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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
William Austin (1802–1857), the child of Deptford laborers, was adopted de facto as an infant by Princess Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales. She rendered the child's identity such a mystery that it prompted the Delicate Investigation in 1806, a quasi-judicial affair published in 1813 in the vexed volume known as The Book. “Prince Austin” was regularly on stage during Caroline's carnivalesque rambles on the Continent from 1814 to 1820, frequently attacked in the loyalist press as “that bastard Billy Austin.” In the uproar of the Queen Caroline affair in 1820, Austin remained a target of loyalist scorn. Because Queen Caroline named him her residuary legatee at her death in 1821, his name registered aftershocks of queenite disruption through the middle of the century. In these narrative contests about Austin's identity, the metonymic traffic between a provisional family form and an absolutist national model bobbed and weaved in a disorderly fashion on the conspicuous stage of a dysfunctional royal family. On this prominent platform, adoptive contingency intermittently confounded closed absolutism.
1 Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 14 March 1845.
2 The most reliable set of facts about Austin is a privately printed volume of royalist genealogy: Camp, Anthony J., Royal Mistresses and Bastards: Fact and Fiction, 1714–1936 (London, 2007)Google Scholar; currently, subsequent addenda is available on the author's website: http://anthonyjcamp.com/. The most reliable accounts in royal biography are scattered references throughout Hibbert, Christopher, George IV: Prince of Wales, 1762–1811 (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Hibbert, George IV: Regent and King, 1811–1830 (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Fraser, Flora, The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.
3 McCauliff, C. M. A., “The First English Adoption Law and Its American Precursors,” Seton Hall Law Review 16 (1986): 656–77Google Scholar. Although adoption was an important feature of Roman law, Behlmer, George notes that “England's common law tradition early on developed an aversion to the idea that parenthood might be transferable” (Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940 [Stanford, 1998], 273)Google Scholar.
4 In her 2009 study of interwar adoption in England, Keating, Jenny registers that she was “surprised to find how little had been published about the early history of adoption in the United Kingdom”: A Child for Keeps: The History of Adoption in England, 1918–45 (London, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 8.
5 See McClure, Ruth K., Coram's Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Tanya, “Unfortunate Objects”: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nixon, Cheryl, The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature (Burlington, Vt., 2010)Google Scholar; Zunshine, Lisa, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Columbus, 2005)Google Scholar; Jackson, Mark, New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth Century England (Manchester, 1997)Google Scholar.
6 See especially Behlmer, Friends of the Family, particularly, chap. 6, “Artificial Families: The Politics of Adoption,” 272–315. This material is adapted and expanded as the chapter “What's Love Got to do with It? ‘Adoption’ in Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives, ed. Carp, E. Wayne (Ann Arbor, 2002), 82–100Google Scholar. See also Keating, A Child for Keeps, passim; Frost, Ginger, “‘The Black Lamb of the Black Sheep’: Illegitimacy in the English Working Class, 1850–1939,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 2 (2003): 293–322CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, Lionel, The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain 1800–1939 (London, 1986)Google Scholar; Wagner, Gillian, Barnardo (London, 1979)Google Scholar; Parr, Joy, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (London, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wagner, Gillian, Children of the Empire (London, 1982)Google Scholar.
7 Simpson, David, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago, 2013)Google Scholar.
8 For the narrative multiplicity of adoption, see Homans, Margaret, “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins,” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 4–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Homans, The Imprint of Another Life (Michigan, 2013)Google Scholar.
9 Homans, Margaret, “Adoption and Essentialism,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 35, no. 2 (2002): 257–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Stevens, Jacqueline, Reproducing the State (Princeton, 1999)Google Scholar, 107.
11 Hunt, Lynn, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar, 8, 10, 196.
12 Shell, Marc, Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood (Oxford, 1993), 124–47Google Scholar; see also Boswell, John, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York, 1988), 20–21Google Scholar. For adoption in Roman culture, see Gardner, Jane F., chap. 2, “Into the Familia: The Practice of Adoption,” Family and Familia in Roman Law and Life (Oxford, 1998), 114–208Google Scholar. Comparing European adoption customs to Roman practice, Gardner comments that “among those most at variance [is] the law of England and Wales” (114).
13 Information in e-mail posting from Patrick Vincent of the Université de Neuchâtel to the NASSR-L listserv (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism), 21 Feb. 2013.
14 There is a considerable amount of information about these 1802 events in the documentary record assembled by Perceval, Spencer in 1807 and published in 1813 as The Book, 2 vols. (London, 1813)Google Scholar. The birth father, Samuel Austin, was from Somerset, where he was “brought up to the woolen-trade”; he came to London to work in the Deptford dockyard because of an “uncle . . . holding a respectable situation there” (letter to the Examiner, 1813, 176). During the 1802 peace he lost his job, which occasioned his wife Sophia, a laundry worker, to appeal for aid to Montague House. William (born 11 July 1802) was the second child; a brother Samuel was born in 1800, and at least two other children survived, Job (born 1805) and Caroline (born 1815), although family letters suggest there may have been more children; see Camp, Royal Mistresses and Bastards, 210–14. As detailed in the final section of this essay, the older brother Samuel became the public voice for the family in disputes about Caroline's will in the decades after her death.
15 Caroline had earlier taken into her household another infant, Edwardina Kent, whose name and troubled history also survive in the biographical record; for Kent's peculiar history, see Camp, Royal Mistresses and Bastards, 208–10.
16 Molloy, J. Fitzgerald, Court Life Below Stairs, or London Under the Last Georges 1760–1830 (London, 1897)Google Scholar, 319.
17 Melville, Lewis, An Injured Queen: Caroline of Brunswick, 2 vols. (London, 1912), 1:99–102Google Scholar.
18 For an example of how Austin was represented as different in kind from other children who were the beneficiaries of Caroline's charity, see the Bury and Norwich Post, 5 May 1813.
19 Stanhope, Lady Hester, Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, 3 vols. (London, 1845), 1:308–10Google Scholar. Published in the year of Austin's lunacy hearing, Stanhope's Memoirs offers disdainful anecdotes of a spoiled toddler, several of which recirculate in later biographies of Caroline.
20 According to the Treason Act of 1351.
21 The image dates from 1807, when Austin was five: “London, Pub. April 2, 1813, by Hassell & Co.; Engraved by W. Nicholls from a drawing by J. R. Smith, portrait painter to his Royal Highness the Prince Regent—made when the child was 5 years of Age.” As a euphemism for an upper-class de facto adoption, “protégé” often appears in the Austin record; the French term began to circulate in English in the eighteenth century.
22 “The Deposition of Charlotte Lady Douglas,” Perceval, Spencer, The Book, 2 vols. (London, 1813), 1:198–99.Google Scholar
23 The Book, 1:223–26.
24 Ibid., 1:4 (emphasis added).
25 Gray, Denis, Spencer Perceval: The Evangelical Prime Minister, 1762–1812 (Manchester, 1963), 84–90Google Scholar; McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford, 1993), 41–42.Google Scholar
26 Jane Austen's Letters, 3rd edition, ed. Le Faye, Deirdre (New York, 1995)Google Scholar, 208.
27 The Book (London, 1813), 2:220–21Google Scholar.
28 Ibid., 2:109. William Cobbett added to the confusion about Austin in February 1813 by retailing a rumor that the mysterious Child was named “Billy Fawcett” (Cobbett's Weekly Political Register, 20 February 1813, 226); see also the Morning Post, 25 February 1813; the Examiner, 1813, 176.
29 Ashe, Thomas, The Spirit of “The Book”; or, Memoirs of Caroline Princess of Hasburgh, a Political and Amatory Romance, 3 vols. (London, 1812)Google Scholar. Ashe's text went through multiple printings and was immediately reprinted in North America.
30 Spirit 3:225 (emphasis added).
31 Spirit 3:268–69.
32 Hibbert, Prince of Wales, 217.
33 Garside, Peter and Schöwerling, Rainer, The English Novel 1770–1829 (Oxford, 2000), 2:42–43Google Scholar; Walker, Eric C., “‘In the Place of a Parent’: Austen and Adoption,” Persuasions On-Line 30, no. 2 (Spring 2010)Google Scholar; http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/walker.html.
34 The term “Caput” in the title of the print loosely signified the governing “heads” of a university body, although historically the term signified more precisely at Cambridge (Oxford English Dictionary 2nd ed.).
35 On 6 April 1813, the Morning Post published a satirical “Letter from Billy Austin,” addressed “To Mr. Whitbread” (the younger Samuel Whitbread, a leading advocate of Caroline's cause): “yes, Sir, though you are so great a man, yet, as your origin, like mine, was also a little queer and obscure, I hope you will not be angry with me for writing you this letter, merely to beg that you will not plead the cause of the good Princess, who has brought me up. For I am told that you do her much harm by it[.]”
36 Bury, Lady Charlotte, The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting, ed. Steuart, A. Francis, 2 vols. (London, 1908), 1:184–85Google Scholar. The diary was originally published in 1838, ed. John Galt, with authorship unattributed but widely assumed to be Lady Charlotte (emphasis in source).
37 Fraser, The Unruly Queen, 273; J. H. Adolphus, A Correct, Full, and Impartial Report of the Trial of Her Majesty, Caroline, Queen Consort of Great Britain, 18.
38 Letters from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 1810–1821, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/1–49.
39 Hibbert, Regent and King, 208; Fraser, Unruly Queen, 465. For multiple identities in adoption, see a foundational classic of modern adoption studies: Lifton, Betty Jean, Twice Born (New York, 1975)Google Scholar. Austin's de facto adoption anticipates modern “open” forms of de jure adoption, where there are negotiated degrees of communicative and personal traffic between a birth parent or parents and adoptive parents.
40 The Book, 1:213; The Examiner (1813), 176; Notes and Queries, 3rd series, 11 May 1867, 51–52; letter from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 11 July 1814, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/16.
41 Letter from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 26 Oct. 1816, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/14; Camp, Royal Mistresses and Bastards, 210–14.
42 Letter from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 11 July 1820, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/22.
43 Letter from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 1 Jan. 1810, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/1.
44 Freud, Sigmund, “Family Romances,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 9 (London, 1959): 235–42.Google Scholar
45 Letter from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 6 Jan. 1815, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/7.
46 Letter from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 2 Feb. 1818, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/17.
47 Contemporary English texts usually rendered the surname “Bergami.” I follow Hibbert and Fraser in using Pergami's preferred form.
48 de Vere White, Terence, “A Lost Correspondence: Letters from Italy from 2nd Marquess of Sligo to Rt Hon. Lord Lowther,” The Twentieth Century 163 (March 1958): 233Google Scholar; emphasis in source.
49 Caroline commissioned a painting of the scene by Carloni, a Milanese artist, which was exhibited in London in August 1820 with a published gloss: [Anon.], The Public Entry of The Queen into Jerusalem, Painted by Signor Carloni (London, 1820)Google Scholar. The print in Figure 4, which adapts the painting, also appeared as frontispiece to Adolphus, John, The Royal Exile (London, 1821)Google Scholar, a book detailing Caroline's travels published in the wake of the adultery trial in 1821.
50 Letter from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 11 July 1817, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/16.
51 Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1838)Google Scholar.
52 Hibbert, George IV, Regent and King, 152–53. The majority of the many references to “Prince Austin” in the print record in 1820–21 are sarcastic jabs in the loyalist press, for example the Morning Post, 30 November 1820.
53 Widely known as the Queen Caroline affair, the government action against Caroline was officially a Bill of Pains and Penalties in the House of Lords. The rich body of recent scholarship on this watershed event includes Laqueur, Thomas W., “The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV,” Journal of Modern History 54, no. 3 (1982): 417–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987), 150–55Google Scholar; Clark, Anna, “Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820,” Representations 31, no. 1 (1990): 47–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunt, Tamara L., “Morality and Monarchy in the Queen Caroline Affair,” Albion 23, no. 4 (1991): 697–722CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wahrman, Dror, “‘Middle-Class’ Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria,” Journal of British Studies 32, no. 4 (1993): 396–432CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fulcher, Jonathan, “The Loyalist Response to the Queen Caroline Agitations,” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 4 (1995): 481–502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
54 M. Dorothy George suggests that this unidentified figure is “perhaps Keppel Craven”; George, M. Dorothy, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol. 10, 1820–1827 (London, 1952)Google Scholar. But the resemblance to other images of Pergami in wide circulation at the time is remarkable, and the absence of any reference to the figure in the key is consonant with the fact that Pergami had returned to Italy after escorting Caroline to the Channel crossing in June 1820. The loyalist press fanned rumors that Pergami was in England clandestinely, for example, the Morning Post, 29 November 1820.
55 Cobbett, William, Rural Rides (London, 1830)Google Scholar, 178.
56 Smeeton, George, The Important and Eventful Trial of Queen Caroline, Consort of George IV, for “Adulterous Intercourse,” with Bartolomeo Bergami (London, 1820)Google Scholar, 131.
57 Smeeton, Important and Eventful Trial, 221. See the Morning Post on 18 November 1820, which rendered explicit in doggerel (“Original Poetry”) the sexual subtext of this testimony.
58 In the wake of the withdrawal of the Bill targeting Caroline, there was a widely noticed procession to a Thanksgiving service at St. Paul's on 29 November, with Austin logged in prominent place among the Queen's triumphant party (Times, 30 Nov. 1820). In a letter to his Austin mother on 8 June 1821, he notes that he has just returned “from the races with the Queen” (letter from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 8 June 1821, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/43).
59 In the flush of parliamentary success, one of Caroline's most fervent supporters, Joseph Nightingale, floated the best words ever bestowed on Austin: “Young Austin, who, of course, is now (December 1820,) in his nineteenth year, is still with his royal and generous protector. With her he has travelled over a great part of the European continent, and through many of the most interesting districts of the eastern world. He has been the subject of conversation in all parts, and bids fair to form materials for an important chapter in the future history of England”; Nightingale, Memoirs of Queen Caroline (London, 1820), 142–43Google Scholar.
60 Huish, Robert, Memoirs of Her Late Majesty Caroline, 2 vols. (London, 1821)Google Scholar, 2:713.
61 Letter from William Austin to Mrs. Austin, 8 Aug. 1821, Lincolnshire Archives, Goulding Papers, 4/A/2/2/46. A trace of Austin's exposure to religion is an octavo copy of an 1817 printing of the Bible “presented to W. Austin by Queen Caroline” in the British Library (C.129.M.9). See also the Morning Post, 30 November 1820.
62 Huish, Memoirs, 2:729–31. In three codicils over the next four days that attended to subordinate details of property, Austin was again specified in several instances. Because the estate was insolvent, Austin's income for the rest of his life (very modest annual interest) depended on separate instruments that Caroline had executed a few years earlier concerning her property at Blackheath. The labyrinthine details of these funds were hammered out in Chancery in July and August 1823, upon Austin's majority; there are lengthy accounts from the vice-chancellor's court concerning “Her Late Majesty Queen Caroline In Re Austin” in the Times on 23 July 1823 and 8 August 1823.
63 As the news of the queen's will spread, a letter to the editor of the Morning Post on 17 August attacked “that non-descript, BILLY AUSTIN.” Although the noun “nondescript” (a technical term in biology for new, undescribed specimens) had begun to acquire connotations of “insignificant; undistinguished” by the late eighteenth century, it also carried primary senses of a mystery or a puzzle, a thing “not easily classified; that is neither one thing nor another; hybrid” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.). A hybrid identity that defies classification is precisely the case of William Austin.
64 Times, 17 September 1821.
65 The other engraving was “Published by J. Robins & Co. Albion Press, London, Sepr. 8, 1821.” Figure 9 is likely the image noticed in the Times on 24 August 1821.
66 Hibbert, George IV, 208; Fraser, Unruly Queen, 465.
67 The Letters of King George IV, 1812–1830, ed. Aspinall, A., 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1938)Google Scholar, 2:282; emphasis in source.
68 Hibbert, Prince of Wales, 217; see also Waddams, S. M., Law, Politics, and the Church of England: The Career of Stephen Lushington 1782–1873 (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar, 152.
69 Morning Chronicle, 27 August 1821.
70 Times, 10 December 1839. In the provincial press, these details were recirculated under headlines such as “A Strange Court Story—Queen Caroline's Protégé” (Staffordshire Gazette, 21 December 1839).
71 See note 14 for Austin family history.
72 Times, 10 November 1832. The item's sympathy was immediately challenged in a notice in the Brighton Gazette, reprinted as far north as Aberdeen (Aberdeen Journal, 28 Nov. 1832).
73 Times, 1 February 1833; Samuel Austin's letter (from Thelwall's papers) was published in Notes and Queries, 3rd series, 11 May 1867, 51–52.
74 Times, 15 January 1833; see also Leicester Chronicle, 19 January 1833; Worcester Journal, 17 January 1833; Times, 24 January 1833 (a letter of protest from Samuel Austin).
75 Leeds Intelligencer, 29 November. 1826.
76 See Keating, A Child for Keeps, 33–35.
77 Caroline's most recent biographer misreports this event on two counts: “it was his brother Samuel Austin [it was Lushington and Wilde] who rescued him in 1846 [1845] from a Milan lunatic asylum to which he had been committed” (Fraser, Unruly Queen, 465).
78 Medical reports by A. R. Sutherland, M.D, Jan. 1846 and Jan. 1847, Royal Archives, Windsor, GEO/Box 13/68.
79 Letter from James Leman to Samuel Austin, 13 March 1845, Royal Archives, Windsor, GEO/Box 13/68. Samuel Austin appears not to have been given advance notice of the lunacy hearing on 7 March.
80 Times, 13 March 1845.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 Information supplied by archivists at the National Portrait Gallery reports the GRO Death Certificate, the Probate record of his will (TNA: PROB 11/2247, pp. 124–25), and the Register of Burials of London Westminster Cemetery, Earls Court, Old Brompton (TNA WORK/97/19/, 1857).
86 After the reports of the 1845 insanity hearing, a record of Austin's life disappears until his death certificate and burial record in 1857. In the middle decades of the century, his story circulated in memoirs and biographies of Regency principals; for example, an obituary of Lord Denman in the Times on 27 September 1854 and a response in the Daily News on 29 September; “Life of Lord Eldon” in Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 7:177 (London, 1851)Google Scholar.
87 London Standard, 3 July 1833. The play was staged at the Porte St. Martin.
88 Secrets & Lies, directed and written by Mike Leigh, October Films, 1996; winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.
89 Stevens, Reproducing the State, 119. Her conclusion: “The contingency of adoption does not disrupt the stability of the Roman kinship system” (120).
90 Letters, ed. Aspinall, 2:282. In 1857, Lushington was at the peak of his judicial career as a judge on the High Court of the Admiralty and on the cusp of his appointment as Dean of Arches in 1858 (Waddams, Lushington, 175). Brougham, who had served as Lord Chancellor from 1830 to 1834 and was Baron Brougham of Brougham and Vaux from 1830, was granted a second peerage in 1860 (Hawes, Frances, Henry Brougham [New York, 1957]Google Scholar, 294).
