Perdita by Paula Byrne

Author:Paula Byrne [Paula Byrne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007383085
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2004-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

She paid a heavy price for her personal and political commitment to Fox. Throughout the campaign she was pilloried mercilessly in caricatures, pamphlets, squibs, and newspaper paragraphs.

A caricature called ‘The Goats Canter to Windsor or the Cuckold’s Comfort’ (14 March) shows her being driven by the Prince of Wales in a high gig drawn by six goats, one of them ridden by Fox. Three men on goats ride beside the gig: Thomas Robinson, wearing his customary cuckold’s horns and facing backwards (which is to say that Mary has left him behind), Lord North (almost certainly not a lover, but perceived as such in the press), and Tarleton in military dress. A different caricature published the same day, showing Fox vomiting into a chamber pot, is captioned with some ribald verses that begin

Mr Fox Mr Fox

If you had the *** [pox]

What a blessing t’would be to the nation;

If Perdita Would

For once do some good

She’d Secure you a tight Salivation.

In another caricature, ‘A Race For A Crown’, published a few days later, Fox, North, and others ride a race mounted on lions, cheered on by the Prince and Mrs Robinson. The triangle of Fox, Prince, and Perdita is also the subject of ‘The Adventure of Prince Pretty Man’ (see p. 156), in which a Falstaffian Fox supports on his shoulders the Prince of Wales, who is stuffing the Great Seal of England into a burglar’s swag bag. Perdita, wearing a trademark feathered hat and with her hands in one of her celebrated muffs, looks on, in the company of a bare-breasted Armistead. It is noteworthy that Perdita is the more decently dressed, not exposed in the manner of a whore.

In the course of the polling weeks there were many more caricatures of this kind, several of them associating Perdita with Georgiana, all linking her to Fox. So, for example, ‘The Last Dying Words of Reynard the Fox’ (early April, when Fox was behind in the poll) has him saying ‘Perdition catch that Wray! I am lost for ever! … curse on all the World but my dear Perditta; oh! I am now nothing.’ Mary’s fame in The Winter’s Tale merges nicely into the mesh of Shakespearean quotation.

Because Mary was so much more famous than Elizabeth Armistead and because she played such an active part in the campaign (Fox’s ‘dearest Liz’ remained out of town at his country residence in Surrey), she was the one who was labelled ‘The Woman of the People’ and assumed to be Fox’s mistress. Squibs on the Whigs would typically end with Fox saying that he was off to visit Perdita in Berkeley Square.

Sheridan was a close ally, so one satirical pamphlet took the form of a parody of his most famous play, entitled The School for Scandal, A Comedy in Five Acts, As it is Performed by His Majesty’s Servants, etc. The title page mimics the typography of the authentic edition of the play so exactly that the British Library copy of the pamphlet is miscatalogued as Sheridan’s own work.

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