The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV

Abstract

Seldom has there been so much commotion over what appears to be so little in the Queen Caroline affair, the agitation on behalf of a notvery-virtuous queen whose still less virtuous husband, George IV, wanted desperately to divorce her. During much of 1820 the queen's business captivated the nation. was the only question I have ever known, wrote the radical critic William Hazlitt, excited a thorough popular feeling. It struck its roots into the heart of the nation; it took possession of every house or cottage in the kingdom. . In obscure Welsh coastal villages, in rural southwest Hampshire, in hamlets hundreds of miles from London where the people knew as little of radicalism they do of necromancy, Caroline found fervid support. Her cause, William Cobbett said, let loose for a time every tongue and pen in England.' The uproar was, of course, about more than a royal domestic quarrel. King George's efforts to divorce and degrade the queen he had hated so long assumed symbolic weight far in excess of its manifest political or constitutional importance. This article is in part an account of this infusion of significance, of how a divorce action became a great radical well a women's cause. But it is also a study in the function of the trivial. The Queen Caroline agitations raise the question of what it is about certain political systems, considered both institutionally and culturally, that allows them to mask the serious behind the silly, to sustain level upon level of com-