Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (37 page)

chy. Her progress threw into temporary relief, through its shabbiness

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and popular appeal, the ongoing institution of the new monarch and

reconstitution of the state. On the other hand, representations of the

Queen in the popular press evinced a preoccupation with her physical

body as the locus of all that was extra-domestic, illicit, and un-English

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about her. Her increasing girth and penchant for revealing clothes

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became metony ms for a general, stubborn refusal to be controlled,

registered in her rumored continental exploits and her precipitate

return to claim her title. That these two contradictory understandings

of Caroline—as disembodied signifier and as fleshly artifact—could

coexist signaled the extent to which assumptions about gender and

anxieties about the relationships among reproduction, domesticity,

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

and national identity were subject to new technologies of production

and display.

The Prince of Wales’ animus against his wife manifested itself

in attempts to deprive her of a public identity. While his Ministers

resisted his efforts to procure a divorce on grounds of adultery, they

offered Caroline a substantial annuity to remain in Europe, assume

a title other than Princess of Wales or Queen, and take no part in

her husband’s coronation. When George III died in January 1820,

the new King had Caroline’s name removed from that portion of

the liturgy where prayers are offered for members of the royal fam-

ily. Such measures, coupled with the stories, persisting for nearly two

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decades, of her sexual indiscretions, instituted Caroline’s body as her

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only consistent standard of identity even before the pamphleteers

and cartoonists began to exploit it. Her participation in the symbolic

meanings traditionally assigned to a member of the royal family was

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slippery in any case, but her unruly eruptions into public view made

her, in her phy sicality, a potent and malleable sy mbol for a variety

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of political interests ranging from radical to loy alist.7 Public fasci-

nation with Caroline’s body identified her as part of an emerging

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sexuality of modernity, both linked to display and disconnected from

reproduction.

That none of Caroline’s many rumored sexual liaisons ever appeared

to result in pregnancy or illegitimate birth posed a problem for her

husband and for those whose interests lay in furthering his. Because

reliable proof of infidelity was absent, attention concentrated on her

body as the site of misconduct, in ways atypical of contemporary dis-

course on adultery. The allegations in the “Delicate Investigation”

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had rested upon claims about bed stains and discussions of what

constituted deep kissing. Stained bed linens and imprints of bodies

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on mattresses continued to figure in discussions in 1820 about the

possibilities for a royal divorce, which the King was now attempting

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to obtain by an Act of Parliament. Public attention now, however,

focused more on indiscretion as a kind of performed licentiousness,

the familiar argument that to be known to be interested in or amused

by matters of sex was proof of carnal knowledge. It was not the Queen’s

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body as organ of royal succession but the Queen’s body as signifier of

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her sexuality—improperly displayed, caressed or caressing, or merely

too proximate to other forms of recognized indecency—that became

the site of contestation.

Early in 1818, to obtain a divorce that would satisfy both himself

and his Government, the Prince of Wales established a commission

to collect evidence to prove that Caroline was having an affair with

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B o d y D o u b l e s i n t h e N e w M o n a r c h y

135

her former servant, Bartolomeo Pergami, with whom she was cur-

rently living in a large house in northern Italy. The Milan commis-

sion, as it came to be called, was ultimately no more successful than

the 1806 royal commission. Their investigations were from the first

impossible to conduct impeccably and descended rapidly into farce,

with dubious witnesses proliferating in response to rumors of large

bribes. Nonetheless, the commission’s collected testimony filled two

green barristers’ brief-bags, one for each House of Parliament. These

were examined first by a secret committee in the Lords and then

entered as evidence in the successive readings of the Bill of Pains and

Penalties, debated in the Upper House through the summer and fall

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of 1820.

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The evidence collected in the green bags was summarized in the

preamble to the Bill, which was read in the Lords on July 5, and

which claimed the Queen had since 1814 (the year she left England

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for Italy) behaved “with indecent and offensive familiarity and free-

dom, and carried on a licentious, disgraceful and adulterous inter-

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course” with Pergami, “a foreigner of low station” (
Hansard
2.2,

July 5, 1820). The testimony given in the weeks that followed,

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almost exclusively from former servants who had been brought to

England by the Milan commissioners, ranged from the practical to

the sensational. Verifiable evidence such as that of Pergami’s succes-

sive and rapid promotions from servant to equerry to chamberlain

to knighted gentleman; sleeping arrangements that located his and

the Queen’s bedrooms near each other and away from the rest of

the household, and the construction of a tent for the couple to sleep

together on shipboard during one journey, was matched with more

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salacious allegations that, while easier to dismiss, had commensu-

rately more popular capital. Witnesses averred that the Queen on at

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least two occasions appeared in public on Pergami’s arm, indecently

dressed; that the couple were often seen embracing; that Pergami

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attended her while she bathed on shipboard; that they watched an

obscene dancer together; that the Queen once lifted a fig leaf on

a statue of Adam and laughed about it with Pergami; and that she

had been seen through the window of a carriage by one servant,

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asleep, with her hand resting on Pergami’s genitals (
Hansard
2.2,

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August 23, August 30, September 4, 1820). Although most of this

titillating evidence was refuted by the Queen’s counsel upon cross-

examination, it became a mainstay of popular cartoonists and cari-

caturists, in whose representations, despite or because of popular

sympathy for the Queen, British xenophobia stressed Pergami’s for-

eign manners and appearance.8

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

The prevailing opinion of Caroline was that she was, in one jour-

nalist’s words “an injured wife” but a “depraved woman” (quoted in

Fraser 445). Most of those loyal to her agreed with Austen’s assess-

ment that her ill treatment by her husband “at first” was largely

responsible for her profligacy. Hence, her affair with Pergami, the

truth of which few even of her supporters disputed, was seen as both

the result and a concentrated image of her misfortunes. If she had

not been virtually driven out of England by her husband (and away

from her daughter, a particularly powerful detail manipulated both

by sentimental radicals such as Cobbett and by the Queen’s attorney,

Henry Brougham), she would not have had to seek comfort from such

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an inappropriate and demeaning source. Pergami was thus classed

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with the numerous Italian witnesses for the Crown, who were vulner-

able to British chauvinism: a group of them had been attacked and

beaten by a pro-Caroline mob upon their arrival in Dover. Both the

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impression that they were herded through the process of testify ing

by anxious commissioners and their broken or nonexistent English

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were liberally lampooned in the press. Italians, and Pergami espe-

cially, became, like Caroline’s much-displayed body, the repositories

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of a nationalist sentiment that located excess of all kinds outside of

the English national character.

The proceedings of the House were published daily in the news-

papers and collected in
Hansard
. The print-consuming public’s regu-

lar and ready access to the testimony made them unofficial jurors

in the “trial” against the Queen. The language and practice of the

courtroom informed the debates, overshadowing procedural distinc-

tions. The House was debating a Bill and examining testimony in

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support of that Bill, but the event was conducted more like a trial

than a parliamentary debate. The Queen’s attorney s raised objec-

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tions to leading questions and cross-examined witnesses, and both

sides referred to the proceedings as a trial. The confusion was further

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confounded, because adultery in the Queen was high treason. The

Lords tried cases of high treason when the defendants were peers

or their wives, although these cases were presided over by the Lord

High Steward, not the Lord Chancellor. Nonetheless, the distinc-

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tion between proving adultery against the Queen and debating a Bill

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whose passage depended on establishing her guilt was sometimes too

fine. The Solicitor General, Sir John Singleton Copley claimed, in

his summing up, “Her majesty is here upon her trial” (
Hansard
2.2,

September 7, 1820).9

Brougham, acting as her attorney general, pointed out with sar-

casm that this practice of publishing testimony compromised it, but

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he also used the occasion to remind the Lords that they had ceded to

the people the right to decide, and the people had decided:

Your lordships, not with a view to injure the Queen—your lordships,

with a view to further the ends of justice, allowed the Evidence to be

printed, which afforded to the witnesses if they wished it, means to

mend and improve upon their evidence—Your lordships allowed this,

solely with the intention of gaining for the Queen that unanimous

verdict, which the country has pronounced in her favour, by look-

ing at the Case against her—your lordships, however, allowed all the

evidence against her to be published, from day to day. (
Hansard
2.2,

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October 3, 1820)10

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Using rhetorical devices he exploited in his reviews for the
Edinburgh

Review
, Brougham projects onto the Lords intentions that are visible

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only through the public response to the printed evidence. Where the

Lords allowed the evidence to be printed in order to guarantee their

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authority, Brougham tauntingly reconstructs that authority as sur-

rendered, via a misguided noblesse oblige, to the “country,” that is,