Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (24 page)

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book: “No doubt these pages will be severely handled by the critics,”

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who, in their practice of tearing down a text, “discover the grains,

atoms, and minutest particles, without even comprehending the

whole, comparing the parts, or seeing all at once the harmony” (4).48

Seeing the harmony between separate narratives, viewing frame and

embedded texts not as minute parts but “all at once,” is just what
The

Royal Legend
’s editors—and through them the readers—do. More

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

nineteenth-century than eighteenth-century critics, in the mode of

Hazlitt, they can see the text within—realistic novel, gothic romance,

or both—and present it to their readers.

That is not as hard, the editors maintain, as readers might think.

Although this text originated in an age when “faint, indeed . . . were

the struggles to emerge from barbarity” (12–13), it is coherent

to modern readers because of, and not in spite of, its gothicism.

“Monks, in that age, were the principal writers” of literature (13),

yet their tastes agreed with Protestant, nineteenth-century tastes.

The author’s emphasis on contrast (“in that age”) echoes Henry

Tilney’s admonition in
Northanger Abbey
: “Remember the country

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and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that

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we are Christians” (194). Still, despite living in a time when “roads

and newspapers lay every thing open” (195), “we” are inclined to

see things rather as Catherine Morland sees them than as Tilney

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does. Contemporary readers are as immersed in and entranced by

mystery as those early monks were. Not only do “many” of “their

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tales . . . still exist” (13), this one being a case in point, but more are

being made all the time, “Many of our modern productions are of a

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nature which, in those times, would have been eagerly sought for, as

abounding with all the extravagant, superstitious, and fabulous ideas

that could be supposed to have been generated by long seclusion in

a cloister” (14–15). The monks would have approved of novels like

Lewis’s
The Monk
(1796) and Edward Montague’s
The Demon of

Sicily
(1807), the two examples the author gives of contemporary

productions (15). Writers don’t need the cloister in order to produce

the cloister’s tales of wonder. In the case of
The Royal Legend
, how-

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ever, because of history, they have both.

This similitude between the present and the past also accounts for

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the gothic narrative of the text’s suppression and discovery: In “the

superstitious taste of the times” (in this case, past times), “minds,

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which feasted on their luxurious wonders, could ill relish the insipid-

ity of truth” (13–14). The narrator gives this as a reason for the man-

uscript’s suppression for 400 years: “Perhaps to this cause, as much

as to any other, may be assigned the concealment of the following

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pages” (14). In the middle ages, they liked things secret, obscure,

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hidden. In our enlightened age, with our roads and newspapers, we

value truth—although not insipidity. That is why the manuscript was

buried for so many centuries and also why we now have it to enjoy.

And we enjoy it because of a kinship in tastes. In “tales” at least

we too like things secret, obscure, hidden. Like our medieval ances-

tors, we prefer luxurious wonder. Can we, with Henry Tilney, enjoy

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W a n d e r i n g R o y a l s

85

the frisson of these tales without losing sight of their removal from

the real world of English education and laws? Or are we more like

Catherine and Tilney’s sister Eleanor, for whom literary and civil hor-

rors are indistinguishable? As it turns out, we don’t need to choose

between these alternatives. We get to luxuriate in wonder, with the

added pleasure of knowing that what we are reading about is
real
.

Henry V was real; Perdita Robinson was real; Prince George is real;

he really did marry his cousin and try to divorce her, and he really did

have a secret relationship that was probably a marriage, with a woman

who really was a Catholic.

The Florizel and Perdita satires were fiction marketed as factual

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documents.
The Royal Legend
offers its readers fact disguised as fic-

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tion masquerading as fact. In the first part of the book, what had been

code reverts to primary nomination as a way to provide both fictive-

ness and immediate recognition. Prince Henry’s first lover’s actual

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name is Perdita, and the text preserves one of his letters, addressed

to “Perdita” and signed “Henry.” The heroine of one Shakespeare

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play is grafted onto another and then extracted from this now con-

veniently augmented source material. Where codes are not available,

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the author supplies them. The Prince’s sycophantic companions are

named Waldon, Bardolph, and Lupo. Malden and Fox are easy to

guess from Waldon and Lupo. In case the reader does not immedi-

ately connect Bardolph with Sheridan, the manager of Drury Lane,

the narrator mentions that he kept “a set of morality men, with whom

he went about the country,” adding in a footnote that “players were

then so called” (45).

The text’s complex and muddy historicizing imposes a compressed

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medievalism, in which historical connections are either exploited or

forced to suggest a kind of literary/historical golden age of the later

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middle ages.
The Royal Legend
“was probably written about the time

that Chaucer, the father of English poetry, flourished, which was

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two hundred years before Shakespeare” (12). The second of these

two claims enforces useful literary connections (a line of succession?)

between English poetry’s father and its greatest practitioner and is

more or less accurate. The first, which fuses literary and historical

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associations, is less so. Chaucer probably died about a year before

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Henry Bolingbroke deposed his patron Richard II to become Henry

IV and some thirteen years before Henry V (who was about thirteen

at the time of the poet’s death) became King. But Chaucer is not only

a useful name to drop when establishing one’s literary credibility—

like the medieval origins of the novel. He also accords with the loca-

tion of the manuscript’s hiding place, in so-called Barham Abbey.

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86

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

There is no Barham Abbey, but there is a village of Barham, which has

its own historical—and Chaucerian—associations. Located in Kent,

near Canterbury, Barham was the home of Reginald Fitz Urse, one of

the four knights who assassinated Thomas Becket in 1170. William

Fitzstephen records in his 1190 biography of Becket that the knights

stayed at Barham Court on their way to the cathedral. In this elabo-

rately constructed background, cathedral, abbey, poets, and kings all

merge into one encapsulated past, a prehistory in which literature
is

history.

The Royal Legend
provides what Simmons calls “a historical cor-

roboration” of the image its editors want to promote (5). If the pres-

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ent Prince is fat and expensive, exploiting the reversionary interest

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without any genuine political convictions, and perfectly willing to

imperil the constitution to suit his own interests, his literary coun-

terpart is “a man whom Nature seemed to have exhausted herself in

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endeavouring to render a prototype of human excellence” (22–23).49

“An appeal to history, after all,” as Simmons points out, “implies

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discontent with the present” (17). Encounters between the present

and the past are ironic. They are designed to make both readers—

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the antiquarian Prince and the modern consumer—uncomfortably

aware of how little we have advanced, or else they are meant to

stress that this is
not
history: “When states and empires, in times

far removed from the barbarity of the present,” says the narrator

of “The Chapel of St. Clothair,” “come to the knowledge of these

records;—if, indeed, they should not, like the hand which now traces

them, be mouldered away;— how will they start when they hear of

one which could permit such deeds” (147). The irony of this passage

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lies in the medieval scribe/narrator’s naïve reliance on perfectibility

(no prince in future advanced eras would ever keep a mistress at the

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expense of his people—would he?). But this contrast is displaced by

readers’ awareness that they are not reading about either a medieval

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prince or a cavalier.

Despite its gothicism, this is not a pseudo found manuscript like

Chatterton’s Rowley poems. The treasure it offers to its discerning

editors, whose gift is in their ability not to unearth but to rewrite, is

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not
its language but its content: the “truth” about one semi-historical

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prince. The narrator of
The Royal Legend
is omniscient. He can report

both Prince and Cavalier’s secret thoughts and intentions and declare

the former’s final reformation with confidence. He is also consistent,

using the same voice, language, and degree of perception whether he

is the Westminster Abbey friar who records the story of the Cavalier

or the modern editor who makes a memoir readable as the novel it

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W a n d e r i n g R o y a l s

87

really is. He can be coy when political satire demands it, as in this

reference to Prince Henry’s promise of future support for Perdita/

Robinson—the 20,000 pound bond of history: “Whether or not the

prince ever intended to fulfil the engagement he had thus voluntarily

entered into . . . is unknown; if, indeed, we look at the more recent

events of his life, we may have some reason to conclude he did not:

however, let that be left for more accurate observers to determine”

(58–59). There are no more accurate observers than that collective

“we” that comprehends both the editors and the readers. Together

we know perfectly well what recent events are—and that they
are

recent and not 400 years old.

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The title page of
The Royal Legend
disarms its gothicism at the

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outset, by establishing that the text concerns the recent, not the

ancient, past. The motto is a passage, in Latin, from
The Aeneid
:

“
Quorum animus meminisse honet luctuque refugit
.” Below it appears

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a translation, “At which my memory with grief recoils.” Both quote

and translation appear in an article by Addison in
The Guardian
,

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volume 2 (July 1713). The newspaper was collected and in print

throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. The

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author of
The Royal Legend
might have accessed it in the thirty-four-