ABSTRACT
Virulent personal attacks on royalty and aristocracy were a characteristic feature of Reynolds’s Newspaper. These were written in extravagant language, attacking both the political and personal lives of their subjects and, typically, dwelling on their sexual depravity. An early signed front-page article, entitled ‘The Crowned Miscreants and Harlots of the European Continent’, besides listing the political crimes of Queen Maria Christina of Spain, described her as ‘the bloated, gluttonous, depraved strumpet’ and ‘this lump of sensuality and grossness’ who has had a bastard by a ‘coarse-mannered, vulgar uneducated fellow’.1 A few years later another front-page article, signed by Reynolds, was devoted to the marriage of Napoleon III of France, a figure who had incurred Reynolds’s particular hatred for overturning the Second French Republic, and who was regularly excoriated throughout his reign. Reynolds describes the Emperor as a ‘blood-stained murderer’ and ‘wholesale robber’, one who is ‘so loathsome and degraded’ as to be unfit even for the company of the British aristocracy. Also, Reynolds alleges, he has been a frequenter of brothels. Although Reynolds cannot produce evidence against the morals of the Emperor’s bride – he grudgingly admits that she may be pure – he claims that she has for some years been ‘paraded by her mother in husband-hunting speculation in every great city of Europe’ and that the mother has herself been the subject of scandal.2
