Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (39 page)

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Her long-sleeved night-dress closes with a ruffle just below her chin.

Part Desdemona, part Othello, she appears to be the dupe of the two

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men, who grin conspiratorially.15

Travelling Tête à Tête
, like the
Knight Companion
, combines this

emphasis on nearly pornographic display with a multiplicity and inde-

terminacy of signification. In this print, an ogling horseman, like the

servants in the previous print, licenses voyeuristic pleasure framed

as prudish condemnation and includes the audience in both. The

text registers xenophobia linguistically, while calling attention to the

theatricality of a scene that simultaneously displays and confounds

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interpretation. The original testimony was from an equerry to the

Princess who, in the course of one journey , claimed to have pulled

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aside the curtains to her carriage to reveal her inside, asleep, with

her hand resting on Pergami’s genitals. Brougham refuted this testi-

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mony before the Lords: the accusing equerry turned out not to have

been accompanying the Princess on this particular journey and the

carriage had blinds, not curtains (
Hansard
2.2, October 3, 1820).

But Lane obviates these contradictions by presenting Caroline and

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Pergami unrealistically framed in the carriage window, and repre-

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senting the outrider as taken aback, his attention arrested by what he

sees. His response, in broken and impossibly inflected English, once

again calls attention to his—and the viewer’s—voyeuristic pleasure in

the scene, while at the same time making it impossible to determine

its significance: “Ha Ha, by Gar, vat dat I see yonder/Dat look so

tempting red and vite?”

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

The lines are a corruption of lyrics from Theodosius Forrest’s 1759

“The Roast Beef of Old England: A Cantata,” itself a reworking of

Fielding’s “The Roast Beef of Old England,” which was written for

his 1731
Grub Street Opera
and subsequently used by Hogarth as

a subtitle for his 1748 engraving
The Gate of Calais
. The lines in

Forrest run:

Ah ! sacre Dieu! vat do I see yonder,

Dat looks so tempting red and vite?

Begar I see it is de
Roast Beef
from Londre;

Oh, grant to me von letel bite!16

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In these sources the object of the xenophobic ridicule is a starving

Frenchman, reinforced in Lane by the insertion of “by Gar” for “sacre

Dieu,” possibly a reference to the buffoonish Frenchman Doctor Caius

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from Shakespeare’s
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, whose speeches are

peppered with “by gars.” But the outrider’s speech is also reminiscent

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of the patter accompany ing a peep show, an association reinforced

by the framing of the window. His gaze is directed downward and

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toward the Princess, suggesting that “dat,” which arrests his vision

is a feature of her sexuality, not Pergami’s—she, after all, and not

he, is meant to be connected to the roast beef from London. But

what tempts him? Her breasts, which are displayed above the frame

of the window? Her own genitalia, accidentally display ed below it?

The overdetermined quality of both the framed scene and his desire

testifies not so much to the Princess’s guilt as to the multiplicity of

signification that images of her body enable in the discussion sur-

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rounding the dissolution of her marriage. Sometimes, as here, display

substitutes for testimony in ways that simultaneously exploit and call

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attention to a similar exchange in the debates themselves.

The attorneys for the Crown had established a pattern of falling

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back on immodest behavior whenever more damning evidence was

either unreliable or refuted by her counsel. Display was a favorite reg-

ister of immodesty, and many of the discussions focused on Caroline’s

breasts: just how low-cut was a particular dress? How much of her

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bosom did a portrait reveal? How unfastened were her upper clothes

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when Pergami entered her dressing room? The answers to these ques-

tions were not always explicit enough for the prosecution’s purposes,

but, in the companion pieces
Dignity!
and
Modesty!
Lane provides

enough fleshliness for both condemnation and titillation.

Dignity!
depicts a décolleté Caroline sitting at a dining table with

Pergami. Both look startled and affronted. Caroline’s Grecian-style

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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

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dress falls off the shoulder and clings to her breasts, only partially

covering them. Standing facing the couple is an officer, who addresses

Caroline, although he gestures toward Pergami, saying, “I can rec-

ognize no power in you to enoble anyone—and I shall not degrade

myself and the service by sitting at table with such a fellow as that.”

The accompanying motto is Milton’s description of Eve, slightly

misquoted, from Book VIII of
Paradise Lost
: “Grace was in all her

steps, Heaven in her eyes/In all her actions dignity.” The two lines

in Milton read, “Grace was in all her steps, Heav’n in her eye/In

every gesture dignity and love” (488–89).
Dignity!
references the tes-

timony of Captain Pechell of the
Clorinde
, the Royal Navy frigate on

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which Caroline and her entourage traveled on one leg of her journey

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through Sicily into North Africa and Palestine in 1816. Having heard

from another British captain about Caroline’s habit of seating Pergami

with her at dinner, Pechell sent her a message voicing his objections in

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the language used in the engraving. She deliberated for a day but in

the end refused to remove Pergami from her table, choosing instead

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not to dine with the Captain. The Attorney General used the story

as proof not so much of their liaison, per se, as of Caroline’s general

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abandonment. The key to the episode is the implicitly un-English dis-

regard of proper distinctions. Caroline’s depravity has reached such

proportions that she no longer tries to hide it, dining in public with a

former servant, and immune to the honest English seaman’s request

that she “spare a British officer the disgrace and scandal of sitting at

table with a person who had filled that menial situation” (
Hansard

2.2, August 19, 1820). The suggestion that she has lost all sense of

proportion implies her guilt.

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Because Pechell never spoke directly to Caroline on the subject,

the scene in the engraving is imagined. By transferring an epistolary

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exchange to a verbal one, the caricature can emphasize the signifying

force of Caroline’s excessive body as a correlative to her excessive but

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ultimately insubstantial “actions.” Although the second half of his

speech is an almost exact quote from his testimony and the Attorney

General’s summary,17 the first half is a fabrication. The assertion,

“I can recognize no power in you to ennoble anyone,” refers to the

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various honors Pergami acquired in advancing from courier to equerry

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and beyond, most of which happened during this same journey. In

the Sicilian province of Catania he was made a Knight of Malta. In

the town of Augusta Caroline purchased a barony for him, appar-

ently so that she could make him her chamberlain, a position only a

noble could hold. Finally, in Jerusalem she made him a Grand Master

of the order of St. Caroline, an order she instituted herself. Pechell’s

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

challenge is a recognition of the transparent favoritism behind the

honors and a reinforcement of the King’s claim that Caroline is not

royalty. Yet, it is also anachronistic, because Pergami had none of these

titles at the time Pechell objected to being seated with him. By dis-

torting the timing, the engraving shifts the implications of the scene.

The question is no longer whether a British officer should be obliged

to dine with someone who has stood behind his chair, but whether

Caroline is Queen, a question implicitly answered by Pechell’s blunt

use of the personal pronoun. Caroline’s habit of conferring honors

willy-nilly on undeserving foreigners is de facto evidence of the adul-

tery that un-queens her, making the honors invalid. The alterations

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in Milton’s passage are now clear. Ennobling one’s low-born lover,

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causing him to sit at table with his social superiors, are actions, not

gestures. Pechell’s response makes it evident that the Queen’s behav-

ior must be opposed—even by the semi-passive opposition of refusing

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to dine with her and her paramour. For all its assumed domestic-

ity, Caroline’s cohabitation with Pergami has nothing to do with the

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“nuptial sanctity and marriage rites” that for Milton constitute the

“love” that is omitted from the passage in this print.

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The familiar peering figures in this engraving hover not at a half-

open door, as in the earlier pictures, but behind Pechell. One looks

at Pechell, the other at Pergami; possibly they are waiting to see who

will triumph. They are not in this case witnesses to adultery , and

Caroline’s body is the site of prurient, not evidentiary, interest. If they

are voyeurs, their role is to endorse the audience’s glee at her humili-

ation, in being told off by a morally superior social inferior. The print

establishes a series of glances. In one sequence, the viewer watches a

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servant watching Pergami, who watches Pechell watching Caroline.

Her startled look at being seen corresponds to her disheveled body, as

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if that body registers her centrality in the sequence of the public gaze.

As knowing viewers, the audience can gaze at several levels, from the

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thrice mediated wonder of that servant to a direct gaze at Caroline’s

breasts, aligned with both the soup tureen on the table and Pechell’s

crotch, but visually overpowering both.

By contrast, Caroline’s body
is
the site of evidentiary interest in

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Modesty!
which again makes the Crown’s case, this time by trans-

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lating inference into fact. The engraving depicts a scene described

in Louise Demont’s testimony , in which Caroline, accompanied by

Pergami and Demont, attended the theater St. Carlos in Naples and

was beset by rowdy theatergoers. The Princess had by this time lost

or dismissed all of her English attendants. The salient fact of the tes-

timony is once again her refusal or inability to recognize proper social

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distinctions in trying to pass off servants as attendants, as well as

her inappropriate degree of comfort with foreigners. But the Solicitor

General’s leading questions, and Demont’s eager answers, make dis-