Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (48 page)

yright material fr

In
The Royal Legend
, the antiquarian Prince cures himself of these

Cop

natural defects of monarchy by identifying them elsewhere, in the

blindness of the Cavalier and in the “distempered” imaginations of

cloistered monks. He wills his dissociation from “instances of human

depravity” first by allowing them to move him and then by refus-

ing to believe in them, “for the honour of human nature” (193–94).

Both texts use “nature” to mean what is corrigible or malleable: the

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_07_con.indd 176

9780230616301_07_con.indd 176

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

T h e L a t e Q u e e n a n d t h e P r o g r e s s o f R o y a l t y 177

regal character is constructed; nature can be redeemed and made

honorable; opinions can be adopted by an act of will. But
The Royal

Legend
’s wishfulness, like Hazlitt’s nationalism, is satire. Correction

is only possible within a past so overdetermined by literary and his-

torical markers that it too becomes fantastic. In the text’s afterlife

fantasy subsumes satire:
The Royal Legend
is today catalogued in the

OCLC under “juvenile fiction” and listed with two subject headings:

“Henry V, King of England, 1387–1422” and “Gothic revival.”

The Royal Legend
’s linking of political satire with nostalgic fan-

tasy recalls
Poetic Epistle
’s evocation of Bolingbroke’s patriot king—a

golden age of English royalty that is chimerical b ut longed for. In

veConnect - 2011-04-02

Humphrey’s memorial of the Queen Caroline affair, memory is fixed,

algra

disconnected from desire. The pamphlet is more pageant (even if anti-

pageant) than tale, an ironic counterpoint to the spectacular pag-

eantry of the coronation. Valerie Cumming has pointed out that, for

romso - PT

his coronation, “the most extravagant in English history” and the

most expensive (43), George IV stressed a particular notion of the

lioteket i

historical. The decorations in Westminster Abbey and Westminster

Hall “inclined heavily to the Gothic” (43), and attendants wore

sitetsbib

period dress under their ceremonial rob es (44). The “most dra-

matic” of the “feudal offerings and services” was “the appearance

of the King’s Champion on horseback,” for which
“a trained and

docile beast used to crowds was hired from Astley’s circus” (43). Ian

Duncan has suggested that the repetition of this staged historicism

in the King’s visit to Scotland the following year was “no deluded

ab olition of modernity for a regression to misty origins” (4). The

King’s penchant for pseudo-historical spectacle, aided in Scotland by

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

Walter Scott’s careful stage management, signaled not the histori-

cal continuity of British monarchy but its a-historical romanticism as

.palgra

a public enactment of manifestly “inauthentic” (7) gothic and his-

torical fiction. The Scottish visit was “a gaudily up-to-date national

om www

spectacle that relied on the availability of sovereignty—its mystic link

with the past decisively broken—as a sign among other things that

gathered its meaning in public circulation and consumption” (4).

The King’s theatrical and incoherent antiquarianism is a repetition

yright material fr

of the same canny marketing that produced
The Royal Legend
’s anti-

Cop

generic mixture of romance and irony, novel, legend, and political

satire. Marketing himself as the sign of a monarchic past with which

he has no actual political connection—and which only exists in the

literary historical imagination of romantic writers—the King is pure

performance, a “spectacle of legitimacy . . . as a neoabsolutist politics”

(Duncan 5) in post-Napoleonic Europe.

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_07_con.indd 177

9780230616301_07_con.indd 177

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

10/22/2010 6:04:50 PM

178

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

That such gaudy extravagance would b e linked b oth to oriental

despotism and to lack of substance is inevitable, and the coronations

of first William IV in 1831 and then Victoria in 1838 were notable

for their comparative austerity and for their conscious modernity; nei-

ther ceremony included a Champion.23 This is not to say that both

succeeding monarchs’ rejection of ceremony was not its own form of

public performance.24 John Plunkett points out that Victoria’s femi-

ninity and perceived political innocence set her off from “the excesses

of her aged Hanoverian uncles” (18) and gave to the first two decades

of her reign “the tangible freshness of a revivified royalism, compa-

rab le in the magnitude of its sentiment to that aroused b y Queen

veConnect - 2011-04-02

Caroline in 1820” (19). He suggests that Victoria and Albert’s “civic

algra

publicness” (14), enhanced and disseminated by “a burgeoning print

and visual culture” (13),25 came to define constitutional monarchy in

post-reform England. “Coinciding with the aftermath of the Reform

romso - PT

Bill turmoil and the changing balance of power between the Crown,

the Lords, and the Commons, royal civic activities were invested with

lioteket i

the discourse of popular constitutionalism. They were integral to the

coterminous creation of Victoria as both a popular and a constitu-

sitetsbib

tional monarch” (14–15). If William and Victoria found new ways of

representing royalty in the reform and post-reform eras, and exploited

new technologies in doing so, they were the inheritors of strategies

that emerged in the later Georgian period. The public was primed for

this new mode of civic performance under the Regency and the reign

of George III—whether in “veneration” (Plunkett 22) or ridicule of

the public privacy of monarchy.

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

.palgra

om www

yright material fr

Cop

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_07_con.indd 178

9780230616301_07_con.indd 178

10/22/2010 6:04:51 PM

10/22/2010 6:04:51 PM

No t e s

Introduction: The Royal Char acter

in the Public Imagination

veConnect - 2011-04-02

1. I use the words “royal” and “monarch” (and their variants, “royalty,”

“monarchy,” “monarchical,” etc.) interchangeably. By the late eigh-

algra

teenth century both terms in common usage referred equally to kings

and to those who ruled (queens, regents). “Royal” also referred, and

romso - P

still does, to near relatives of the monarch, as in “royal family,” and I

T

use it in this sense also.

2. Austen’s conservatism is famously unstable. Feminist critics espe-

lioteket i

cially have suggested that a feminist subtext undercuts or at least

tempers the conservative trajectories of her novels. In
Equivocal

sitetsbib

Beings
, Claudia Johnson provides a comprehensive discussion of the

conservative reading of
Emma
as well as its implicit feminist critique

(192–96).

3. Unlike
Pride and Prejudice
, in which she was revising an earlier draft,

Austen wrote
Mansfield Park
,
Emma
, and
Persuasion
after 1810. She

began writing
Mansfield Park
in February 1811, the same month in

which the Regency began (Sturrock 30; see also Tomalin 223–24).

4. Clara Tuite suggests that
Mansfield Park
can be read as “a provincial

deflection of the wider national issues of responsible hereditary gov-

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

ernment” (
Romantic Austen
132).

5. The phrase “Queen Caroline affair” historically refers to the events

.palgra

of 1820 and 1821, when the uncrowned King attempted to divorce

his wife by Act of Parliament. Although Caroline was technically

om www

Queen, supporters of the new King used a variety of means, some

political, some rhetorical, to contest her legitimacy. Similarities as

well as an evident continuity between this episode and the Prince’s

first attempt to obtain a divorce, some fifteen years earlier, have often

led scholars to refer to their marital disputes before, during, and after

yright material fr

the Regency as the Queen Caroline affair.

Cop

6. There was no expectation that the King should remain chaste outside

marriage. The legitimacy of succession depended on only the Queen’s

chastity, a fact that was always an anxious subtext of discussions about

dissolving the Prince’s marriage. Nonetheless, the King’s celebrated

monogamy made him a prototype, especially in the nostalgic imagi-

nation of the Regency, for an ideal bourgeois husband and father.

10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian

9780230616301_08_not.indd 179

9780230616301_08_not.indd 179

10/22/2010 6:05:08 PM

10/22/2010 6:05:08 PM

180

N o t e s

7. Mole uses this term in
Byron’s Romantic Celebrity
to describe the

transaction whereby intimate contact with celebrated figures is both

mass marketed and offered as “an escape from the standardised

impersonality of commodity culture” (25). Turner suggests that,

during the Restoration, the King’s sexuality “made it difficult to sep-

arate him into ‘two bodies’, and mingled the public realm of politi-

cal authority with the private emotions aroused by illicit sexuality:

jealousy, excitement, furtive identification, and shame” (106). In this

case, however, Charles II’s absolutism meant that the spectacle of his

profligacy cooperated with and augmented, rather than substituting

for, his political power.

veConnect - 2011-04-02

1 Chronicles of Florizel

algra

and Perdita

1. As the title suggests, Garrick’s liberal adaptation focuses on the young

romso - PT

lovers, omitting the first three acts, and minimizing the importance

of Leontes and Hermione to the action.

lioteket i

2. The Prince’s letters to Robinson have been destroyed, but he wrote

the next day to his sisters’ governess, Mary Hamilton, that he had

seen, the night before, “the most beautiful Woman, that I ever

sitetsbib

beheld. . . . Her name is Robinson” (quoted in Byrne 100–01).

3. Robinson insisted that she was not selling the letters to the Prince

but was simply returning them in exchange for the settlement she

was entitled to. When the Prince’s representative refused to autho-

rize more than 5,000 pounds, however, she made a veiled blackmail

threat to Malden, claiming that the Prince’s “ ‘ungenerous and illib-

eral’ treatment was justification for ‘any step my necessities may urge

me to take’ ” (quoted in Byrne 153). Malden passed this threat on to

Colonel Hotham, who was acting for the Prince, but he held firm on

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

the 5,000 pounds.

4. In legal terms, reversionary interest refers to the ownership rights

.palgra

of an individual to whom a property will revert after the expi-

ration of an intervening interest such as a trust or a life- interest.

om www

Eighteenth-century political writers commonly used the phrase to

refer to a Prince of Wales’s alliance with the political opposition, and

their expectation of patronage when he succeeded his father to the

throne—their reversionary interest in a government that was tem-

yright material fr

porarily in the hands of the other party. In the Introduction to his

Cop

edition of George III’s letters to Lord Bute, Sedgwick explains the

metaphor, which may have originated with Robert Walpole: “with an

heir-apparent in opposition and bidding against the King, the influ-

ence of the Crown was divided against itself, and equalled on balance