Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (7 page)

sitetsbib

The act of reading published correspondence, especially private cor-

respondence, of another person is voyeurism at a remove. The reader

is not invited to identify with the writers of the letters but rather with

the publisher who testifies to their bona fides. Hunt writes that read-

ing epistolary fiction is identificatory because it lacks that authorial

presence: “In the epistolary novel, there is no one authorial point of

view outside and above the action (as later in the nineteenth-century

realist novel); the authorial point of view is the characters’ perspectives

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

as expressed in their letters” (Hunt 42). Both the legal and the print

contexts for the Cumberland letters make the experience of hearing

.palgra

or reading them sadistic rather than intimate. The listeners/readers

are either judging the writers or laughing at them, and sometimes

om www

both; the account of the trial notes that the plaintiff’s counsel cre-

ated “a great laugh” when he observed, in his closing remarks, “[t]hat

however aggravating the circumstances were otherwise, they could

not charge his R. H. with intriguing merely for the sake of intrigue,

yright material fr

as the
incoherency
of his letters, plainly proved him to be really a

Cop

lover” (66). In being reported, the laughter is multiplied: the readers

not only laugh at the Duke; they laugh at his discomfiture caused by

the laughter in the courtroom. The counsel who reads, the enterpris-

ing publisher who prints, and the consumer who buys the letters,

share a laugh at the principals’ expense. Because the audience already

knows that Lady Grosvenor’s husband already knows everything that

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 19

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 19

10/22/2010 6:02:59 PM

10/22/2010 6:02:59 PM

20

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

is written in the letters, to read them is to watch the lovers walk into a

trap they are too stupid, or too self-absorbed, to recognize.

The Budget of Love
and
Effusions of Love
, on the other hand, offer

the possibility of a triple identification: with the letter writers Florizel

and Perdita, with the editors of the letters, and with the Prince of

Wales and Mary Robinson. Both texts claim to contain the actual

letters that the Prince wrote to Robinson in 1780, arranged in

chronological order to provide a coherent narrative of their affair.

This is a much less plausible claim than the one made by the edi-

tor of the Cumberland letters, as these texts’ coherency makes clear.

The Cumberland letters’ authenticity rested partly in their unread-

veConnect - 2011-04-02

ableness; because as texts they were interesting to no one but their

algra

writers, they became interesting as artifacts. The Florizel and Perdita

letters, partly because readers knew they began as courtship letters,

offer the promise of a love story. The first task of their epistolarity is

romso - PT

to tell the tale. Robinson’s biographer, Paula Byrne, points out that

the letters in
The Budget of Love
“are dated between March 31 and

lioteket i

April 18, 1780, which is exactly the time when the Prince and Mary

were in almost daily correspondence before their first private meet-

sitetsbib

ing” (139). “Almost daily” is Robinson’s phrase, but she uses it early

in her account of the affair, before she and the Prince have met. They

probably did not correspond much after they became lovers and even

less after the affair ended. Beyond the Prince’s “cold and unkind”

note ending the affair (Robinson
Memoirs
II. 72), two queries and

one “furious letter” (Byrne 151) from Robinson to him, most of the

breakup correspondence was handled by Lord Malden and the Prince’s

treasurer, Colonel Hotham. In Robinson’s
Memoirs
, the apex and

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

culmination of the courtship, and probably of the correspondence as

well, was the Prince’s written promise of 20,000 pounds, “to be paid

.palgra

at the period of his Royal Highness’s coming of age” (II. 70). This

offer convinced Robinson to quit her profession, leave her husband,

om www

and accept the Prince’s promise of protection, and she kept this letter

after returning all the others. In the
Memoirs
she describes receiving

this bond, “[p]revious to my first interview with his Royal Highness”

(II. 69), and within two pages “all the fairy visions which had filled

yright material fr

my mind with dreams of happiness” have been “destroy[ed]” by his

Cop

abrupt and unexplained desertion (II. 71).

In both
Effusions
and
Budget
, however, the narratives end with

decisive farewell letters, which distribute the blame equally between

the lovers. In
Effusions
, after a series of half-flirtatious accusations

of infidelity on both sides, Perdita abruptly declares that her “suspi-

cions” of Florizel’s faithlessness “were but too well grounded” and

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 20

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 20

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

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

21

breaks off the affair, taking care to add, in a postscript, “I hope you

will not forget your promises respecting the provision you were to

make for me” (63). His reply addresses her as “FAITHLESS, Faithless

Woman!” and claims that her accusations are only a “skreen” [sic] for

“your own infidelities.” He identifies the threat in her postscript, and

assures her that she is “welcome” to publish his letters, “provided

you do not mutilate them, and intentionally make nonsense of them”

(64). This is a neat way of offering both an explanation and an adver-

tisement for the novel. If we are reading the letters, they must be

whole and coherent.8 Like Robinson with her 20,000 pound bond,

we have the Prince’s word on it. In
The Budget of Love
Perdita informs

veConnect - 2011-04-02

Florizel that his last letter “fell into the hands of my Husband; but do

algra

not let that surprise you—he bears the
name
only” (83). Adding that

she married him as a cover for indulging her sexuality, rather than

out of love, she promises that her husband “is too well bred not to

romso - PT

conform to the will of his wife” and that her lover “should think him

no impediment; for he shall be none” (84). Florizel, who was appar-

lioteket i

ently unaware that his inamorata was married, is “petrified” (85) at

her licentiousness and immediately ends the relationship. In language

sitetsbib

that sounds more like the real-life father than the son, he declares:

I am not a stranger to my state, and who I am;—I know that I am

an object of example:—in such a situation am I fixt, that the weaker

part of men will think it a sufficient precedent to imitate me even in

wickedness. (87)9

The wickedness he does not wish to model is not keeping a mistress

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

but “injuring an unfortunate man” (85). Criminal conversation, the

crime for which his uncle had been fined 10,000 pounds ten years

.palgra

earlier, is the “abomination” (86, 87; he uses the term twice) that

makes him “shudder” (87), although he comforts himself with the

om www

knowledge that “while I sinned, I did not know it was a sin” (88).

The Budget of Love
is the more cautious of the two novels in its

depiction of royalty. The editor is constrained here and elsewhere in

the text to separate the madcap Prince from his Whig companions

yright material fr

(including his uncle Cumberland) and associate him with his father.

Cop

The Prince turned eighteen in August 1780, although he did not

come of age for another three years. In recognition of the fact that his

schoolroom days were over, the King granted him limited adulthood:

a separate establishment, an allowance, and relaxed supervision. He

was by this time notorious for evading governance and compari-

sons with Shakespeare’s Prince Hal were common. Some of these

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 21

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 21

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

22

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

were overtly critical, depicting the Prince’s excesses as a drain on the

national resources.10 Others, like this example in
Budget
and the later

Royal Legend: A Tale
(1808), reflect an expectation that the time has

now come for him to throw off this loose behavior and become the

prince, and then the king, that the nation needs. Florizel’s rhetoric

in this letter answers this expectation. His awareness of a public self

and of his responsibility to the nation contrasts sharply with Perdita’s

frankly self-interested sexuality: “I no sooner lost the slavish name

of Maid, than I found myself a Wife, and was determined from that

moment to take the reigns of government into my hands, and keep

my husband at a proper distance.—He never had my love; but I have

veConnect - 2011-04-02

found him convenient” (83–84). If the misspelling of reins is deliber-

algra

ate, then Perdita is the one whose sexuality puts the government of

the nation at risk; Florizel the one who corrects the balance.

In both novels, the letters and the affair begin and end together.

romso - PT

Epistolarity conveys both authenticity and intimacy. Of course, these

are
not
the actual letters the Prince wrote to Robinson in 1780,

lioteket i

which only a handful of people—the Prince, Robinson, and Lord

North—read before they were destroyed. The Prince’s letters were

sitetsbib

never produced in court; they were never lost or stolen, published by

their writers, nor carelessly relinquished by someone who didn’t know

their value. Their editors’ claims about them position them less as the

documents in the case and more as fraudulent “found manuscripts” of

the kind that Margaret Russett suggests contributed to the construc-

tion of romantic identity.11 The putative editor of
Effusions of Love

uses the story of the Cumberland letters to authenticate his novel (and

perhaps to force an association between the Prince and Cumberland):

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

“The Reader may, perhaps, be sceptic enough to doubt the authentic-

ity of the following Billets; and to question by what means the Editor

.palgra

could gain possession of them. But let him recollect how the Letters

from a certain Relation of Florizel, to a Countess celebrated for her

om www

beauty, made their way into the world” (5). According to this logic,

what happened to those letters explains why we are reading these.

Except that it doesn’t: everyone knows how the Cumberland let-

ters came to be in the world, but that knowledge does not explain

yright material fr

the appearance of these letters. If readers finish the novel, they learn

Cop

that Perdita published them on a dare—or with permission—from

Florizel. But, because they know that Lady Grosvenor did not pub-

lish her letters from the Duke of Cumberland, one instance does not

explain the other. The closest explanation is that the Cumberland case

proves that letters are vulnerable and marketable, suggesting that the

editor of these letters is a canny speculator but not revealing anything

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 22

9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 22

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM

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

23

more about how he came by them. In the sleight-of-hand introduc-

tion, the Cumberland letters do not account for the Florizel and