Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy by Kristin Flieger Samuelian

Author:Kristin Flieger Samuelian [Samuelian, Kristin Flieger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Modern (16th-21st Centuries), England, 0230616305, 18th Century, 2010, Palgrave Macmillan, History
ISBN: 9780230616301
Amazon: 0230616305
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

C h a p t e r F o u r

B ody D ou bl e s i n

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t h e Ne w Mon a rc h y

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A

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t the height of the Queen Caroline affair, from late summer of 1820

to late summer of 1821, more reproductions of the Queen’s image

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were available for sale than images of Mary Robinson were in the

early 1780s.1 The flood of prints was partly the result of technologi-

cal innovations. In Radical Satire and Print Culture, Marcus Wood

recounts that the practices of placarding and bill posting increased

in the second decade of the nineteenth century, in part because of

the introduction of “fat-face” and “Egy ptian” typefaces—larger

and heavier typefaces designed for use in ephemera such as advertis-

ing, pamphlets, and broadsheets (156). The radical press under the

operations of entrepreneurs such as Cobbett and William Hone ben-

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efited from this new technology. Hone’s 1820 pamphlet The Queen’s

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Matrimonial Ladder is a case in point. Illustrated by Cruikshank

and accompanied by a children’s toy ladder, the pamphlet chron-

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icled “with fourteen step-scenes” the royal marriage as a series of

wrongs suffered by the Queen.2 The penultimate rung of the ladder,

labeled “CORONATION,” has broken under the weight of the new

King, who lies sprawled on the ground, overlooked by a triumphant

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Caroline, seated at the top of the ladder. A similar toy ladder depict-

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ing the progress of a “discordant marriage,” which Hone apparently

saw in a shop window, provided the inspiration for the pamphlet

(Wood 174). Hone’s use of another text for the purpose of parodic

contrast illustrates the link between radical politics and bourgeois

domestic ideology that Thomas Laqueur and others have suggested

characterized public responses to the Queen Caroline affair.3 Hone

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

presents Caroline as the victim of a corrupt monarchy, whose claim

to a moral high ground rests more on her vulnerability than on her

rectitude. By spring of 1821, satirical anti-Caroline engravings had

begun to dominate, although the Queen’s death in late summer pro-

duced a temporary resurgence of sympathetic ephemera. Whether

sympathetic or satiric, however, the engravings of 1820 and 1821,

like the written texts of the previous decade, concentrated pub-

lic attention on Caroline’s body as containing a range of political

meanings.

The Unruly Queen in the Popular Press

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In March 1820, Robert Peel, the Tory MP and later Prime Minister,

wrote to John Wilson Croker, then Secretary of the Admiralty:

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Do you not think that the tone of England—of that great compound

of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy,

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and newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion—is more

liberal—to use an odious but intelligible phrase—than the policy of

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the Government? (quoted in Fraser 365)

Although Peel’s rhetoric opposes national character to government

policy, his juxtaposition stresses their interdependence. He asserts that

public opinion, an overdetermined phrase that comprehends—and

collapses—the terms of psychology, moral philosophy, and print, in

being “more liberal” than the policy of the Government, is best con-

stituted to shape that policy. In this perspective, he anticipates both

the power and the manipulation of public opinion that characterized

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