Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (11 page)

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

a tête-à-tête
column—might be satire. Accepting the letters means

accepting that they contain in epistolary form the affair between the

Prince of Wales and Mary Robinson. Their construction as narrative

must accord with the fact that, like the Cumberland letters, they are

proof of sex.

Both novels date the beginning of the affair much earlier than

it happened, making the sex concurrent with the correspondence,

rather than its culmination. The letters are a way of registering the

lovemaking. The author of
The Budget of Love
dates each one. The

first letter, in which Florizel coyly identifies himself as the “one more

charmed than all the rest, sitting on your left” (17) at the theater the

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night before, is dated March 31, 1780. The final letter is dated April

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18. These letters fix the lovers’ first assignation as April 8, and in a

letter dated April 9, Florizel rhapsodizes, “what a night was last!”

(47).26 The letters in
Effusions of Love
are undated, but in them too

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the correspondence does not preface the affair as much as accompany

it: the letters and the lovemaking together constitute the relation-

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ship. When the novel begins, they are already correspondents, and

the first letter is Florizel’s answer to an unquoted letter from Perdita.

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In letter ten, Perdita writes, “I must acknowledge, Florizel, that you

have at length convinced me” (14), and by letter twelve she is lament-

ing that “The honey-moon is not yet over, and you have been absent

three whole days—three whole nights—Not a billet from you in all

that time” (15). In both novels, the letters are a means not only

of expressing but of enacting desire and its culmination: a kind of

epistolary sex. In
The Budget of Love
, when Perdita asks Florizel on

April 3 to “fix on some time and place” when they can meet (25),

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he replies, “I wish I could fold myself up in this letter; and when you

open it, tumble into your bosom” (27). In
Effusions
the culminating

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moment comes after Florizel writes a letter entirely in French and

signs it in his own blood. The editor kindly provides a translation27

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and adds a footnote telling us, “FLORIZEL actually pricked a vein

in his arm, to sign this Letter” (13). Perdita’s reply indicates that

she sees the gesture as a kind of anticipatory penetration, a bond in

blood that both suggests and promises further—and more profit-

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able—commingling to come:

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A letter with the signature of r– – blood, may flatter me, that, one day,

some of that blood may flow in the veins of my posterity. I own to you,

I am dazzled with ducal coronets, in my sons and grandsons.

Alas! my vanity and ambition have surmounted all my ideas of virtue

and chastity—and I must yield. (14)

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C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a

35

The editor is making an implicit claim of intimacy with the main

characters that, like the sleight of hand in his preliminary narrative,

simultaneously invokes and obscures the process of authentication.

How is he to know that this is the actual blood of the actual Prince

of Wales, any more than the woman who is convinced by it to yield

all her ideas of virtue and chastity? His groundless footnote makes

the absence of proof the guarantor of authenticity: I know because I

am privileged to know. I know because
I know
. In its instrumentality

within the narrative frame of the novel, this letter reproduces the one

containing the 20,000 pound bond, which convinced Robinson to

agree to an assignation. The blood in this letter replaces the royal sig-

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nature and seal, which are both affidavits and unmaskings. In them,

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according to Robinson’s own narrative framing, the Prince dramat-

ically takes off his Florizel mask and appears in his true character

as royal (and sincere) lover. Except that he doesn’t: inasmuch as the

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promise of a minor was at least voidable, he is using fraudulent means

to dupe Robinson into becoming his mistress, with the promise of

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future wealth and a reminder that she would be sleeping with the

next king.28 The letter is not a forgery, but its stamps of authenticity

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are meaningless. Not so the letter in the novel, which is verified by a

disinterested third party, one who either was there at the actual sign-

ing or has confirmation from someone who was. Or perhaps he just

knows royal blood when he sees it. In any case, he is gifted in a way

that his readers are not. If we can assume that the editor who foot-

notes the letters and translates them into English is the same editor

who pens the preliminary “Address” to the reader, then it is by his

hand and through his privileged knowledge of the writers that the

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letters become legible as narrative. The Prince’s second, he guarantees

that they have not been “mutilated,” while also obscuring the process

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of their transformation from letters to novel.

Because these are collections of letters rather than lost manu-

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scripts, their editors’ claims of privileged possession depend on fanta-

sies of verification and on an ability to imitate what their readers will

identify as the voices of the central characters. Their intimacy with

the royal family and its appendages can be traced through degrees

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of separation—Florizel to Perdita to chambermaid to lover to edi-

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tor—or through mystified identification: royal blood is distinctive

if one has the gift of distinction. Their ability to catch and replicate

royal speech also registers intimacy, although this is another fiction

with which their readers collude. The language of the letters is fanta-

sized royal speech, constructed first by the royal romance of Garrick’s

Florizel and Perdita, into which the Prince and Robinson inserted

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

themselves, and which afforded such fertile opportunities for late

eighteenth-century print culture. The letters attempt to replicate how

readers might imagine a seventeen-year-old prince, already known for

being a party boy, would express himself, and how a somewhat older

actress, known for playing ingénues and for performing in drag, and

who might be the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, would answer.

The novels offer their readers the opportunity to imagine the private

lives of celebrated figures, to become individual consumers of a mass-

produced intimacy. What they imagine, however, has already been

constructed for them by the prior texts on which the stories depend.

In the foundational text, Garrick’s adaptation of
The Winter’s Tale
,

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the courtship is clandestine but not illicit, and the lovers marry in the

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end. In this Florizel and Perdita story, the shepherdess turns out to

be a princess, whose marriage to the prince heals internecine wounds

and unites two royal families. Presumably, Prince George was trad-

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ing on the lure of this family romance when he used the names of

Shakespeare’s lovers in his seduction of Robinson. Anyone reading

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these novels recognizes an irony written into their conception: this

shepherd and shepherdess are actually having sex, and if you read

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far enough into the novel you’ll get the details of their affair. Sex is

the reason for these novels, and it therefore informs the content of

the letters that comprise them. Of course, sex was also the goal of the

original letters between the Prince and Robinson, but it probably was

not a big part of their content. Despite the novels’ promise of mass-

produced voyeurism, the actual letters, could they have been read by

the public, probably would not have pulled back the bed curtains to

show how royalty did it. According to Robinson’s
Memoirs
, the Prince

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sent the first of the Florizel letters a few days after the command per-

formance on December 3, 1779 (II. 40). They did not become lovers

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until early June. By the following December it was over. Probably the

couple had been estranged since at least September, and Robinson’s

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claim that she was taken by surprise by the Prince’s dismissal note

answers the needs of her own narrative of the affair. Based on this

sequence, the bulk of the Florizel and Perdita letters almost certainly

constitute the courtship, rather than chronicle the sex.

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What made them valuable to the royal family as documents was

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probably not their erotic content; it was more likely their political

content. The letters reputedly contained unpleasant comments by the

Prince on members of his family. Horace Walpole claimed in his jour-

nal that the Prince wrote more like a selfish child than the effusive

lover he is represented as in the novels, and one who was not overly

particular about his language: “In his letters to Mrs. Robinson, his

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mistress, he called his sister, the Princess Royal, a poor child, ‘
that

bandy-legged b
– –
h
, my sister’ ” (Walpole II. 361). It is not clear how

Walpole knew this. Robinson may well have talked about details of the

Prince’s letters.29 Certainly the Prince’s strained relationship with his

father and resentment of parental strictness were known, and Walpole

is not alone in believing that the letters are more interesting for what

they reveal about George as a son and brother than as a lover. Those

associated with the family who knew about the affair seem to have

been particularly concerned that no internecine strife should show to

the world at large, and that the letters posed a risk of this.30 Given the

Prince’s growing alliance with the opposition Whig party, who hoped

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for a powerful ally in the Lords when he came of age, letters in which

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he spoke disparagingly about his family could be seen as valuable to

a variety of interests. As demonstrations of filial impiety, they could

exacerbate already uneasy domestic relations. And, if they tipped the

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muffled acrimony between Prince and King into public squabbling,

the letters could force the opposition’s hand years before they could

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expect any real benefit from the Prince’s partiality. It was not to keep

the affair a secret that the King sought money from Parliament to

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recover the letters. After promising to deliver his son, he wrote, “I do

not doubt that the last evening papers, or those of tomorrow morn-

ing will have the whole business fully stated in it” (60), adding that

“[n]othing you do can be long a secret” (61). The Prince’s sayings,

not his doings, need to be kept secret.

In the novels, however, this political valence is missing. In neither

does Florizel write anything that suggests familial tensions. These

letters are valuable—interesting, coveted, brought out with a flour-

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