Redressing Lord Cornbury: Gender, Transatlantic Gossip, and Political Culture in Colonial British America

Abstract

Redressing Lord Cornbury: Gender, Transatlantic Gossip, and Political Culture in Colonial British America Karin Wulf (bio) Patricia Bonomi. The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1998. xvi + 290 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Almost any audience will perk up at the mention of sex, and most will giggle. (I witnessed a most unflattering display of this tendency at a recent historical conference.) Certainly this has proven to be the case when I have lectured to undergraduate students about Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury (1661–1723), a first cousin to Queen Anne, the allegedly crooked royal governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708, and a favorite example for historians looking to disparage the practices of royal patronage in the first British Empire. Charges of Cornbury’s corruption, however, usually have been largely overshadowed by an even more compelling tale. For almost three centuries rumors have abounded concerning the cross-dressing predilections of Cornbury. According to one rumor, during his tenure in the colonies he claimed that he dressed in women’s clothing the better “to represent her Majesty” (p. 17). An oft-cited and quite ugly portrait, reputed to be Cornbury thus attired, resides in the New York Historical Society. Patricia Bonomi’s new book aims to put the kibosh on such tittering at Cornbury’s expense. Cornbury, Bonomi contends, was a fairly effective royal governor, but historians’ whiggish tendencies have inclined them both to overlook his successes, and to believe the scurrilous tales spread by his opponents. She posits that the rumors of his administration’s corruption and his transvestism were just that—rumors circulated by his political enemies. Moreover, she demonstrates quite convincingly that the portrait’s femininely-attired subject was unlikely to be Cornbury. Most significantly, Bonomi uses the Cornbury case to explore the nature of transatlantic political culture in the first British empire. New scholarship on the British Atlantic, the practices of empire, and the transformation of discursive technologies in the eighteenth century will be enriched by this book. [End Page 33] The Cornbury case also provides an excellent example of the significance of gender and sexuality in what Bonomi calls “the politics of reputation.” In our own era, when Hillary Rodham Clinton’s sexuality is fodder for internet rumor, and Janet Reno’s physical and intellectual stature are mockingly portrayed by a male actor on Saturday Night Live, we need hardly be reminded how frequently derisive references to gender and sexuality are the political weapons of choice. As Joan Scott noted more than a decade ago, “gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated.” 1 The principal contribution of Bonomi’s work, therefore, lies not in salvaging the reputation of Governor Cornbury, but in exploring the means by which his colonial contemporaries propagated the story of his gender transgressions. Looking at the relationship between bitterly partisan politics and a developing print culture exemplified by the Grub Street hacks, Bonomi shows just how explosively politics and new media forms interacted. Institutions for communication were created to serve political ends, and ultimately transformed the political culture by ushering in a new ethos of scandal-mongering. Matt Drudge may be only the latest iteration of this phenomenon. The Lord Cornbury Scandal opens with a brief introduction to the history of Cornbury’s reputation. In the first chapter, “Lord Cornbury Redressed: The Governor and the Problem Portrait,” Bonomi marshals a host of evidence to discredit the putative portrait of Cornbury in drag. Apparently no contemporaries identified the painting as Cornbury. The first known identification of the subject as Cornbury came from English gossip in the 1790s, a period when there was a great deal of attention to transvestism because of the famous case of the ambiguously gendered Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont. In the political culture of the time even George Washington could be described as being “of the female sex,” and appeared in an English illustration in female dress (p. 26). Art historians also suggest that no painter working in the colonies at the time...