Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (26 page)

Caroline had given birth to an illegitimate child, but they acknowl-

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edged that her “conduct” must “necessarily give rise to very unfavour-

able interpretations.”3 The Princess was reported to have entertained

men without adequate chaperonage; she dressed revealingly, was “too

familiar” (Perceval 9), especially with naval officers, and allowed her-

self to be laughed at and talked about by the servants (32). If she

did not actually have sex with the men mentioned in the allegations

(and she almost certainly did with at least some of them), clearly she

had behaved badly. The commissioners could not convict her of adul-

tery, but they could convict her, ex parte, of being an incorrigible—if

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unpolished—flirt.

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The motivation behind the commissioners’ conclusions was

probably to provide the Prince with grounds for a legal separation,

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a mensa et thoro
.4 But the accusation of unladylike behavior had a

class resonance as well. Although Lady Douglas’s testimony, chiefly

regarded the, ultimately disproved, accusation of illegitimate mother-

hood, it devoted substantial attention to the Princess’s vulgarity and

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low behavior. Douglas describes the Princess as “a person without

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education or talents, and without any desire of improving herself”

(Perceval 45); she accuses her of being slovenly in her dress, at times

to the edge of indecency (45), at others inappropriately overdressed

(60). She describes the Princess eating and drinking to excess, and

especially drinking quantities of ale, which, in Douglas’s testimony,

Caroline mispronounces as “ oil” (44). She implies, moreover, that

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the Princess’s irregular sexuality extends to her making unwanted

advances to Lady Douglas herself—as if her chief crime is not her

excesses but their indiscriminate quality:

In a short time, the Princess became so extravagantly fond of me,

that, however flattering it might be, it certainly was very troublesome.

Leaving her attendants below, she would push past my servant, and

run up stairs into my bed-chamber, kiss me, take me in her arms,

and tell me I was beautiful, saying she had never loved any woman so

much . . . and such high-flown compliments that women are never used

to pay each other. (41–42)

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The compound image here is of a large, undisciplined child, who fol-

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lows “the impulse of the moment . . . without regard to consequences

or appearances” (52), and an uncolonized exotic. The common

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denominator is an unwillingness, even incapacity, to control a variety

of appetites. Perhaps most interesting for my purposes, however, are

her descriptions of Montague House, the Princess’s residence, follow-

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ing the supposed birth of her illegitimate child. These descriptions

convey a class inflected distaste that gets at least some of its force

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from the implied (and heavily italicized) contrast between the elegant

features of a royal residence and the domestic squalor superimposed

by the Princess’s illegitimate and uncouth maternity:

. . . from this time the drawing-rooms at Montague House, were liter-

ally in the style of a common nursery. The tables were covered with

spoons, plates, feeding-boats, and clothes round the fire; napkins [dia-

pers] were hung to air, and the
marble hearths were strewed with nap-

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kins which were taken from the child
; for, very extraordinary to relate,

this
was a part of the ceremony
Her Royal Highness was particularly

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tenacious of always performing herself
; let the company be who they

might. (62)

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The profaning of the “ marble hearths” with the dirty diapers of a

supposed newborn converts the crime of adultery into a metonym

for the royal marriage itself, when the disappointed Prince George

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represented himself as having been struck by what he described as his

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bride’s “personal nastiness,” meaning, apparently, her unwashed and

smelly body (quoted in Fraser 56). In Caroline’s distasteful and dis-

reputable advent, for the Prince and his allies, foreignness stands in for

uncouthness in an overdetermined layering of unpalatable attributes:

she is vulgar, smelly, fat, and loud. The putative birth ten years later

of her illegitimate child, the signifier of her uncontainable sexuality,

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replicates and confounds her unsavory reputation. Later testimony

refuted the allegations, proving that Willy Austin’s mother was alive

and well, and establishing that he was cared for by a nursemaid in a

nursery that was, as was typical for the time, at the top of the house,

far from the drawing rooms (Fraser 170). But this retroactive correc-

tion does not alter the initial rhetorical effect of the allegations’ color-

ing and context. The implied conclusion of the commission’s report is

that flirting and “[c]onduct unbecoming” (Fraser 171) are adequate

moral, social, and perhaps legal substitutes for adultery. Similarly,

being unwashed, over or underdressed, excessively and inappropri-

ately maternal, and drinking lots of “oil” can stand as determinants

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for being both sexually and socially outside the pale.

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The composite portrait generated by the delicate investigation and

the discussions surrounding it is of a ribald and slightly ridiculous fig-

ure, a woman who refuses to conform to contemporary expectations

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and who is at once an object of sympathy, contempt, and prurient

fascination. Yet, despite the implications of its content, the publica-

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tion of the commission report generated more support for Caroline

than condemnation. In a letter dated February 1813, Austen articu-

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lated the prevailing view of the royal marriage, which cut across party

lines in its identification of the Regent as the root cause of his wife’s

misconduct:

I suppose all the World is sitting in Judgement upon the Princess

of Wales’s Letter. Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can,

because she
is
a Woman, & because I hate her Husband—but I can

hardly forgive her for calling herself “ attached & affectionate” to a

Man whom she must detest—& the intimacy said to subsist between

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her & Lady Oxford is bad.—I do not know what to do about it;—but

if I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think

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that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved only

tolerably by her at first. (Austen
Letters
208)

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The letter Austen refers to was officially from Caroline but was almost

certainly written for her by her attorney Henry Brougham.5 It served

as a kind of introduction to the Book, prefaced by a “ Narrative of

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Recent Events” that recounted her three attempts to deliver it to the

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Regent in January of the same year. The letter was delivered in a sealed

envelope and returned unopened each time, although an unsealed

copy was made available to the Prince’s advisors. The narrative does

not report that the whig-leaning
Morning Chronicle
published the

letter on February 10, or that excerpts from “the Regent’s Valentine,”

as it was called, were printed on commemorative china and widely

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sold (Fraser 231). All the world might well sit in judgment on a docu-

ment with such a public life.

Yet the letter itself is neither testimony nor evidence. Its relation-

ship to the documents in the case is tangential. Its approach is extrale-

gal; it is a salvo in a war of words that uses the now-tabled case against

the Princess as leverage. Brougham’s argument in the letter is that the

separation of mother and daughter is a threefold evil. It is a source

of unhappiness to both mother and daughter: “To see myself cut off

from one of the few domestic enjoyments left me—certainly the only

one upon which I set any value, the society of my child—involves

me in such misery, as I well know your Royal Highness could never

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inflict upon me if you were aware of its bitterness” (xi–xii). Separation

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is deleterious to the daughter’s development, causing “serious, and

it soon may be . . . irreparable injury” (xii). The crux of Brougham’s

argument, however, is that the division between mother and daugh-

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ter fosters a public image of Caroline that ought to have been set

to rest by the conclusion of the commission report, six years earlier.

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Because “in the eyes of an observing and jealous world, this separa-

tion of a daughter from her mother, will only admit of one construc-

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tion” (xii), it is the duty of the Regent, “the natural protector” (xi) of

both mother and daughter, to

reflect on the situation in which I am placed: without the shadow

of a charge against me—without even an accuser —after an inquiry

that led to my ample vindication—yet treated as if I were still more

culpable than the perjuries of my suborned traducers represented me,

and held up to the world as a mother who may not enjoy the society

of her only child. (xii)

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Brougham’s letter sentimentalizes the judgment in Austen’s. Both

judgments are against the Prince. His refusal to accept his natural

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responsibility to protect his wife—from the observing and jealous

world or from herself—is for both Brougham and Austen the origin

of all subsequent evils.

The assumptions governing these letters appear in two novels pub-

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lished within two years of each other: Thomas Ashe’s
The Spirit of “the

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Book”
(1811) and Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
(1813). Ashe’s novel

promises a “true” account of the events leading up to and includ-

ing the delicate investigation. Like
The Royal Legend
,
The Spirit of

“the Book”
provides explanations for scandalous royal behavior that

exonerates and sentimentalizes the principals. Heroines and heroes of

romance, the central characters (particularly Caroline) offer readers

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the same opportunity for intimate identification as Richardson’s

Pamela or
The Royal Legend
’s Prince Henry. Ashe’s book, however,

contains none of the satire of
The Royal Legend
. The sentimental-

ity in his novel is continuous with the sentimentality of Brougham’s

letter; although often implausible, it is never ironic. In his depiction

of the Princess, Ashe recognizes the political necessity behind the

hypocrisy for which Austen can hardly forgive her. His Caroline is the

Caroline of Brougham’s letter: a robbed and doting mother, attached

and affectionate to a husband who has never appreciated her manifest