Romantic Interests: Sex, Lies and Poetry Redux, Part 2

By Charles Cuykendall Carter
July 6, 2015
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

Detail from William Elmes's satirical print, "A Kick Up in a Great House"; here, the Queen mounts a bucking John Bull, a symbol of the common British person. 

This post is a continuation of Part 1 of a two-part re-presentation of an NYPL exhibit on the adultery trial of England's Queen Caroline, mounted twenty years ago by then-Pforzheimer Collection Curator Stephen Wagner. The exhibit was taken down after only two days due to a major leak.

Sex, Lies and Poetry: Romantic Reactions

News of the trial soon spread as far as Italy, where it drew the attention of the young expatriate poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend and rival Lord Byron. Members of the English community in Italy, Byron and Shelley among them, relied on Galignani's Messenger, a weekly English-language newspaper published in Paris, for the latest gossip about Caroline. In the summer of 1820, shortly after receiving a copy, Shelley set out his own opinions on the affair in a letter to a friend in England, the comic novelist Thomas Love Peacock (transcript of the excerpt below). Typically, he sided neither with king nor queen, but viewed the institution of royalty itself as an "absurdity."

Excerpt from Shelley's letter to T. L. Peacock, 12 Jul 1822. 

Plaster bust of P. B. Shelley, sculpted from memory after Shelley's death by by Marianne Hunt, wife of Leigh Hunt. 

Shelley had already taken note of "some excellent remarks" on the royal scandal in the Examiner, a liberal weekly published in London by his friend, the poet and journalist, Leigh Hunt. But in their personal correspondence, he also received Hunt's private opinions about the trial, which was just getting under way (here is a transcript of the excerpt below):

Leigh Hunt's letter to P. B. Shelley, 23 August 1820. 

Engraved portrait of Lord Byron, after George Saunders.

Lord Byron, holed up in Ravenna with an Italian countess, also followed the Queen's trial with keen interest. He had known both parties to the scandal during his celebrity years in England, and although he did not believe Caroline to be entirely innocent of the main charge—her indiscreet involvement with her former servant—he nevertheless supported her cause.

The proceedings lasted from August until mid-November of 1820 when, largely because of rising public indignation, they were discontinued. Byron had already received news of the Government's defeat when he penned some occasional verses in early December. The satirical poem, written from the King's point of view, is not reticent about the possible consequences for the regime: 

"... the truth's so disclosed / ... That if my good army don't thwack hard / I'll be damned—if I shan't be deposed."

Excerpt from Byron's holograph verses, "Pall Mall lay all sparkling," 7 December 1820. 

Whether from discretion or indifference, Byron apparently never sought to have the lines published. Most likely he felt them too casual a production to commit to print. 

The Pforzheimer copy of Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant. Only six other copies are known to survive. 

 

Shelley's literary response to the events in England was less judicious than Byron's. Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, a two-act barnyard burlesque in which all the leading political figures of the day were satirized, was rushed into print in London and caught the censor's eye the moment it appeared. (Google Books version of the 1876 facsimile.)

Shelley's friend Horace Smith arranged for the anonymous publication of Oedipus Tyrannus, in which George IV assumes the title role, his queen and ministers figured among the thinly disguised cast of characters, and the English people—Burke's "Swinish Multitude"—appeared as the chorus.

In one scene (included in a fragment of the original manuscript held by the Pforzheimer Collection), "John Bull" invites the Queen to "mount" him.  She "leaps nimbly upon his back" and calls for help from her "loyal pigs" to hunt down her enemies. The scene could possibly have been inspired by William Eames's satirical print, "A Kick Up in the Great House" (detail shown at the head of this post), which was published a month before Shelley wrote Swellfoot

The readily identifiable dramatis personae, along with Shelley's exhortation to "Choose reform or civil-war," all but guaranteed the swift suppression of the work. Of the 200 copies printed, only seven—those already sold—seem to have escaped the flames after the Society for the Suppression of Vice demanded that the entire edition be burnt.