Abstract
This chapter examines literary representations of Sir Robert Walpole in the 1720s and 1730s, assessing the extent to which private scandal informed or impinged upon his political celebrity. Through analysis of texts including Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai (1736), it enquires what force the depiction of a lascivious prime minister held within the propaganda battles of the age. The chapter argues that we need to refine our ideas of eighteenth-century scandal in order to take account of the full spectrum of responses to privacy and intimacy in public life. It also makes the case for Walpole as a celebrity on the basis that his renown—like his power—was perceived as vulnerable to popular speculation and was contingent on the vagaries of personal narrative.
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Notes
- 1.
Tatler 112, 27 December 1709, in Donald F. Bond, ed., The Tatler, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), II: 175.
- 2.
“Amiable, adj.,” OED Online, June 2017, accessed 13 July 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/6378?redirectedFrom=amiable. The hybrid meaning is given by the OED as definition 3, “implying the possession of that friendly disposition which causes one to be liked”. The first example of this usage is taken from Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).
- 3.
See Joseph Roach, “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’,” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, ed. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15–30; Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
- 4.
Nussbaum, 21. See also Stella Tillyard, “Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century London,” History Today 55, no. 6 (2005): 25.
- 5.
Earlier in the essay, for example, Steele discusses how both Agesilaus and Augustus were known to enjoy playing games with children. Darryl P. Domingo has recently commented on the essay as a whole as reflecting a growing acceptance in eighteenth-century culture that “readiness to take time out from serious matters is what qualifies men for greatness”. See Darryl P. Domingo, The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 73.
- 6.
See Leo Braudy’s distinction between classical models of fame and those that came to prominence from the late seventeenth century onwards. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 362.
- 7.
I have demonstrated the political uses and abuses of the concept of disinterested friendship with respect to eighteenth-century writers and politicians in Emrys D. Jones, Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Politics of Private Virtue in the Age of Walpole (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 8.
P. David Marshall has commented on these issues with respect to political publicity in the twentieth century, stating that “politics, like the culture industries, attempts to play with and contain affective power through its intense focus on the personal, the intimate, and the individual qualities of leadership in its process of legitimation”. See P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xiii. One goal of the present chapter is to demonstrate how even in the early eighteenth century, similar understandings of intimacy’s power could influence political discourse.
- 9.
Tom Mole, “Introduction,” in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, ed. Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 12; Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 14–15.
- 10.
Joseph Roach, “Celebrity Erotics: Pepys, Performance, and Painted Ladies,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 1 (2003): 211–30 (216).
- 11.
Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 8.
- 12.
Cobbett’s Parliamentary History (London: Printed by T. C. Hansard, 1812), XI, 1295. The speech in question was delivered on 13 February 1741 as part of the debate on Sandys’s motion to remove Walpole from office. The transcript provided by Cobbett is based on contemporary reports. Regardless of potential inaccuracies, the speech has contributed to Walpole’s historical reputation in significant ways; it was, for example, quoted in the House of Commons during debate on the Ministers of the Crown Act of 1937, the first legislation to recognise the position of Prime Minister with a specified salary.
- 13.
For the quotation and an attempt to contextualise it, see William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1798), I: 757.
- 14.
Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 14.
- 15.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 83–84.
- 16.
Essays and Poems, 82.
- 17.
Essays and Poems, 84.
- 18.
Essays and Poems, 234.
- 19.
The motto, “l’homme qui ne se trouve point et qui ne se trouvera”, inverts the title of a misogynistic essay by Charles de St Évremond. For a contemporary English translation, see The Character of a Woman that Never Was and Never Will Be ([London?]: 1718). The possibility that Wortley Montagu implicitly feminises Walpole through association with this precedent should be borne in mind given this chapter’s later reflections on the gendering of political celebrity.
- 20.
Essays and Poems, 234.
- 21.
Among the poem’s other invocations of the lover’s need for retreat is the statement that “’Tis Solitude alone can please, / And give some Intervals of ease”. See Essays and Poems, 234.
- 22.
For rumours of Catherine’s infidelities, including with Walpole’s loyal ally Lord Hervey, see Edward Pearce, The Great Man: The Life and Times of Sir Robert Walpole (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 27.
- 23.
Wortley Montagu’s modern biographer, Isobel Grundy, notes Horace Walpole’s report that his father made Skerrett burn “a whole trunk of Lady Mary’s letters and verses”. However, she also remarks on the relative lack of scandal surrounding the relationship: “public opinion knew better where it stood with an average rake than with [Walpole]”. See Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 369.
- 24.
Marilyn Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 13–19. Morris attacks Habermas’s emphasis on the rationality of the public sphere, while reinstating and antedating Sennett’s narratives of the personalisation of politics. For the works to which she is responding, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989; originally published, 1962); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
- 25.
Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character, 9.
- 26.
For the view that celebrity is inherently ephemeral, see Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London: Penguin, 2012), 335. It is significant that when discussing the rise of “a new kind of sexual celebrity” in the early eighteenth century (299), Dabhoiwala associates the phenomenon almost solely with female figures, particularly prostitutes and courtesans, so that in the case of the much-publicised relationship between Frederick, Prince of Wales and his mother’s maid of honour Anne Vane, it is the latter rather than the prince himself who is involved in the culture of celebrity.
- 27.
The poem in question is entitled “Epistle from Mrs. Y[onge] to her Husband”. It takes as its subject matter the scandalous divorce trial of 1724 in which William Yonge, faithful ally of Walpole, successfully sued his wife and her lover for adultery. As explicated by Wortley Montagu’s twentieth-century editors, the failure of Walpole’s example flagged by the poem is twofold: Yonge has followed his patron insofar as he has himself committed adultery, but he has neglected to heed Walpole’s own forgiving attitude to the affairs of his wife. See Essays and Poems, 230.
- 28.
Jerry C. Beasley, “Portraits of a Monster: Robert Walpole and Early English Prose Fiction,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14, no. 4 (1981): 406–31 (419).
- 29.
Eliza Haywood, Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (London: Printed for S. Baker, 1736), 89.
- 30.
The difficulty of accurately charting currents of desire in amatory fiction has been usefully connected both to the politics of the genre and to the nature of the reader’s pleasure by Ros Ballaster. She argues, with particular reference to Haywood and her contemporaries, that “[a] reading of textual fantasy requires that the critic recognize that imaginary pleasures are invested across an entire spectrum of literary techniques and phenomena, whereby desires are constantly displaced and transformed, rather than simply acted out through a single literary character”. See Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 28–29.
- 31.
Haywood, Eovaai, 193.
- 32.
Haywood, Eovaai, 7.
- 33.
George Haggerty has described how Sir Robert’s son Horace used his father’s masculinity as a rhetorical “antidote” to his own perceived effeminacy. See George E. Haggerty, Horace Walpole’s Letters: Masculinity and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 120.
- 34.
See Note 26 for Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s gendering of the phenomenon.
- 35.
Haywood, Eovaai, 193.
- 36.
Haywood, Eovaai, 194.
- 37.
Haywood, Eovaai, 195.
- 38.
Haywood, Eovaai, 199.
- 39.
Jennifer L. Airey, “Staging Rape in the Age of Walpole: Sexual Violence and the Politics of Dramatic Adaptation in 1730s Britain,” in Interpreting Sexual Violence, 1660–1800, ed. Anna Leah Greenfield (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 95–105 (98).
- 40.
Beasley, “Portraits of a Monster,” 427.
- 41.
[Anon.], A True and Impartial History of the Life and Adventures of Some-Body (London: Printed for Richard Higgins, 1740), 38.
- 42.
True and Impartial History, 12.
- 43.
True and Impartial History, 27.
- 44.
[Anon.], The History of Benducar the Great, Prime Minister to Muley Mahomet and Muley Moluch, Emperors of Morocco (London: Printed for C. Davies [1742?]). Jerry Beasley has suggested that the text was in fact published as early as 1731, a reasonable suggestion considering its failure to reference the excise crisis of 1733 and other key events of Walpole’s later career. See Beasley, “Portraits of a Monster,” 421.
- 45.
Benducar the Great, 37.
- 46.
Benducar the Great, 54; Walpole had been instrumental in George I’s founding of the modern-day Order of the Bath in 1725.
- 47.
Benducar the Great, 54.
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[Anon.] A True and Impartial History of the Life and Adventures of Some-Body. London: Printed for Richard Higgins, 1740.
[Anon.] The History of Benducar the Great, Prime Minister to Muley Mahomet and Muley Moluch, Emperors of Morocco. London: Printed for C. Davies, [1742?].
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Beasley, Jerry C. “Portraits of a Monster: Robert Walpole and Early English Prose Fiction.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14, no. 4 (1981): 406–31.
Bond, Donald F., ed. The Tatler, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
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———. “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It.’” In Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, 15–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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Tillyard, Stella. “Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century London.” History Today 55, no. 6 (2005): 20–27.
Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary. Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy. Edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
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Jones, E.D. (2018). “A Man in Love”: Intimacy and Political Celebrity in the Early Eighteenth Century. In: Jones, E., Joule, V. (eds) Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76902-8_8
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