Die I Will Not
Page 29
Citing Wilfrid Hindle’s The Morning Post: 1772-1937, Herd repeats a story from late 1832 or early 1833 when the Post’s outspoken Tory editor Nicholas Byrne was assassinated in response to a reactionary article (something to do with the editor’s opposition to the new Reform Act). Hindle had discovered a report of November 2, 1872—forty years after the supposed murder—in which Byrne’s encounter with the masked man is described. As in my version, Byrne followed the assailant into the street, but he, or in my case she, fled. Herd concludes that Byrne did not die in the initial attack, the death not being reported until June 27, 1833, when the journalist expired after “an illness of many months.” Or so says a curiously uninformative Morning Post announcement, which contained no mention of an inquest or funeral.
In Gossip of the Century, Julia C. Byrne, Nicholas Byrne’s daughter-in-law, describes an 1820 incident during Queen Caroline’s divorce trial in the House of Lords when public feeling ran high in her favor. The mob attacked the pro-George Morning Post, breaking windows and smashing everything in sight, causing the editor Byrne to fear for his life—he brushed through this incident only to later lose his life to the masked man (perhaps). Harold Herd trots out other oddities of the case of the murdered journalist, such as that Julia C. Byrne recounts this mob violence against the Post but doesn’t mention a word about her father-in-law being stabbed!
According to Herd, the early nineteenth-century Morning Post (in my version, the fictional London Daily Intelligencer) expressed a “slavish” admiration for the Prince Regent, later George IV. Indeed, a sycophantic poem, written under the pseudonym “Rosa Matilda”—in which the author apostrophized the Prince of Wales as an “Adonis”—was responsible for provoking Leigh Hunt’s famously scathing riposte that opens this novel. For Hunt’s temerity, he and his brother were found guilty of seditious libel, paid stiff fines, and spent several years in prison.
Once I started my own digging, I learned so many improbable and startling facts about the slain editor’s family circle that I was for a long time puzzled as to how to accommodate them, though, of course, these details are merely the basis for a murder plot of pure invention. First, Nicholas Byrne’s wife was Charlotte Dacre, whose poetry I quote at the beginning of each section. Byrne and Dacre conducted a liaison for some years, and Dacre bore him three children before their eventual marriage in 1815. Dacre was also a Gothic novelist, author of, among other works, Zofloya or The Moor, a reviewer opining of this particular novel that the author had been “afflicted with the dismal malady of maggots in the brain.” In addition to her literary pursuits, Dacre was Leigh Hunt’s journalistic foe “Rosa Matilda,” proving to me at least that a female Collatinus does not stretch the bounds of possibility. As a side note, the practice of adopting the pseudonym of a Roman patriot for political letters was common in both England and colonial America. Often these names are repeated, so it’s difficult to tell who’s who. I believe there may have been a Collatinus or two, but my Collatinus is fictional.
There’s more to this complex web of interrelationship. It turns out that Charlotte Dacre’s father was a man called John King, a Jewish moneylender or “cent-per-cent,” a cultured man and gentleman upstart. My character Horatio Rex is based on the colorful figure of John King: he was falsely accused of assaulting two women; he was a printer, who renounced his radicalism to escape prosecution; he may have betrayed his fellow Jacobins as a government spy; he lived high and engaged in shady financial dealings; he was “married” for forty years to an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, the Countess of Lanesborough. In my portrayal of Rex, I am particularly indebted to Todd M. Endelman’s essay “The Checkered History of ‘Jew’ King: A Study in Anglo-Jewish History” and to a fascinating pamphlet written by King himself entitled “Mr. King’s Apology; or a Reply to his Calumniators.”
I must add that, remarkably, John King and the Prince Regent shared a mistress, Mary “Perdita” Robinson, the celebrated actress and author with whom the Prince fell in love after seeing her perform in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The Prince of Wales became her “Florizel,” a nickname that rather inspires derision. According to Paula Byrne (no relation to Nicholas Byrne) in Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson, King and Mary Robinson enjoyed a passionate correspondence, which he later published in 1781—hardly very chivalrous of him, but it seems she owed him money. In her turn, Robinson blackmailed her lover’s father George III to obtain a financial settlement after the Prince of Wales tired of her charms. The king paid this demand to ensure the return of compromising letters his son had written to his inamorata! And, by the way, Robinson also wrote poems, which were published in the newspapers under various pseudonyms, penned her memoirs, and produced a feminist work called “A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination.”
Now for the Prince Regent and his hated wife Caroline. Leaving for the Continent in 1814, she shocked all Europe by frolicking with her Italian servant Bartolomeo Pergami and only returned to England after her husband had ascended the throne. I had known that George IV tried and failed to divorce his wife, and I remembered the story about her banging on the door of Westminster Abbey while he was being crowned—she died a broken woman soon after. However, I didn’t know that George and Caroline had engaged in a preliminary skirmish in the spring of 1813, airing their dirty laundry in the press. But the whole business is there to read in the newspapers of the day. In one incident, an effigy of the “perjurer” Lady Douglas, who had testified against Caroline in the Delicate Investigation, was carried through the streets and burned before an enthusiastic crowd. At this time Caroline had a useful friend in the lawyer Henry Brougham, who had also defended Leigh Hunt and later defended Caroline herself during her divorce proceedings. Brougham was responsible for drafting the Princess’ letter to the Regent that initiated the 1813 press war.
I don’t think I have been too unjust in my portrayal of the Prince Regent. He really did send an underling (his secretary Colonel McMahon) to bribe and browbeat the press into submission, and he was terribly unpopular—deservedly so, in my view. One more delicious tidbit: he reportedly had a habit of getting on his knees to blubber over women who had rejected his advances. There’s also a story that he dramatically stabbed himself to get the Catholic Maria Fitzherbert to agree to an illegal marriage with him. But in the end, he abandoned her to marry Caroline so that his obscene debts would be settled.
The magistrate Nathaniel Conant participated in the 1806 Delicate Investigation and then headed a similar investigation in 1813. According to Lady Anne Hamilton, Caroline’s lady-in-waiting, “Conant, the poor Marlborough-street magistrate, who procured the attested evidence for impeachment, was created Sir Nathaniel, with an increase of a thousand pounds a year, as chief of all the police offices.” Admittedly, Lady Anne was a Caroline partisan, but it’s true enough that Conant was invested as a knight in 1813 and became Chief Magistrate of Bow Street this same year. His 1822 obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine has the following somewhat suggestive statement: “He possessed a very clear understanding and promptness in decision, which, added to a great mildness of disposition and manner, peculiarly fitted him for the situation he held, and were evinced on many trying occasions, when he was intrusted with the particular confidence of the government.”
Finally, I found references to a solicitor and confidential agent of the Prince, whose name kept cropping up in the Caroline inquiries. This man—and I won’t name him because, as far as I know, he is perfectly blameless—helped interview witnesses, including the laundress who deposed that the Princess’ linen showed signs she had miscarried a bastard child. From this historical footnote, I developed my concept of the “Prince’s Man.”
March 7, 2014
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