at inns where his lady hap-

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pened to be staying. W hen they could not be together, they wrote

each other long letters. Lord Grosvenor intercepted his wife’s letters

and kept copies, using the information to set a trap for the couple,

whereupon he sued the Duke for criminal conversation, and asked for

100,000 pounds in damages. He was awarded 10,000 pounds, prob-

ably because of his own suspect conduct (five women testified they

had been his mistresses; one said she had a child by him and received

twenty pounds in compensation). Attorneys for Lord Grosvenor read

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aloud excerpts from the letters at the trial, and they were subsequently

published, first in the
Middlesex Journal
and then in a pamphlet that

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included
The Genuine Copies of Letters which Passed between His Royal

Highness the Duke of Cumberland and Lady Grosvenor
along with
A

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Clear and Circumstantial Account of the Trial in the Court of King’s

Bench
(London: 1770).

Rambling, ungrammatical, and badly spelt, these letters are more

silly than titillating.6 As narrative they are boring. There is some

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suspense, as the couple become increasingly worried about Lord

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Grosvenor’s suspicions, but the reader knows the outcome before the

first letter. The other possible narrative hook, the progress of a seduc-

tion, is entirely absent. There is no sex in these letters; the writers are

already lovers when they begin their correspondence. The structure

of the letters is accidental rather than formal. Moreover, the lovers

are so coy in their references to encounters (despite the fact that they

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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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often wrote in lemon juice or milk so as to be undetectable) that the

counsel for the plaintiff resorted to charging that no one would “write

in a manner
so simple and void of meaning
” unless he had something

to hide—unless he were making his letters “answer the purpose of

intrigue” (52). The letters’ dullness is proof of their criminal subtext.

Contemporary readers could not identify with the writers of such let-

ters; at once sentimental and self-absorbed, they are testaments only

to their authors’ foolishness.7 The perusal of them is nearly an act of

voyeurism, rather than of the affective identification that functions in

Pamela
. Yet it is not quite voyeurism, because voyeurism entails a direct

relationship between the voyeur and the person being watched; what

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the voyeur sees does not require authenticating. The Cumberland let-

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ters have been authenticated first by their legal context: they were cop-

ied, witnessed, and read aloud to the King’s Bench. They were given

another context upon publication after a judgment was rendered. This

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time, the editor authenticates them, first on the title page as “The

Genuine Copies of Letters,” and then in an advertisement claiming

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“Copies of the following Letters were some Time ago put into [his]

Hands for the Purpose of conveying them to the Public.”