In March 1845, a notice circulated in British newspapers of a “Commission of Lunacy on William Austin, the Adopted Son of the late Queen Caroline,” as one provincial headline billed the item. This widely duplicated piece reported that a London jury in the past week “returned a verdict ‘That William Austin was of unsound mind, and incapable of managing his affairs’ . . . The unfortunate gentleman was adopted when a child by the late Queen Caroline, and to him she bequeathed by will a portion of her property.”Footnote 1 This essay foregrounds the story of William Austin to argue that this high-stakes celebrity adoption contributes a notable chapter to a larger history that has only recently begun to be constructed, namely the passage from de facto to de jure adoption in the history of surrogate parenting in Britain. In accounts of Georgian politics, William Austin pops up, occasionally, as a footnoted bit player in episodes in the rowdy life of Caroline of Brunswick, including the “Delicate Investigation” of 1806 and, most prominently, her trial in the House of Lords in 1820. But scholarship has never placed Austin center stage as an adoptee, which is the primary purpose of this essay.Footnote 2
The history of surrogate parenting in Britain offers a legion of de facto forms, but England and Scotland came remarkably late to modern de jure adoption—England in 1926 and Scotland in 1930.Footnote 3 The history of de facto adoption during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries features important work in the eighteenth century and the latter half of the nineteenth century, but there is a striking gap in the scholarship of late Georgian and early Victorian adoption.Footnote 4 On one side of the divide, the history of the London Foundling Hospital from 1741 anchors an extensive body of work on orphans, foundlings, illegitimacy, and infanticide in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.Footnote 5 On the other end, scholarship tracking child welfare from the 1860s through the 1926 Adoption of Children Act features topics such as baby farming, Poor Law regulations, child emigration projects, the Waifs and Strays Society, and the schemes of Thomas Barnardo.Footnote 6 In the current state of British adoption history, Romantic surrogacy is the missing crucible between eighteenth-century surrogate practice and Victorian surrogate practice. The neglected history of Romantic-period adoption offers not only an important set of overlooked narratives but also the opportunity to incorporate a rich body of theory about subjectivity and identity on the margins, in the study of figures such as subalterns, migrants, exiles, and other outsiders. David Simpson recently collects these figures in the category of the stranger, a figure at the center of some of the most pressing ethical and political challenges of modernity, such as immigration.Footnote 7 Adoption is a primary form of cultural performance where strangers and familiars pass as one another, and this high-profile but forgotten episode from Romantic adoption history thus also belongs to histories of alterity in British culture.
Because British adoption history spotlights charitable and legislative interventions in the lives of the urban poor, it is fair to ask what a slice of royal history adds to the mix. A short answer is that, because the history of William Austin features a family of London laborers earlier in the century, vexed adoption topics later in the century such as sexual license, illegitimacy, and eugenics emerge in this earlier material. In addition to bringing to focus Romantic-period adoption and issues of class in adoption, Austin's history provides an exemplary case of the narrative multiplicity that structurally defines adoption, often disruptively.Footnote 8 During Austin's lifetime, half a dozen different stories of his parentage circulated at one time or another. Tracking these many tales and their media forms draws out a countervailing dynamic on the other side of the narrative excess of adoption, where engines of silence and secrecy churn out reactive forms to the disruptions of narrative over-abundance. The narratives of scandalously contingent family forms are double-edged, offering in their narrative multiplicity not only democratizing promise but also the threat of radical destabilization, a threat often rendered mute in the silence and secrecy that attend adoption. As Margaret Homans observes, adoption, with its palpable fictionality, challenges essentializing narratives of family formation and nation building, but that very fictionality also sponsors aversion and stigmatization.Footnote 9 In this essay, I argue that the adopted child is the locus of a politically inflected narrative multiplicity that cuts conflicting ways: this clamorous multiplicity is potentially liberating and democratizing, but it is also destabilizing in its uncertainty, in its liability to doubt, fears of which disruption are marked by silence and secrecy. Narratives of surrogate parenting in the early nineteenth-century supply sites where the culture plays out anxieties about the nation.
Because the actors in this chapter of adoption history orbit centers of state power, the story of William Austin also spotlights mutually constitutive relationships between familial and national forms. In Reproducing the State, Jacqueline Stevens remarks that “metaphors of family connections have been too frequently pushed aside in recent studies of the nation, largely because of a belief that, even if nations are not genetically homogeneous, families are, and therefore it makes no sense to turn to the family for ontological or historical (as opposed to psychoanalytical) understandings of the nation.” To counter this trend, Stevens installs the traffic between family and nation at the center of her argument, tracking in familial forms such as adoption “the metonymic subtleties of their interconstitutive patterns.”Footnote 10 With similar aims in her study of the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt points to “the centrality of narratives about the family to the constitution of all forms of authority.” During the Revolution, Hunt argues, “the most obvious material at hand for thinking politically was the family, not the family as some kind of modal social experience, but the family as an imaginative construct of power relations.”Footnote 11 The family is most explicitly an imaginative, contingent structure when it cobbles itself together not in consanguineous but in surrogate forms, such as adoption. Narratives of the state become remarkably tangled when forced to grapple with mongrel family forms, with border crossings of surrogate parenting. In the history of William Austin, the metonymic traffic between a provisional family form and an absolutist national model bobs and weaves in a disorderly fashion on the conspicuous stage of a dysfunctional royal family. On this prominent platform, adoptive contingency intermittently confounds closed absolutism.
A particular challenge to British models of the state and family during the Napoleonic period was the association of adoption with France, where adoption was construed as an essential mark of revolutionary citizenship. Marc Shell draws the deep connection between Rousseau's abandonment of his children and Roman jurisprudence, wherein adoption and adrogation were mechanisms of statecraft and protocols of citizenship.Footnote 12 As George Behlmer emphasizes, English common law construed parentage and children in a manner sharply distinct from cultural and political traditions on the Continent based in Roman law. In Britain, blood always trumped fictional kinship. In revolutionary France, fictions of kinship triumphed. The new nation adopted the many orphans of the Terror, joining them in the autochthonous siblinghood of enfants de la patrie. British culture coded adoption as French, to be viewed with suspicion or admiration, depending on one's politics. In 1794, the English expatriates Helen Maria Williams and John Hurford Stone each signed the guestbook of a Swiss library as “an adopted child of the French Republic” and “filius adopti Repub. Gallicae.”Footnote 13
These details leap ahead of the task at hand, however, which is the untold story of a British adoptee whose life unfolded at this very time when adoption was a vexed political trope. The history of William Austin offers a telling series of narrative tangles, which circulated in multiple forms of print culture—journalism, the book trade, graphic satire—and multiple forms of public spectacle, ranging from the theatre, to trials, processions, weddings, and funerals. I take up that history in three parts. The first follows Austin's adoption as an infant in 1802 to the crisis of the secret “Delicate Investigation” in 1806, which adjudicated competing narratives of his identity, and to the belated publication of the documents of that affair in 1813. The second tracks his scripted performances of multiple identity in Caroline's carnivalesque rambles on the Continent from 1814 to 1820, culminating in the explosion of the adultery trial in London in 1820 and Caroline's death in 1821. The last section takes up the valedictory shadow of Regency turmoil cast by Austin's madness and disappearance into silence two decades later, on the cusp of the revolutionary eruptions across Europe of 1848.
ADOPTION, THE DELICATE INVESTIGATION, AND THE BOOK, 1806–1813
In the fall of 1802, the Princess of Wales maintained, riotously, her own separate establishment, Montague House, on the edge of Blackheath at Greenwich. The one child of the royal marriage, Princess Charlotte, was six years old; the Prince of Wales and his warring spouse bitterly contested her care and supervision, and Princess Caroline was able to see her daughter only intermittently. Although many alternative narratives subsequently disrupted the following set of facts, best evidence indicates that in November 1802, Sophia Austin, the wife of a laid-off Deptford dockworker, came to Montague House with her second child, a three-month-old infant, to beg for assistance. Alert to their mistress's extravagant whims, Caroline's servants suggested that Mrs. Austin return the next day with the child to allow the princess to take stock of him. The baby, William Austin, was immediately taken under care at Montague House and became a permanent and puzzling fixture of life with Caroline in the royal fast lane.Footnote 14
Throughout her stormy career as Princess of Wales, Caroline decorated her court with children plucked from her surroundings, a royal habit that boasted a pedigree as old as Moses.Footnote 15 In Caroline's case, such typical royal practice was long interpreted as especially motivated by her enforced separation from her one biological child. In the language of a late-nineteenth-century account, “The maternal feelings of the Princess, being thwarted in this way, found vent in adopting children, and placing them out under care in the village, where she constantly visited them.” But this account also emphasizes that William Austin was a singular exception to this rule: “not satisfied with this, she subsequently had one of them, an infant of a few months old, named William Austin, removed to her own house, where she tended him with the greatest care and affection, an indiscretion she soon had cause to bitterly repent.”Footnote 16 In an account from a German guest in 1803, “eight or nine” charity children were under her care as generic philanthropic supplements, a surplus signifying a venerable tradition of royal patronage.Footnote 17 But William Austin functioned in a unique way as a substitute, as a surrogate marker for a missing royal child.Footnote 18 William Austin stands out as a special case, his life the primary proving ground of the vertiginous stakes of surrogate identity, played uncomfortably close to the centers of power.
Especially because it exasperated her despised spouse, Caroline cultivated an air of mystery about baby William, known as Willikin or Willy. Amply proportioned, the princess was an infamously bawdy social ringmistress, which meant that a clandestine pregnancy was not out of the question. Gossips were not shy to speculate that the child might be the product of any one of her several rumored lovers, especially Sir Sidney Smith, Captain Thomas Manby, or the artist Thomas Lawrence. While the mystery of Caroline's sex life was spinning, the princess was not above keeping Willy's low origins in view as a complicating narrative. The thought that the royal Princess Charlotte on her occasional visits to Montague House would spend sibling time with a dockworker's son gave the Prince of Wales fits, as Caroline well knew. Mid-century memoirs from disgruntled survivors of Caroline's circle traffic in unflattering snapshots of a child whom Lady Hester Stanhope in 1845 branded “a little, nasty, vulgar brat,” adding “It was unpardonable in the P—ss to lavish her love upon such a little urchin of a boy, a little beggar, really no better.”Footnote 19 A primary trace of Willy Austin's special status in these royal skirmishes—what Lady Hester called “pure spite to vex the Prince”—is that at least two engraved early childhood portraits survive (Figures 1 and 2), a mark of status unbestowed on the other anonymous children encircled by Caroline. These early images anticipate William Austin's remarkable cameo appearances in the later graphic record of Caroline's boisterous exile and tumultuous return.
William Austin. The Protégé
William Austin.
After three years of rumors about William Austin, the Princess of Wales quarreled flamingly with two of her favorites, Lord and Lady Douglas, who began spreading toxic dirt. These gossipy grenades were also a high-stakes political game, which ignited a secret government investigation in 1806 focused on the identity of this mysterious male child. Lady Douglas indicated to the government her willingness to testify that not only was the child the illegitimate issue of the princess—which was trouble enough: adultery on the part of the Princess of Wales, if proven, would be treasonFootnote 20—but Lady Douglas piled a second fiction on the top of the fiction of illegitimacy: she indicated that she would testify that the Princess of Wales to acquit herself was not unwilling to attribute paternity to none other than the Prince of Wales. Here is an excerpt from Lady Douglas's deposition published in The Book in 1813:
In May or June following [March 1802], the Princess came to my house alone; she said she came to tell me something that had happened to her, and desired me to guess. I guessed several things, and at last I said I could not guess any more. She then said that she was pregnant, and that the child had come to life. . . . She never told me who was the father of the child. She said she hoped it would be a boy. She said, that if it was discovered, she would give the Prince of Wales the credit of being the father, for she had slept two nights at Carlton House within the year. . . . When she first told me she was with child, I rather suspected that Sir Sidney [Smith] was the father, but only because the Princess was very partial to him.Footnote 22
Were a tale of royal paternity to gain currency, in least consequence the royal pair would be guilty of little more than yielding to a mutually repugnant conjugal spasm on one of the princess's rare visits to Carlton House, which in the logbook of royal self-indulgence would not make much of a stir by itself. But if Lady Douglas's version of Caroline's story were to gain credence, the nation would of course have a new male heir on its hands, or an imposter thereto, and an ugly succession crisis would erupt.
Such high-stakes anxieties provided the Prince of Wales sufficient ammunition to persuade the king to instruct the government to undertake an official inquiry about the identity of “the Child” (as he was styled), although the prince's motives were entirely self-interested: he saw the Douglas conspiracy as a devoutly wished-for opportunity to find some leverage to dump a hated spouse. The identity of a surrogate child provided an inviting platform to interrogate and stigmatize the sex life of the absent princess. As always when illicit sex is the brief, the prosecutorial machinery of the engines of state wallowed in proxy pleasures. The royal commissioners pored over birth and baptismal records and devoted special attention to stained fabrics and the servants who washed the bed linen.Footnote 23 In the end, Princess Caroline wriggled her way out of trouble, even though the commissioners kept her entirely in the dark about the secret proceedings. In the language of the official verdict, certainty triumphant banished doubt:
We are happy to declare to Your Majesty our perfect conviction, that there is no foundation whatever for believing that the child now with the Princess of Wales is the child of her Royal Highness, or that she was delivered of any child in the year 1802, nor has any thing appeared to us which would warrant the belief that she was pregnant in that year, or at any other period within the compass of our inquiries. The identity of the child now with the Princess, its parentage, the place and date of its birth, the time and circumstances of its being first taken under her Royal Highness's protection, are all established by such a concurrence both of positive and circumstantial evidence, as can, in our judgement, leave no question on this part of the subject. That child was, beyond all doubt, born in the Brownlow-Street Hospital, on the 11th day of July 1802, of the body of Sophia Austin, and was first brought to the Princess's house in the month of November following.Footnote 24
“Perfect conviction,” “no question,” “beyond all doubt,” “no foundation whatever”: this is the language of deep-seated power on the run from questions and doubt, which in spite of the commissioners’ best efforts continued to surround the person of William Austin. By their cascading redundancy, these absolute phrases betray a desire to corral the multiple narratives of adoption into a single story. The anxious knowledge that this was an impossible task drove the commissioners to construe the identity of the adopted child as a fixed question with a single determinate answer, grounded in the body of the biological mother. The narrative multiplicity and contingency that necessarily define a surrogate child loomed as threat rather than promise.
In terms of adoption and narrative theory, it is conspicuously ironic that this quasi-judicial investigation, instead of unequivocally nailing down the identity of William Austin, only multiplied the manifold stories already in circulation. The Delicate Investigation worked entirely in secret, so the little information that percolated out in 1806 was exclusively rumor, gossip, and innuendo, which instead of putting to rest questions and doubts about “the Child” only gave fiction more fuel. The vexed publication history of the investigation boosted the narrative energy generated by a secret proceeding about a mysterious child. Whereas a print record of the investigation would seem to serve the cause of certainty, the print product of the episode instead became another mysterious pawn in the rapidly shifting power formations of party politics. Having gained what felt like victory, Caroline's partisan supporters—especially the Pittite evangelical Spencer Perceval, Caroline's chief advocate and adviser—decided to play an oppositional hand and print all the documents, findings, and a long response by the princess (ghosted by Perceval) in a volume that became known as The Book, a publication intended to embarrass the prince and his new allies, the post-Pitt coalition government including Fox. But The Book, which Perceval printed in 1807 and stockpiled threateningly in advance of publication, was immediately withdrawn when the new government stumbled over the Catholic Emancipation hurdle and Perceval suddenly found himself on the inside, holding power. Fearful of accusations of blackmail as a path to power, Perceval's new government pivoted with alacrity and bought back and burned all copies of The Book it could find, which transformed The Book into an officially banned, censored, and clandestine object and placed the veridical claims of the investigation under an additional cloud of suspicion.Footnote 25 In the world of print, the adopted child became not less but more mysterious.
The belated publication of The Book in 1813 only stirred again the narrative brew. The battle between the royal parents from 1806 to 1813 continued to center on the care and education of Princess Charlotte, escalating sharply when the prince became regent in 1811. Disputes came to a very public boil in February 1813, with the newspaper circulation of an indignant letter of protest to the prince from Caroline (now ghosted by Henry Brougham), a document that caught Jane Austen's eye in Hampshire and accelerated a rising tide of sympathy for Caroline and disdain for the regent.Footnote 26 Pressing this advantage, Caroline's Whig advisers exhumed The Book from its early grave and published it posthumously. On the 1813 title page, the precipitating question of “THE CHILD” featured prominently, typographically mischievous in the same font and point as “THE KING”, earlier on the page: “A Statement of Facts / Relative to / THE CHILD, / Now Under the Protection of Her Royal Highness.” The story of the surrogate child now circulated in a documentary record and sworn testimony; this is a print account, as the title page puts it, “Faithfully Copied From Authentic Documents.” This veridical dynamic was most vividly captured in the transcribed voice of Sophia Austin, the birth mother, who testified on 7 June 1806:
I know the child which is now with the Princess of Wales. I am the mother of it. I was delivered of it four years ago the 11th of July next, at Brownlow-street Hospital. I have lain in there three times. William, who is with the Princess, is the second child I laid in of there. It was marked in the right hand with red wine. . . . I did wean the child, and brought it to the Princess's house on the 15th of November, and left it there, and it has been with the Princess ever since. I saw the child last Whit-Monday, and I swear that it is my child.Footnote 27
In spite of such a decisive tone, forensic details from the 1806 proceedings played out against a multitude of competing accounts at their belated print appearance in 1813. Four hundred pages into the documentary record, a fly-title page offered “A Statement of Facts” about the identity of what remained, except in Sophia Austin's voice, an anonymous creature, “THE CHILD.” But instead of certainty, the surrogate child in The Book in 1813 appeared in an abstracted anonymity that offered a blank canvas upon which Britons busily projected multiple images of identity.Footnote 28
In the long gap between the Delicate Investigation and the publication of The Book, opposition culture generated even more tales about the peculiar child filling Princess Charlotte's place with her mother. While The Book was officially banned, the hack writer and blackmailer Thomas Ashe cranked out from his Newgate cell a fictionalized version of events, published in 1811 as a scandal novel titled The Spirit of “The Book,” which cast itself as a series of letters from mother to daughter, from Caroline to Charlotte.Footnote 29 Here is a taste of Ashe doing his Caroline impression, just after he introduced “the child”:
The circumstances of my attention to the little boy, mentioned to you, my dear Charlotte, in my last letter, and other circumstances industriously buzzed about by report, aroused certain conjectures; these conjectures engendered suspicion; and in process of time the parentage of the little W——m was not merely doubted, but boldly attributed to me.Footnote 30
“Conjecture,” “suspicion,” “doubt,” “attribution”: this oppositional language gleefully disrupted the dominant tale of absolute certainty, which in 1811 still remained officially secret. The most remarkable feature of Ashe's clumsy plot is that, in its conclusion, it floated an entirely different tale of parentage. The narrative revealed that the lost love of Caroline's youth was a German nobleman who had taken up surreptitious residence in a cottage near her country estate; the boy W——m was revealed to be the orphan son of a clandestine marriage between Prince L——s and Melina, the childhood friend of Caroline. This lost lover had smuggled this orphan child from Germany and put him in the way of Caroline on her outings, and she took the bait.Footnote 31 Beyond the fact that this version erased William Austin's laboring-class origins, what makes Ashe's clunky plot especially interesting is that it put into popular print circulation yet another story about Willy Austin's identity—in brief, that he was the natural child of German nobility. Ashe's tale is worthy of special attention because it is a story that Caroline herself seems to have set spinning and a story that she repeated to witnesses at least twice in the last years of her life, once—dramatically—on her deathbed.Footnote 32
Bibliographers of the novel in this period have recently documented a remarkable spike in “scandal” fiction in the wake of the Delicate Investigation, so Ashe's example of representational practice can be multiplied, even to an entirely different order of sophistication in texts such as Jane Austen's Emma, published in 1815, which presents multiple adoption subplots and is anxiously dedicated to the prince regent.Footnote 33 The nexus of surrogate children, politics, and representational practice is also vividly on offer in satirical prints, which as popular graphic genre sponsored the narrative circulation of William Austin's figure post-Waterloo. Before I follow Caroline and Austin to the Continent, an 1813 print from the Tory periodical the Satirist supplies a final example of how the adopted child figured in political discourse in the early years of the Regency.
Circulated in the immediate wake of the much publicized February 1813 letter from the princess to the regent, this print (Figure 3) appeared at the same moment when The Book rose from a pulped grave, offering in its April Fool's Day images a loyalist send-up of oppositional politics in the guise of an absurd conspiracy.Footnote 34 Henry Brougham, the ghostwriter of the letter from the princess, is the bewigged figure seated on the right (the book at his fingertips is “The Young Man's Complete Letter Writer”), engaged in horse-trading conversation with the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett.
“A Caput: New College Oxford”
William Austin is the homunculus crawling out of the container before the cloven-footed Brougham, who offers this devilish deal to Burdett: “The interests of Billy Austin are entrusted to my care—he shall marry Your daughter by that Lady & dash for the—[image of crown].” Austin's container—the ark of bulrushes for Moses?—is inscribed with a detail from Austin's birth record, available in the testimony only now in print circulation in The Book: “from Brownlow Hospl Glass to be kept dry this side up.” The opposite homunculus is if anything even odder: a female figure with her father's unmistakable profile—one of the bastard children of Burdett and Lady Oxford, who is the woman busy in the left corner with another lover (Lord Oxford is the cuckhold on the far right). Diminished as “Billy,” Austin lunges for a crown that has tellingly slipped askew off its cushioned seat. The quasi-normative figure of an aristocratic bastard (Burdett's and Lady Oxford's daughter) strikes an attitude isomorphic with a figure whom the state has ruled is a legitimate child (William Austin, born in “Brownlow Hospl”), but a child who remains nevertheless a threateningly surrogate figure, scandalously plucked from a pair of laborers and planted in the courts of royalty. Beyond this class violation, surrogacy threatened more generally because it had the bad habit of reminding absolute power that the identity forms upon which power depended might be rendered contingent, in spite of the claims of blood. Sufficiently anxious to deploy the weapons of ridicule to attempt to spin these multiplying stories to its advantage, established power envisioned these two little grasping bastards and their puppet masters as a farcical plot to knock state power off its soft seat.Footnote 35
In spite of the state's best efforts, the identity of William Austin refused to remain fixed. Caroline's pleasure in bedeviling the question purrs teasingly on the cusp of her Continental journeys in a diary entry from 1814 by Lady Charlotte Bury:
She swore to me as she was standing by the fire the other day . . . that Willikin was not her son. “No,” said she, “I would tell you if he was. No,” she continued, “if such little accident had happened, I would not hide it from you. He is not William Austin, though,” added she; “but avouez-moi, it was very well managed that nobody should know who he really is, nor shall they till after my death.” I replied, that I thought it was nobody's business who the boy was, and that I, for one, had no curiosity to know. “That is for why I tell you,” replied the Princess. “Then somebody ask me who Willikin is de child of. De person say to me, ‘Dey do say, he is your Royal Highness's child.’ I answered, ‘Prove it, and he shall be your king.’ The person was silent after that.”—I could not resist laughing, and the Princess laughed, also. She takes great pleasure in making her auditor stare.Footnote 36
From 1814 to her death in 1821, when much of Europe and Britain stared perplexed at Caroline, William Austin was nearly always a puzzling figure in the frame.
ADOPTION ABROAD AND THE ADULTERY TRIAL, 1814–1821
In 1814, Princess Caroline began her rowdy exile on the Continent. William Austin, now twelve, was her constant companion. She delighted in introducing him in European courts as “the little prince,” which occasioned a great deal of diplomatic dyspepsia.Footnote 37 In this far more public phase of his adoptive life, William Austin became an actor in multiple forms of theatrical spectacle: royal boxes at the theatre, royal processions, urban parades, a state trial, a coronation, a state funeral. The most telling forms of evidence from this period are widely circulated graphic prints, several examples of which follow. But I begin with a different body of evidence: namely, a curious set of letters from Austin to his birth mother that survive archivally.Footnote 38 Whereas biographers of Caroline and the regent log them as evidence that Austin was in no doubt about his parentage, I read them instead through the lens of adoption theory, as evidence of the structural necessity for an adopted child to inhabit and perform multiple identities.Footnote 39
Throughout his life as a surrogate royal child, Austin maintained contact with his laboring-class birth family in London. William's royal connection provided an economic tether for his birth family: soon after William's placement, Samuel the penniless father began “turning a mangle” in the laundry in Pimlico operated by Caroline's footman Thomas Stikeman, and he later was employed in the West India docks and as a “locker-up” in the Custom House.Footnote 40 In the letters to his birth mother from the Continent, Austin regularly asked for news about his biological siblings: an older brother, Samuel (b. 1800); a younger brother, Job (b. 1805); and a much younger sister, Caroline (b. 1815), whose well-chosen name delighted him.Footnote 41 When Austin returned to London with the queen in 1820, he met with members of his birth family, but always in third-party locations, and it is clear that there were limits to his knowledge of his blood relatives. In his birthday letter to his birth mother on 11 July 1820, explaining that he cannot be with his family “for the reasons I told you before,” he adds: “Two women came this morning saying that they were my aunts but as I never knew that I had any aunts I thought it [wiser?] to desire Mr. Hieronymous to say so.”Footnote 42
Although the bulk of the four dozen letters from William to his birth mother dates from the continental travels and the months of the queen's trial, the earliest document, written from Kensington Palace on 1 January 1810, announces to his birth mother in an eight-year-old's labored script the theatrical theme that would increasingly define Austin's life: “I went to the play yesterday and saw Cinderella I was very much pleased.”Footnote 43 The palpably overdetermined irony of this event is that, like Cinderella, Austin the biological child of laborers was actually living the fantasy of status elevation that Freud famously posited is a developmentally necessary fantasy of adoption shared in childhood by all.Footnote 44 On the road with the Princess of Wales, the teenaged Austin found himself on display in the exalted public spaces of royal boxes in the theatres and opera houses of Europe. Soon after Caroline's traveling circus pitched tents in Naples in late 1814, Austin addressed a letter to “My Dear Mother” on 6 January 1815:
The Play House [phrase deleted] The Opera House is very fine indeed at Naples the King and Queens box is in the middle very large and fine [T]here is a large chandeleer in the middle hung from the top [T]hey give always in the month of January Masquerades in the Opera House every body that likes plays and [word missing] goes in [T]here is one on Sunday and I am going to see it, it will I dare say be very beautiful indeed.Footnote 45
Similarly, three years later, to “My Dear Mother” from Pesaro on 2 Feb. 1818, after asking for news of his siblings, Austin observed that “I amuse myself very much at Pesaro every evening almost there are theatres or balls and Masquerades[.]”Footnote 46 Such very public appearances were a primary theatrical venue for Austin's performance as proxy royal progeny in the bizarre improvisational show that was Caroline's court on the road, crisscrossing Italian sovereignties for five disreputable years.
The headline delinquency of these continental peregrinations was Caroline's lusty attachment to Bartolomeo Pergami, the Milanese courier who quickly rose from new court functionary to ringmaster.Footnote 47 The prince regent and his government tracked Caroline fiercely, planting spies and bribing servants in clandestine surveillance that led to a rerun of the Delicate Investigation, the secret Milan Commission in 1818–19, which laid the rotten evidentiary footings for the adultery trial in 1820. But British travelers happy to volunteer the latest scandalized gossip eagerly supplemented this state sponsored surveillance. A letter home from Lord Sligo in Rome on 6 November 1814 supplies a typical snapshot of how the surrogate figure of Austin in the theatre offended establishment sensibilities: “It was really abominable, there was the Princess . . . and Billy Austin sitting in front of the Box and all the English and most of the nobility of Florence standing behind her to pay their respect. Now really it was too bad to have that little bastard sitting in front while everyone else was standing up.”Footnote 48 To established power and its many opportunistic supplicants such as Sligo, Caroline and her entourage were a transgressive horror; the diminutive “Billy” tags the phrase “that little bastard” to cut the royal patronym “William” down to size.
Caroline's most elaborate extravaganza during her continental interval was a ten-month journey to the Holy Land, which produced sharply competing images of William Austin. While London lavishly celebrated the wedding of her daughter Princess Charlotte to Prince Leopold in May 1816, the royal bride's absent mother shipped out with Billy Austin and Pergami via Athens on the way to Constantinople and a triumphal entry into Jerusalem in July, on Austin's birthday. Figure 4 is a widely reproduced queenite print of that Jerusalem moment.Footnote 49
Caroline's Entry Into Jerusalem.
Austin, Pergami, and Caroline are the three becollared figures in the foreground, composing a defiantly parodic image of a nuclear royal family far from home, posed at just the moment when the newlywed royal Princess Charlotte was set to produce proper issue, next to the crown. Having boosted Pergami's shadowy class status early in the voyage by making him a knight of the established Order of Malta, Caroline in Palestine multiplied this offense by creating a new Order of St. Caroline with William Austin the dockworker's child and Pergami the courier as her knights. The transgressions that pile up in the scene—a surrogate child, an adulterous lover, profligate honorifics—rest outrageously upon the framing transgression of the Gospel narrative, wherein an itinerant prophet perched on an ass defied state power. This defiantly unorthodox tableau is a proleptic image of Caroline's riotous triumphal procession into London in June 1820, which oppositional stage managers smartly designed to echo these heresies.
Loyalist satire recast the Levantine journey as devilishly unhallowed. Figure 5 is an 1821 copy of a print relocating the unholy royal family in Egypt, ironically one of the few places in the eastern Mediterranean that Caroline did not tour.
“A Reposo—Temptation in the Wilderness.”
Whereas the Jerusalem print piggybacks on the antinomian substructure of the Gospel event to justify the lawlessness of the modern performers, this loyalist print redraws the journey as raw blasphemy. The outrageousness of Caroline as a Christ figure is now a wicked measure of her vast failures to resist temptation. The satanic tempter from the Gospel narrative here transformed into Mahomet rendered the scene for a contemporary British audience doubly beyond the orthodox pale. The print gleefully exploited the many sins of the flesh supplied by Caroline's and Pergami's example, but the stakes of the biblical temptation story ratchet up in seriousness from pleasures of the flesh to political power, as Milton in Paradise Regained had spelled out for a British audience. Although the action in the right foreground of this print is all about sex and drink, the pyramids in the left background reminded a viewer that royal state power was simultaneously very much at issue. Near the center of the scene is wee Willy Austin, blowing soap bubbles, identified in the subtitle as “young Saint Austin,” in the disreputable company of “Saint Caroline” and “Saint Bartholomew.” Those bubbles marked the desire of established power to dismiss these lawless characters as inconsequential and ephemeral, but they also signified the recalcitrantly disruptive enigma of the surrogate child, whose performative identity is, like a bubble, both elusive and eye-catching.
For William Austin, the Jerusalem journey superscribed his birth identity, as he explained to his London mother in an anniversary letter from Rome on his fifteenth birthday, 11 July 1817: “to day is my birth day . . . [I]t is also a year that We entered Jerusalem and it will always be kept an Anniversary for that Great Voyage which we have made, and undergone the dangers of the Sea.”Footnote 50 After returning to Italy in late 1816, Caroline and company shifted restlessly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, scuttling north to Germany and Austria in the spring of 1817 before settling down in Pesaro on the Italian coast for the last two years of her Continental sojourn. Two of the most pointed graphic attacks on Caroline hang on a visit to Vienna in the spring of 1817, which came off badly: the Emperor Francis I refused to receive Caroline, taking refuge in the fact that his court was still officially in mourning following the recent death of the Empress. The first of these two prints drawn by George Cruickshank shows the gatekeepers at the British ambassador's residence also refusing Caroline's party, while Caroline's herald demands extensive top-tier bedding (“Vite! Vite!! 7 Lits de Maitre—13—de Domestique”) for its many rumored bedroom sports. Willy Austin, who was now fifteen, peeks in profile from his privileged seat in the royal carriage, his low roots nevertheless underscored in a figure of an urchin and his curs greeting the royal carriage. Pergami is an equally scandalous figure, an erect feather on his headgear a preparation for the even more outrageous images in the accompanying print.
Figure 6, “R-y-l Condescension,” illustrates vividly how loyalist satire pitched Pergami and Austin as the two defining males in Caroline's outlaw ways.
“R-y-l Condescension.”
In Vienna, Caroline introduces her motley crew to Prince Metternich, who bows in elegant contrast to Caroline's literal grossness: “Permit me, Sir Prince, to present to you my sweet [del] suite—.” Metternich's reply (“Your R—l H—s is really too condescending!!”) repeats with bald irony the attack in the print's title, “to condescend,” signifying, in the words of Johnson's Dictionary, “to sink willingly to equal terms with inferiours.”Footnote 51 The class violations in the persons of Pergami and Austin morph hypersexually throughout the print. Pergami's sword hilt caressed by Caroline's hand is a wicked touch, and the embroidery on his trouser leg stands erect in anatomical salute. Cruickshank poses Willy with a firm grip on his own slender shaft, a riding crop, which is pointed shamelessly at his surrogate mother's crotch. The absent legitimate male member, the print thereby suggests, belongs to the Prince Regent. Tagging the main figures, the four prints on the wall underscored the sexual theme. Pergami is a stud horse (“Cock horse a favourite Stallion”), and to the right of Caroline's print (“A view in Wales”), above Austin's curly head, is an image labeled “Billy A—favourite mule—!!,” captioned additionally as an ass who treads on Austin's birth turf, “Black-heath.” The dwarfish Austin is simultaneously an overgrown infant and a budding adolescent male whose relationship with his adoptive mother the print sexualizes incestuously to compound her primary adulterous sins with Pergami.
At the death of George III in 1820, Caroline defiantly returned to London in early June to frenzied acclaim, the tumultuous crowds that greeted her as queen also hailing the eighteen-year-old Willy Austin as “Prince Austin.”Footnote 52 Among its many tools during these wild months, radical opposition latched on to the figure of Willy Austin to help seize control of the narrative of political power. The open identity of the surrogate child provided London radicals another weapon to threaten Old Corruption with the idea that the public now possessed mobilized power to declare which forms of power were legitimate.Footnote 53 A print attributed to Theodore Lane (Figure 7) illustrates how the loyalist press counterattacked. Welcomed by a radical throng in London, Caroline and her Continental train parade in from the storm-racked right of the frame, greeted on the left by a gallery of the queen's most notable supporters, including Henry Brougham, Sir Francis Burdett, and William Cobbett.
“Grand Entrance to Bamboozl'em.”
The train of braying asses anchors a send-up of Caroline's grand entrance into Jerusalem. Pergami and Austin, Caroline's two headline knights in that history, yield the foreground to two local targets of loyalist scorn who escort the queen on either side, Alderman Wood (“Absolute Wisdom”) in jester's cap and his son, John Wood (“Young Absolute”) on her left arm, who was pulling novice duty as the queen's chaplain. But the print's targets of ridicule signify that Pergami and Austin also threaten disruption in primary forms. The yellow-capped figure to the right of Young Absolute haunts the scene in the guise of Pergami, a ghost unnamed in the key (Pergami could not risk being physically present in Britain).Footnote 54 Austin is the red-capped dwarfish figure trailing Young Absolute while cradling two infants in his arms; he is labeled in the key below as “Billy By-Blow of Black-heath in charge of the Nursery.” This figure cuts both ways: it attempts to defuse the figure of Austin by multiple diminishments of stature, chronology, and name, but at odds with this purpose the nursery figure also draws risky attention to the increasingly shaky fact that what William Cobbett called “the THING” grounds its authority in the claims of birth and blood.Footnote 55 At such a feast of power, which still stakes its ultimate guarantees in consanguinity, a surrogate child is an unwelcome guest.
In the eventful narrative of the last year of Caroline's life, Austin almost always clocked in among the crowded cast. Transcripts of the quasi-judicial proceedings in the House of Lords against the queen fed the maw of scandal, wherein the puzzling identity of Austin frequently popped up, one among many odd dishes on a very large menu of the peculiar. Here is a typical moment in one servant's testimony:
Did the Princess and Bergami commonly dine alone or with some other person? Sometimes they dined alone; sometimes with Wm. Austin, who was reported to be the son of the Princess.
How was Wm. Austin called, either by the Princess or in her presence? Some called him “William,” some called him “the young Prince,” and sometimes I have seen the Princess when he was going to bed give him some token of affection as a mother would give her child.Footnote 56
The bedtime habits of an adolescent male rarely circulated in such a public manner. Here is testimony from another servant about sleeping arrangements at Naples, where the prosecution alleged the queen's affair with Pergami commenced:
Do you recollect a young person of the name of William Austin, being with her Royal Highness? Yes.
Before the Princess arrived at Milan, where was William Austin in the habit of sleeping generally? Generally he slept in the room of her Royal Highness.
Do you recollect where her Royal Highness slept, at what house, on the night before she entered the city of Naples? In a country-house.
Do you recollect whether her Royal Highness slept in the room of William Austin in that country-house? I cannot positively say about that night; but, generally, he was in the habit of sleeping in the room of her Royal Highness.
Had her Royal Highness about that time any communication with you about the place of sleeping of William Austin? Her Highness told me, during that evening, that William Austin had become too big a boy to sleep in her room, and he must have une chambre particuliere.Footnote 57
Here is Austin in judicial transcripts, there is Austin in a victorious thanksgiving procession to St. Paul's, here is Austin with the queen at the theatre and the races.Footnote 58 The first image of Austin as an adult was published in London on 22 September 1820 (Figure 8) as interest in the trial surged toward its November crest.
“WILLIAM AUSTIN, Her Majesty's Protége”
In the uproarious year of Caroline's return and trial, a surrogate child was but one among many offbeat sideshows in a widely pitched carnival of disruption.Footnote 59 But at the queen's death, Austin returned to the center of the show, now inscribed within a new legal narrative that trailed him the rest of his days. After her humiliating exclusion from the king's coronation in July 1821, Caroline's health failed precipitously until her death on 7 August, surrounded at the end by Lord and Lady Hood, Lady Anne Hamilton, Alderman Wood and son, five physicians, two lawyers – and William Austin, “overwhelmed with grief.”Footnote 60 Later on the day of his surrogate mother's death, Austin wrote to his birth mother:
Dear Mother[,] You must undoubtedly have heard the horrible News[.] I cannot find words to express them. But we must at all times submit to the Almighty. [W]ait with Patience till you hear from me again as I have not strength to see you for some time but do not come to see me or any of you till I desire you[.] I am your sincere son WAustin[.]Footnote 61
Austin's adoptive mother is dead, and he holds his birth mother at a distance: this moment dramatizes the existential plight of an adopted child, who experiences mothers both as surplus and as absence, simultaneously. Rushed into print while queenite fervor still lingered, the many published accounts of the queen's last days foregrounded “Her Majesty's Last Will and Testament,” the primary beneficiary of which was William Austin. The main document, signed four days before her death, directed her trustees to sell all her property, invest the proceeds, and “pay the principal of the whole of the said trust property to William Austin, who has been long under my protection, on his attaining the age of 21 years; and, in the mean time, to pay the interest and proceeds of the same, or so much thereof as to them may seem meet, towards the maintenance and education of the same William Austin.”Footnote 62 This well-known document bids to define William Austin's identity in the final period of his life. (Unfortunately for Austin, the estate was effectively insolvent.) A figure such as Austin was more legible to this culture in a discrete inheritance narrative honoring property instead of a wild array of competing narratives transgressing biology, especially and ironically because biology was still the dominant determinative ground of the system of property and power. Billy Austin bedding down near the Princess of Wales was a thought beyond the pale, but “the maintenance and education of the same William Austin” is language that had a chance to gain the traction of legitimacy.Footnote 63 After the queen's burial in her native Brunswick, a routine item in the Times on 17 September is telling in how it enumerates the band of final mourners returning to England: “Lord and Lady Hood, Lady Anne Hamilton, Count Vasali, Captain Hesse, Dr. Lushington, Mr. Wm. Austin, Lord Yarmouth, and other persons of distinction, arrived at Dover on Friday by the Rob Roy steam-packet from Calais.”Footnote 64 In person and in print, Austin the dockworker's son and primary legatee of the queen now traveled as “Mr. Wm. Austin” in the company of “other persons of distinction.” Another mark of his elevation from infantilized target of satire to a figure of adult record—however ambiguous—is that at least two engraved portraits survive from the aftermath of her death, one of which is reproduced as Figure 9.Footnote 65
“Mr. W. Austin,” 1821.
Instead of “Billy Austin the little bastard,” here is, momentarily, in the language of the Times, “Mr. Wm. Austin,” poised on the cusp of his majority. Whatever democratizing promise might have been lurking in his scandalous history only fleetingly materialized, however, because events in his last decades instead manifested the doubt and uncertainty that also attend the figure of the surrogate child, an individual who must navigate multiple forms of identity. In William Austin's case, these displacements arrived at a sad spectacle of derangement and, at the end, silence.
AFTERMATH: THE MADNESS OF WILLIAM AUSTIN
At just this moment when engines of law and press fixed Austin in a legal narrative as Caroline's principal heir with marks of distinction in a potentially redeemable cultural currency, other media machines stirred up yet again the old question of his biological parentage, rendering his identity once more a topic of mystery and speculation. The deep suspicion that a figure such as Austin threatened established order with counterfeit claims rebounded with new force within weeks of Caroline's death. Until his death in the middle of the century, Austin's life after Caroline punctuated the public record at regular intervals with unsettling reports of doubt, dispute, and, finally, madness.
In the wake of the queen's death, the puzzle of Austin's identity entangled the old speculation that she was his biological mother with the surmise that he was instead the natural child of German nobility, a tale that had been in quasi-fictional circulation as early as the publication of Ashe's The Spirit of “The Book” in 1811. Modern biographers of George IV and Queen Caroline briefly log the evidentiary residue of this story, which survives in two primary sources in the archival record.Footnote 66 In brief, the tale—little different from Ashe's purportedly fictional version—is that the boy known as William Austin was the illegitimate biological son of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Brunswick, the lost love of Caroline's youth. After taking in the Deptford baby named William Austin in 1802, Caroline conspired to have the German infant switched for the English child (no version of the story attends to what happened to the English baby or the German mother). The first of these two sources is a March 1819 letter from James Brougham, who was with Caroline in Italy, to his brother Henry in London: “[S]he has told me all about W. Austin who is not ye son of Austin, but quite another person, and also about the Manby business. Nobody knows anything of these matters. She told Percival, Eldon, and yrself that W.A. was not her son, wh. was true, but tho’ old Austin and his wife both believe him to be their son, he is not.”Footnote 67 James Brougham's additional details of the story in March 1819 accord with a second account forty years later, in an 1858 letter from Stephen Lushington, the queen's lawyer and co-executor, to Henry Brougham, in the wake of Austin's death in 1857:
I will tell you all I know as to W. Austin. The Queen on her deathbed informed me that W. Austin was not the person he purported to be, that he was in truth a son of a brother or friend of Brunswick who was dead and that he had been clandestinely brought over from the continent. She then explicitly declared that W. Austin was not her own child. She did mention who the mother was but indistinctly. When attending the funeral I was on board a vessel in the Elbe commanded by Capt. Fisher, W. Austin being with him, a German nobleman or General (I do not remember which) asked for permission to see W. Austin; he immediately said you know his history and to my great surprize repeated in substance what the Queen had said to me respecting W. Austin's birth and parentage and he then added that Austin bore a great resemblance to his reputed father. I have no recollection of the name of this Consul or General. The enquiries made for him afterwards by Lord Liverpool produced no result.Footnote 68
Instead of seeking a verdict, my interest in these details is simply to emphasize an important fact that scholarship has skated past: rather than fading into consensus or indifference, the question of William Austin's identity erupted again in public immediately after Caroline's death, with renewed speculation. The queen's ultimate tale spinning about Willy Austin was news that hit the street the moment it occurred, in predictably garbled versions. While Caroline's final attendants were still in Brunswick for her burial, the Morning Chronicle on 27 August 1821 launched a queenite attack on a “calumny of a most atrocious nature” published a few days previously in the most aggressive loyalist vehicle, John Bull:
It is alleged that the QUEEN disclosed to Dr. LUSHINGTON, in the presence of four other persons, that WILLIAM AUSTIN was her own son, and that this disclosure was communicated by Dr. LUSHINGTON to the Earl of Liverpool. . . . In another paragraph the falsehood is stated even more circumstantially . . . Dr. LUSHINGTON is at this time out of the country,—and the vile calumniator has availed himself of his absence, in the hope that before the lie can be contradicted by him, it may obtain an extensive circulation.Footnote 69
Regardless of the contradictory details, what matters is that the newspapers immediately sniffed out that multiple stories about Willy Austin still percolated. What continued to “obtain an extensive circulation” was not an impossibly unequivocal single truth about his identity but a renewed superabundance of narratives.
When Austin's blood kin subsequently asserted inheritance rights, Lushington as executor played the mystery identity card to turn aside their importunities. Austin's older brother Samuel, a clerk in a London office, maintained an often testy correspondence on behalf of the birth family with Caroline's executors, and he periodically took these disagreements to the papers. In December 1839, in the wake of the most recent dispute about Austin's legacy, The Times printed a lengthy complaint from Samuel Austin, which ended by outing Lushington's tactics:
[U]pon my threatening to apply to the Court of Chancery, [the executors] indirectly insinuate that the individual in question is not my brother, for that her late Majesty on her deathbed made an important communication to Dr. Lushington, which, in the event of an application to the court, he should be obliged to divulge, and thereby deprive the family of the property, but that, if the family remained quiet, and permitted my brother (still calling him my brother) to remain where he is, they (the executors) would, in the event of his decease, divide his property amongst them, and would enter into any agreement, or sign any understanding to do so. I can clearly prove the William Austin in question to be my brother, but, being in humble circumstances, am unable to compete with the executors, and it is only by bringing the matter before the public that I shall succeed.Footnote 70
Three decades after the “Delicate Investigation,” the identity of William Austin still circulated in public in plural forms, which contested for priority and subjected his identity to competing claims of proof.
In the Austin family management of the story, Samuel the older sibling became the proxy advocate because mental illness silenced William, who remained the impecunious family's best hope for a meal ticket.Footnote 71 After Caroline's death, William Austin lived primarily in Italy, where he could stretch his modest income. He visited England in 1823 (at his majority) and again in 1827–28, both times in failed hopes that Chancery proceedings about the queen's will would yield better terms. The first public notice of his illness, a brief piece in the Times on 10 November 1832, is remarkable on several counts.
We have received a letter from SAMUEL AUSTIN, the brother of WILLIAM AUSTIN, who, it will be recollected, was humanely brought up by QUEEN CAROLINE in her deserted state, whose humanity her base and cruel enemies attempted to turn to her ruin. The young man is at present in a mad-house at Milan, and but moderately provided for, where he has been for three years. The circumstances which affected his understanding were, we learn, the sufferings of his magnanimous benefactress, and the indignation conceived at seeing THEODORE MAJOCCHI, of “ non mi ricordo ” memory, and others of that stamp, living in affluence on British gold, the fruits of their perjuries, whilst himself, and other faithful servants of the Queen, were left to starve. His mother and the rest of his family are here in England, in great distress. The humane may hear of them at No. 4, Jamaica-row, Bermondsey.Footnote 72
This paragraph bid to be one of the most forthright salvos of residual queenite fervor, lobbed into the old Regency fray a dozen years after the fact. Pugnaciously, it politicized the very madness it made public: the letter blamed William Austin's mental illness on the old attacks on Caroline and the unjustly rewarded conduct of government agents in the Adultery Trial. Three months later, in February 1833, the aging radical John Thelwall wrote to the Times about an unspent subscription fund intended for a monument to Caroline. Samuel Austin wrote privately to Thelwall the next day, arguing that the unspent fund belonged by right to his brother William and soliciting Thelwall's assistance: “is not my brother a living monument of her memory and her wrongs?”Footnote 73
Four months after the passage of Reform in July 1832, the Times’s report of Austin's madness also mapped the adoptee in his birthplace among the poverty-stricken and the dispossessed, the birth family who claimed him now suffering in the Bermondsey precincts that would soon become infamously Dickensian. Throughout Austin's adoptive life, establishment culture stigmatized him as inescapably vulgar, coarse, and ill-bred. Press accounts of Austin's birth family subsequently underscored the association of adoption with social abjection, a theme prominent in later adoption debates. On 15 January 1833, the Times reported that Mrs. Sophia Austin, recently widowed, had appeared before the authorities:
Among the persons who applied on Friday last to the overseers of the parish of St. Mary, Whitechapel, for parochial relief, was Mrs. Austin, the mother of William Austin. The latter, it will be recollected, had become very conspicuous, some years ago, in consequence of the notice of him by the late Queen Caroline, who had made him her protégé, and concerning whose birth, parentage, &c, an inquiry before the Privy Council was instituted. From the statement of the applicant, it appeared that her husband had for some years held a situation in His Majesty's Customs, but, being of most extravagant and profligate habits, he lived, if not beyond, at least up to his income, and having died a short time since, left the applicant and his daughter, a girl of 15 years of age, in great distress.Footnote 74
The alleged “extravagance” and “profligacy” of Austin's birth father point to the dissolute character of this unwholesome set. Tagged with such base associations, the Austin family also endured a spotlight on licentiousness and wantonness. An item in the Leeds Intelligencer on 29 November 1826 reported the court appearance of “William Austin's Mother” on charges of assaulting a young woman while drunk:
A fat, portly, consequential looking lady, who proved to be no less a personage than Mrs. Austin, the mother of Wm. Austin, the protégé and residuary legatee of the late Queen Caroline, was brought up on Monday . . . charged with having, while under the influence of the “green eyed monster,” inflicted divers assaults on the person of Miss Dorothea Manck . . . whom she suspected of having engrossed more of Mr. A's affections than the code of morality countenanced. After hearing the case, bail was given for the mother of the Prince of Como, and she was discharged[.]Footnote 75
Such records indicate how the popular press bundled Austin's adoption narrative with salacious tales illustrating the unwholesome unruliness of the urban poor. Adoption debates leading up to the 1926 Adoption Act also struggled with the fraught question of eugenics, in which this suspect population of adoption risked definition as threateningly degenerate and biologically ill-bred.Footnote 76 In the final chapter of Austin's story, he appeared center stage as a lunatic, an anticipatory image of the opprobrium later haunting adoption debates.
In a madhouse in Milan, William Austin had at least two absent mothers: his adoptive mother, now dead; and his birth mother, who was alive but also separate from him in London, in distressed poverty. Distress defines the tale of William Austin to its end. In 1845, Caroline's executors, Lushington and Sir Thomas Wilde, acting as guardians, arranged for his return from Milan to London and commitment to Blackland House, Chelsea, an asylum run by Dr. A. R. Sutherland.Footnote 77 Manuscripts in the Royal Archives at Windsor preserve a flurry of clerkly correspondence on this occasion about the person most often referred to in the documents as “the lunatic,” whom Sutherland evaluated as always in “the same lost and fatuous mental condition . . . He occasionally appears cheerful and attempts to sing but never enters into conversation.”Footnote 78 At Austin's return, a solicitor's clerk wrote to Samuel Austin to put the Austin family on notice of William's removal and the legal proceedings that declared him insane.Footnote 79 On 7 March 1845, William Austin made his final public appearance, at a Commission of Lunacy in a London court. In full or variously excerpted, the following account in the Times was reproduced throughout the nation, in other London papers and in Carlisle, Hull, Bristol, Kendal, Lancaster, Leicester, Lincolnshire, Manchester, Newcastle, Reading, Cornwall, and Sheffield. The account was headed in some papers “Queen Caroline's William Austin,” in several (and in the Times source text) “William Austin, the Adopted Son of the Late Queen Caroline,” and in one “Commission of Lunacy on the Celebrated William Austin.”Footnote 80
These last images of a severely aphasic and disaffected Austin, “the unfortunate gentleman,” remain vivid and unsettling. The audience of his final performance included “Mr Commissioner Winslow and a special jury of 17 gentlemen of the county, at the Sheriffs’ Court, Red Lion square,” assembled as a “commission de lunatico inquirendo to inquire into the state of mind of ‘William Austin, late of the city of Milan, but now residing at Blackland House, Chelsea, gentleman.’” The officers of the court opened with a summary snapshot of Austin's deterioration in Milan: “The unfortunate gentleman became completely imbecile, and his imbecility was so absolute as to amount almost to idiotcy.” The Italian keeper who accompanied him from Milan then testified: “He would eat, drink, and sleep, but never spoke. During the three years he never spoke once. When spoken to he never answered, and was incapable of doing anything. He was very much attached to a piece of stick, which never leaves his possession night or day. He never gave any reason for his attachment to the stick.”Footnote 81
At this point, the court proceeding tripped over an awkward moment. Attempting to take the measure of Austin, the “Learned Commissioner” from his presiding chair “thought they should know something of his early life.” The prospect of such noisy and scandalous history stumped the house: “there appeared to be some objection to answer, upon which the Learned Commissioner said, it was not necessary, certainly.”Footnote 82 In the middle of the Chartist decade, the loud echoes of Regency unrest could still baffle a courtroom, which plainly preferred quiet order. It was more prudent to produce William Austin himself, safely speechless, who then discomposed a theatre for the final time. The “unfortunate gentleman” was escorted into the court:
He was attired in a long rifle-green great coat, thickly trimmed with fur, with a cap en suite, red and black cross-bar trousers, and a similar waistcoat. In height he is about 5 feet 6 inches, and rather stoutly made. He is a good-looking man, with a most intellectual countenance, and having a remarkable high forehead. In his hand he held a small piece of grape-vine stick, which he kept twirling round, totally unconscious of all that was passing. The Commissioner spoke to him three or four times, but he took not the slightest notice. He, however, on the bidding of the keeper, stood or sat down, but beyond that all with him was blank. On the Commissioner giving the order for him to withdraw, he followed the keeper out as docile as a lamb. It was a most painful sight.Footnote 83
Once this disturbing human form was again out of sight, the press narrative took refuge in judicial order: “The jury immediately returned a verdict ‘That William Austin was of unsound mind, and incapable of managing his affairs.’” The final sentence of the account ventured in its first clause the equivocal term “adopted” to describe Austin's identity but retreated in the second clause to the safer ground of property law: “The unfortunate gentleman was adopted when a child, by the late Queen Caroline, and to him she bequeathed by her will a portion of her property.”Footnote 84
And there his story ends. Austin died in Blackland House asylum in Chelsea on 11 February 1857, from “general decay and debility. For several weeks there was great difficulty getting him to take any food”; he was buried on 16 February in a private grave in the nearby Brompton cemetery.Footnote 85 There has been confusion on this point. In his 1935 biography of George IV, Roger Fulford noted that “Austin died in 1849,” but he did not cite a source for this information. Hibbert (the king's biographer) and Fraser (the queen's biographer) subsequently cited this 1849 date, with Fulford as source. Such confusion in the historical record is very much of a piece with the lifetime story of this adoptee, which is the history of a recalcitrantly enigmatic life that refuses to fit in a series of public frames. William Austin was an anonymous “Child” who was mysteriously absent from the secret court of the Delicate Investigation; Billy Austin was the little bastard and favorite boy, who was transgressively out of place in royal theatre boxes; William Austin was the Deptford boy who was a knight of the Order of St. Caroline entering Jerusalem; Billy Austin was the protégé and prince, who was an absent witness hovering nearby throughout the queen's trial; William Austin was a nondescript who was also the queen's residuary legatee; William Austin was billed in newspaper headlines as the adopted son of the queen, who was a speechless spectacle in another London courtroom summoned on his account. The press report of his insanity hearing ended by attempting to define him in terms of the queen's property rights, wherein he has indeed faded legalistically into a footnote in the historical record.Footnote 86 But especially in these final images, the strangeness of his figure and conduct defies such assimilation and erasure. Silently fingering that peculiar piece of stick, occasionally breaking into song like a mad George III wandering the halls of Windsor, he lingers in mind as a quintessential misfit, the “unfortunate gentleman” indeed, always and everywhere the stranger, the odd man out.
William Austin's life was loud and noisy. From the hubbub of the Delicate Investigation and The Book through the rowdy years on the Continent to the riots of the adultery trial and the death of Caroline, turmoil defined large stretches of his life. These rackets mark threats of disruption—ethical, political, ontological. The din registers how adoption, nominally a private, domestic action, necessarily turns up the public volume on family formation, sometimes clamorously. When the family on the adoption stage is royal, the metonymic traffic between family and nation moves in a tight, tense circle. When one party to such prominently public surrogacy is a laboring class family, systems of hierarchical order must shift and rebalance to stabilize. The many stories of William Austin by their very multiplicity supplied vehicles of revolutionary threat. As late as 1833, the Paris theatre flipped off the British establishment with a rowdy melodrama, Bergami, in which Castlereagh is shot in Lords during the queen's trial, Caroline is poisoned by an agent of the king at the king's coronation banquet, and Bergami stabs the agent to close the curtain with revenge and justice. And what of Billy Austin? Not the child of Sophia Austin, not the child of Caroline, not the child of German nobility, he is now the biological son of a friend of Bergami's, the firebrand hero. These scrambled French narratives served a threatening theme, noted with dry amusement in the London press: “an immense insurrection of an indignant people takes place.”Footnote 87 That dry amusement is also nervously defensive laughter.
But William Austin's loud life also brims with silence and secrets. Often the scene of public controversy, adoption as a social practice offers on the other side a vexed history of secrecy and silence, marked in modern British culture by Mike Leigh's 1996 adoption film Secrets & Lies.Footnote 88 Austin was silently absent from the first two quasi-judicial proceedings that interrogated his identity, the Delicate Investigation and Caroline's adultery trial. Judicial process carefully segregated Austin offstage, a place where secrets multiplied. When Austin finally appeared before a court in person, his insanity hearing in 1845, he was literally speechless, exhibiting an aphasia that is a peculiarly overdetermined image of the stakes in play. Such hush registers the reflexive reaction to the threats contingency posed to absolutist forms of family and nation. Silence is the sound of power consolidating, as when Stephen Lushington advised the Austin family to keep quiet. The dynamic is what Jacqueline Stevens unpacks as the paradox of adoption in Roman social history, where the system of state formation toggles between an openness to contingency and a reflexive consolidation of closed, established power: “If adoption renders the alien a citizen, then kinship can be copied. . . . Although the practice suggests the possibility of evading the kinship system, it also underscores the power of that system.”Footnote 89 When Austin died in 1857, twelve years after his last courtroom performance, the newspapers were entirely silent about his life. That silence is peculiar, given the press and popular appetite for royal gossip. Any storytelling about Austin was now off the record. Henry Brougham and Stephen Lushington, both now in positions of prestige at safe distance from their advocacy for Caroline in 1820, corresponded about Austin in the wake of his death, but privately.Footnote 90 The history of William Austin either offers too many stories or withdraws into silence, a silence that muffles the risks of contingent identity. As the commissioner of the London court in 1845 was given to understand when he asked to hear more about William Austin, the less said the better. The reaction to the hubbub of his adoption proved very effective. After his life, very little has ever been said about William Austin.
In the wake of Austin's death in 1857, baby farming scandals in the 1860s prompted the 1872 Infant Life Protection Act. National debates about surrogate parenting began the long run-up to the Adoption of Children Act of 1926. These debates negotiated troubled social waters of illegitimacy, infanticide, eugenics, and child emigration schemes, social pressures that led to the National Children's Home and Orphanage in 1869, the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society in 1881, and the many schemes of Thomas Barnardo, who opened his first home for London nondescripts such as Billy Austin in 1870. In North America, the state of Massachusetts passed the first modern adoption law in 1851, a piece of legislation that navigated the multiple fictions of adoption in a nation invented from manifold narratives less than a century earlier. In Britain, the narrative multiplicity of adoption mixed uneasily with deep-seated narratives of the nation, so that the figure of the surrogate child posed a threat rather than a promise, as in the elided history of William Austin (Figure 10).
