Queen Caroline in Caricature – August 1821

Posted on September 28, 2021 by Dr Fallon

Caroline’s Death and an Unpublished George Cruikshank Image

Ian Haywood, University of Roehampton, London

Figure 1. George Cruikshank, *Vox Populi, Vox Dei*. Unpublished design for a caricature on the violence at Queen Caroline’s funeral. Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Author’s photograph.

Queen Caroline’s death was as controversial as her life. After more than a year of political upheaval and unprecedented media attention, Caroline passed away on 7 August 1821, aged 53. The medical cause of death was a digestive blockage, but Caroline’s followers saw things differently. In their eyes, she had died of a broken heart, the victim of a government-led campaign of persecution and vilification. She was the ‘injured’ queen to the very end. Only weeks earlier, on 19 July, Caroline had been barred from attending George IV’s coronation in Westminster Abbey, and this definitively un-queenlike humiliation was widely believed to have hastened her rapid demise, especially as she was already a weakened figure. The coronation debacle was the climax of a sustained propaganda counter-offensive which followed her stunning triumph in late 1820 (see the ‘November 1820’ blog). When Caroline failed to seize the political moment and bring the government down, her enemies made a concerted effort to shift public opinion against her by dwelling on eye-catching flaws: her sex life, her corrupt aristocratic lifestyle, and her departure from the moral codes of respectable femininity and the correct standards of royal conduct. As anti-Caroline caricatures flooded the market, her support wavered further when she accepted an increased allowance of £50,000, the same amount she had symbolically refused when she returned to England the previous year (see the ‘June 1820’ blog). But her death was an immediate and sensational rallying point for her supporters, an opportunity to retake the moral high ground and to dominate the media with tributes, commemorations, and accusations of foul play. The violence that erupted at Caroline’s funeral only confirmed the malign role of the government and its petty determination to deny her royal reputation and rights. The public outrage at this neo-Peterloo atrocity led to some memorable caricatures, including a striking unpublished design by George Cruikshank, which shows popular justice being meted out to a military officer (Figure 1).

To understand and appreciate this image more fully, we need to retrace our steps and look more closely at the explosion of print culture which followed Caroline’s death. As already noted, this was the moment to reverse the tide of negative reportage and visual propaganda which had dominated 1821 up to that point. In this loyalist counter-narrative, ‘Caroline the Curst’[1] was the antithesis of the indomitable, rebellious heroine of the radical imagination. Instead of Boadicea, she was Messalina, the infamous meretrix augusta or ‘imperial whore’ of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire, an aristocratic Roman matron who supposedly slept with lower-class men to satisfy her insatiable sexual appetite.[2] According to one verse satire entitled Messalina, Caroline’s trial (which technically had found her guilty of adultery, though only by the slimmest of margins) ‘pronounc’d the queen / Had clearly a low trollop been’[3], a slur that evoked memories of the virulent lampooning of Caroline’s ‘butcher-kissing’ predecessor Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, another upper-class woman who dared to mix in public politics.[4] The accusation of demeaning promiscuity was also a metaphor for the greater offence of courting public opinion. Caroline had willingly turned herself into an ‘exhibit’ for public consumption, ‘courting the favour of a populace, whose breath is bought and sold’ instead of rededicating herself to her husband.[5] She was a triple offender, exposing her royal body indiscriminately to the disreputable gaze of lovers, radical politicians, and the masses. This multiple prostitution of her image was the focus of a series of high-quality caricatures published by George Humphrey in early 1821.[6]

Two examples of these prints are included here (Figures 2-3). The title of Installation of a Knight Companion of the Bath (Figure 2) puns on Caroline’s promotion of Bartolomeo Bergami from servant to personal assistant. The chivalric title Knight of the Bath was normally awarded for outstanding military or diplomatic service, and not – as in this case – for sexual gratification. This scene illustrates one of the alleged examples of adultery which were recounted in fulsome, often risible detail at Caroline’s trial. Instead of the purifying bathing ritual of the original chivalric Order, we witness a Rowlandsonian erotic frolic in which Bergami’s orgasmic ‘copious shower’ expresses the sheer joy and guilt-free abandon of their relationship. This is indeed damning visual evidence of ‘low trollop’ behaviour, but as so often in caricature the scene is also full of mischievous satirical traps. Caroline’s opponents might well have gloated over this bathtub tryst, but they were also forced to confront the voyeuristic basis of their pleasure. In the background there is a partially open door which shows two servants who are spying on the lovers, and while this device may signify the authenticity of the eye-witness accounts, it is also a reminder of the prurient gaze of scandal which made Caroline’s trial simultaneously titillating and distasteful. This tainted gaze contrasts with the openly affectionate eye contact of the two lovers, and this juxtaposition could imply that Caroline’s accusers are both jealous and resentful of her sexual independence and – as represented by the discarded clothing – her contempt for convention. Another object which defies social and moral norms is the miniature portrait of Bergami which is hanging on the wall behind her head and which she wears openly and unashamedly in other prints. For viewers today, these complexities make this image far more challenging and rewarding than first impressions might suggest.

The second example from the Humphreys series switches the satirical focus from private to public indiscretion. Grand Entrance to Bamboozl’em (Figure 3) is a parody of the spectacular processions and rallies which became such a feature of Caroline’s campaign, and which (as we shall see) also defined the conclusion of the controversy, though in an unexpected way. The intention of the print seems to be to undermine the memory of these gatherings by converting them into a cross between a pantomime and an impending riot, simultaneously laughable and threatening. Caroline is located appropriately at the centre of the scene and her appearance conveys these mixed messages of menace and ridiculousness: she rides an ass instead of a horse (a wry allusion to visual representations of her ‘public entry’ into Jerusalem in 1815), wears a very revealing ‘décolletée over-dress’[7] instead of modest and dignified attire, openly sports the Bergami locket, and on her head is a red cap of Liberty which also resembles the clown’s hat worn by her companion Alderman Wood – a far cry from their heroic stance in Robert Cruikshank’s The Secret Insult (1820), the print which heralded Caroline’s return to England (see ‘June 1820’ blog). According to the writing on her saddle-cloth and the text in the oval plate below the image, she is also Columbine and Mother Red Cap, two famous lower-class characters from popular culture. Columbine was the plucky and irreverent servant of commedia del arte and its derivative English pantomime, and Mother Red Cap was a legendary pub landlady and (in some versions of the story) a witch.[8]

These identities are no doubt intended to confirm Caroline’s ‘trollop’ misdemeanours and unforgiveable mingling with the hoi polloi, but they also evoke a rumbustious culture of popular performance and folk tradition which gives the print an engaging, populist and carnivalesque quality. The uplifting impression created by the vivid colours, festive atmosphere, multiculturalism (Caroline’s entourage includes a black man who could be her adopted servant Louges)[9] and conviviality (Bacchus is literally part of the crew), together with the transformation of central London into an amphitheatre of democratic spectacle, overpowers the negativity of the incendiary banners which recede into the right distance, and the ominous bolt of lightning on the horizon. The lively gaggle of reformers who are waiting to greet Caroline (including the Peterloo speaker Henry Hunt, who was still in jail) are not heavily caricatured. The lavish detail of the print, which contains dozens of well-drawn characters and many symbols, is also a tribute to the quality and efficacy of the Carolinite caricature campaign which had set such a high bar. This may be a vaudeville Caroline, but the effervescent and joyous emotion of the scene has an infectious and seductive energy.

Figure 2. *Installation of a Knight Companion of the Bath* (George Humphrey, June 1821). Lewis Walpole Library.

Figure 3. *Grand Entrance to Bamboozl’em* (George Humphrey, February 1821). Lewis Walpole Library.

As these examples show, the caricature assault on Caroline’s moral probity could not entirely eradicate her populist appeal as a woman of the people, and the constant parodying of her cause did, after all, keep her in the public eye. One way to view the king’s lavish coronation, which had been deferred for a whole year, is that it was an attempt to finally eclipse and derail the Caroline roadshow. The liberal and radical press responded by condemning the ostentatious expenditure, highlighting evidence of lacklustre popular support, and of course expressing outrage at the queen’s exclusion.[10] Just a few weeks later, Caroline’s death provided the perfect opportunity to upstage this cynical display of national pomp with the queen’s celestial coronation, a ‘Crown of Glory, / Where oppressors cannot come’.[11] She was now a true martyr who had died for her beliefs. Two phrases were on everyone’s lips: her dying words ‘They have destroyed me’ and the title ‘injured queen’, which was provocatively inscribed on her coffin. These and similar taglines populated the tributary merchandise that flooded the market at all social levels: poems, elegies, sermons, portraits, engraved medallions, hagiographies and broadsides. This was the final chance to set the record straight, and the greater the offence against her, the greater her moral and spiritual victory.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most effective satirical response to Caroline’s death came from William Hone and George Cruikshank. The formidable duo lost no time in announcing the event on the front page of their highly successful satirical newspaper A Slap at Slop (Figure 4). With characteristically audacious visual and verbal flair, the conventional funerary hatchment is replaced with a dagger hovering over the bannered word ‘Persecution’ (Figure 5). The caption below modifies Falstaff’s lines from Act Two, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One: ‘This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my crown’ becomes ‘This Dagger my sceptre, and Persecution my Crown!’ In the original scene, Falstaff is pretending to be Prince Hal’s father the king, so the allusion would be comic if it were not so tragic. The implication is that Caroline’s spouse still resembles the unreformed Hal rather than a responsible ruler, hence George’s callous treatment of his wife is likened to a Tudor-style judicial murder. This was satirical hyperbole, though George’s decision to visit Ireland rather than attend Caroline’s funeral was seen by many as confirming his inhumanity.[12] As the adjacent satirical woodcuts on the front page of Slap at Slop show, Caroline’s death coincided with the second anniversary of the Peterloo massacre. In the radical imagination, she became the latest victim of brutally repressive government.

Figure 4. William Hone and George Cruikshank, Front page of *A Slap at Slop* 27^th edition (August 1821). Wilhelm Busch Museum.

Figure 5. Detail from William Hone and George Cruikshank, Front page of *A Slap at Slop* 27^th edition (August 1821).

The memory of Peterloo was never far away during the Caroline controversy, but no one could have predicted that her funeral procession on 14 August – just two days before the second anniversary – would actually turn into a mini-Peterloo. The violence was a spectacular demonstration of the continuing disagreements about her status and rights. As she herself declared on her death-bed, she was ‘Queen – and no queen’.[13] This ambiguity disfigured and defined both her life and her death. Denied a full state funeral, her followers stepped in to ensure that she was accorded a fittingly grand departure. However, a dispute arose concerning the route that the funeral procession could take through London on the way to Harwich, where her coffin would embark for Germany.^[14] The authorities insisted that the cortege had to avoid the City and East End, which were hotbeds of working-class support. This was fiercely resisted by the organisers of the procession, and things came to a head at Cumberland Gate in Hyde Park. This was a symbolic location, close to the old ‘Tyburn Tree’ gallows and the earmarked site of the new Marble Arch, the monument to Waterloo. As tempers rose and brickbats were thrown, the Life Guards opened fire and killed two men, Richard Honey (a carpenter) and George Francis (a bricklayer). Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the British state had once again shown its true colours.

Through its ineptitude or sheer malice, the British state had handed a propaganda gift to Caroline’s side, and the caricaturists were quick to respond. Robert Cruikshank’s depiction of the event (Figure 6) was clearly based on his brother George’s well-known portrayals of Peterloo, Manchester Heroes and Britons Strike Home![15]The mounted soldiers mowing down protestors and the supplicating female figure in the foreground are hallmarks of the earlier prints, to which The Funeral Procession of Queen Caroline adds evidence of crowd aggression, perhaps in an attempt to be even-handed. George Cruikshank had no such qualms about apportioning blame and demanding retribution. His striking unpublished design, Vox Populi, Vox Dei (Figure 1), shows a military officer subjected to a traditional form of popular punishment known as the skimmington or charivari. This type of public humiliation of an offender was on the wane in the nineteenth century, but there are several putative reasons why Cruikshank deemed it an appropriate visual statement of justice. The most obvious justification was to redress the failure of the judicial process. Just as with Peterloo, no one was prosecuted for the shootings, even though many witnesses at the inquest into the deaths of Honey and Francis testified that an officer called (astonishingly) Gore had ordered the fatal shots.[16] This is almost certainly the pitiable figure riding backwards on the ass, his broken sword symbolizing his fall from grace. He has been found guilty in the court of public opinion: ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei’. To avoid stereotypical associations with mob violence and Jacobin terror, the base of this sculptural composition combines two reassuring republican symbols: the fasces of ancient Roman magistrates (though without the axes), and the crossed hands of amity and solidarity. Echoing press reports of banners and placards at the event, the people are ‘Firm, ‘United’ and ‘Triumphant’, secure in their moral and political righteousness. This is clearly wish-fulfilment, and to modern eyes any celebration of vigilantism makes uncomfortable viewing. But the image is sombre rather than triumphal, and its ultimate purpose is to expose and exhibit wrongdoing. In this sense, the charivari or ‘rough justice’ is a metaphor for caricature itself, an affinity which Punch magazine took to heart in its subtitle ‘The London Charivari’.

Figure 6. Robert Cruikshank, *The Funeral Procession of Queen Caroline* (Thomas Dolby, August 1821) British Museum.

We can only speculate about the effect Cruikshank’s unpublished print may have had. For all its restraint, the starkness of the tribute to popular justice may have been regarded as inflammatory, and this might explain why it was not published. By contrast, the prints that Cruikshank did publish in response to the funeral shootings showcase his visual wit and theatrical brio. The Man-Slaughter-Men and Nobody going to be Punished! (Figures 7-8) ridicule the idea that ‘nobody’ committed the crime by literally showing absurdly elongated soldiers without a body. In The Man-Slaughter-Men three gun-toting soldiers (though not the fourth, who looks horrified) jeer at the ghosts of Joyce and Francis who have arisen from their graves, their headstones inscribed with the actual findings of the inquests, manslaughter and willful murder. The scene derives its initial power from the inverted dramatic situation, as conventionally it is the ghosts who point their fingers at the guilty. Moreover, the perpetrators are also verbally dominant: while the ghosts are silent (no ‘vox populi’ here), the soldiers spout modified lines from Macbeth (3.4.49-50). When Macbeth sees the ghost of the murdered Banquo, he retorts, ‘Thou canst not say I did it; never shake/ Thy gory locks at me’. In the print the word ‘gory’ has been changed to ‘bloody’ to avoid implicating the officer named in the inquest. But the last word (so to speak) is with the victims, as we all know the ultimate fate of Macbeth, and the empty gallows between the guilty and the innocent speak volumes.

Indeed, in Nobody going to be Punished! the gallows have become the location of the action. Unlike Vox Populi, Vox Dei, this is mock-punishment, a farcical show in which the two culprits, one in the stocks with his back to us, the other facing us with a loose-fitting rope round his neck, are engaged in jocular banter, as if this was a pleasant Sunday afternoon in the park. But their smugness is undercut precisely by the absence of bodies: the birch and the trapdoor are stationary, but all they need is a hand to activate them. There are also two clever visual surprises in the scene. In the distance is a second, very tall gallows from which a soldier is hanging and losing his ludicrously over-sized boots (as in bossy boots). It is unclear if this figure is meant to be real or an effigy, but either way this is a rather chilling vignette of popular retribution. Contrary to the print’s title, which could be the quoted words of the arrogant soldier, someone has already been hung; and, moreover, ‘ye cannot say who did it’, as there is nobody about. Finally, the two grotesquely over-sized plumes of the soldiers resemble speech marks or parentheses, the vacated space of the unstated guilty verdict, the last words of the vox populi.[17]

Figure 7. George Cruikshank, *Man-Slaughter-Men! Or a Horse laugh at the Law of the Land* (John Fairburn, September 1821). British Museum.

Figure 8. George Cruikshank, *Nobody Going to be Punished! Nobody going to be Hung!!!* (John Fairburn, September 1821). British Museum

The proliferation of controversial and entertaining images generated by Caroline’s death is testimony to the unprecedented role that caricature played in her campaign to become a legitimate queen. The satirical prints aided, abetted (and to lesser extent obstructed) her cause in extraordinarily creative and resourceful ways, mobilizing both high and popular culture and giving her multiple identities, contexts, and agencies. Caroline prided herself on being the people’s queen, and it was in the world of caricature that her image was truly nationalized. For the caricaturist, everybody is a body for everyone, and nobody can evade the satirical gaze. In an era when public image was becoming an increasingly important factor in social and political success, it was caricature that constantly called the visual bluff of celebrity and power.

Indeed, was the whole elite system of pomp and ceremony, in Robert Cruikshank’s term, simply All My Eye – in other words, nonsense?[18] All My Eye was Robert’s reply to his brother’s earlier celebration of Caroline’s democratic credentials (see the ‘November 1820’ blog), and as so often in caricature, the phrase draws attention to the act of looking (Figures 9-10). So I leave you to look at these two caricatures, and you can decide which print takes the crown.

Figure 9. George Cruikshank, engraving of a transparency of Queen Caroline, included in William Hone’s *The Political Showman – At Home!* (1821). Wilhelm Busch Museum. Author’s photograph.

Figure 10. Robert Cruikshank, *All My Eye* (George Humphrey, May 1821). British Museum.

[1] See Gynecocracy: With an Essay on Fornication, Adultery, and Incest (J. J. Stockdale, 1821), 655. The title refers to rule by women.

[2] This was of course a politically motivated smear: see Caillan Davenport and Shushma Malik, ‘The faces of Messalina,’ The Museum: The Magazine of the National Museum of Australia, 14: 10-15. In Georgian caricature, allusions to Messalina were often used to tarnish the reputations of political women: see, for example, Gillray’s The Offering to Liberty (1789; British Museum Satires 7548) which attacks Marie-Antoinette, and Dido in Despair (1801; British Museum Satires 9752) which targets Emma Hamilton.

[3] Messalina (T. Wright, 1821), 204. Wright was one of the main publishers of loyalist propaganda.

[4] See for example, A certain Dutchess kissing old swelter-in-grease the butcher for his vote (1874; British Museum Satires 6533). For a discussion of this campaign, see Neil Howe, Statesmen in Caricature: The Great Rivalry of Fox and Pitt the Younger in the Age of the Political Cartoon (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), Chapter 3.

[5] A Letter to the Queen by a Widowed Wife Sixth Edition (W. Wright, 1820), 12.

[6] Humphrey was probably assisted by Theodore Lane. The best collection of these prints is a shop album in the possession of the Lewis Walpole Library: see https://walpole.library.yale.edu/news/humphrey-shop-album-conserved-and-cataloged.

[7] Caroline commissioned the Italian artist Carloni (sic) to paint The Public Entry of the Queen into Jerusalem when she returned from her tour of the Middle East. The painting was exhibited in London in 1820, accompanied by a 16-page pamphlet which provided a key to the principal characters. The vainglorious echoes of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (a scene painted by Keats’s friend Benjamin Robert Haydon, and also on show in 1820) were not lost on anti-Caroline satirists, and the painting was parodied on the cover of the illustrated satirical pamphlet The New Pilgrim’s Progress: Or, A Journey to Jerusalem (W. Wright, 1820). To add another layer to this rich intertextual playfulness, the latter image alludes to the many illustrations of Bunyan’s famous story, but echoes the design of William Blake’s and Thomas Stothard’s depictions of The Canterbury Tales. I am grateful to David Fallon and Elayne Gardstein for reminding me of these parallels.’Décolletée over-dress’ is M Dorothy George’s phrase in her description of the print in the British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, now included in the online Collection: see the commentary accompanying British Museum Satires 14188.

[8] Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft, and Wicca (Hermitage, 2008), 217.

[9] According to one of the typical pamphlets that was rushed into print, Louges was ‘inconsolable’ at Caroline’s death (Death of Her Majesty (Thomas Dolby, 1821), 9).

[10] According to the Examiner (22 July 1821), ‘hisses and plaudits…about equalled each other in strength’ at the coronation ceremony, and ‘Not the slightest popular feeling was called forth’ by the illuminations in the evening.

[11] ‘Verses on the Death of Her Majesty Queen Caroline’ (Pitts, Wholesale Toy Warehouse, 7 Dials). The poem is contained in a scrapbook, Satirical Songs and Miscellaneous Papers Connected with the Trial of Queen Caroline, held in the British Library.

[12] For attacks on George’s Irish visit, see Charles Williams’s caricature An Irish Wake (British Museum Satires 14241), and the verse satire Last Moments of Caroline (J. Johnston [1821]). In the latter, Caroline’s ghost appears to George and warns him that unless he mends his ways, there will be no ‘royal passport’ to heaven (14).

[13] Times, 15 August 1821.

[14] Caroline’s coffin was a controversial and contested symbol to the very end. During the night of 15 August, while the funeral cortege rested overnight in Colchester, government representatives entered St Peter’s church where her body lay and replaced the coffin’s inscription ‘Injured Queen’ with a loyal reference to the ‘potent’ king. According to the Times (17 August), the ‘royal victim’ was treated with a ‘remorseless indecency and indignity’ which echoed Peterloo (the ‘Manchester day’) two years earlier. The incident is still remembered locally: http://www.stpeterscol.org.uk/rumpus.html.

[15] British Museum Satires 14242. For the earlier prints, see British Museum Satires 13258 and 13266.

[16] Times, 18 August 1821; Examiner, 26 August 1821.

[17] In reality, the violent repercussions of Caroline’s death continued to spread. History almost repeated itself when the funeral of Honey and Francis on 26 August flared into violence outside Kensington barracks. The ceremony, one of the first examples of a working-class political funeral, deliberately retraced the route of the great processions to Hammersmith which were such a feature of the previous year. An estimated 70-80,000 people flocked to Hammersmith church where Caroline worshipped (her pew was still draped in black). On the return journey, insults and then blows were traded between protestors and drunken troops. High Sheriff Robert Waithman narrowly missed being shot dead by a Life Guard, and a second ‘Caroline Peterloo’ was averted by a whisker. See Joseph Nightingale, Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of Queen Caroline 3 vols (1820-22), 3: 380-9; Times, 29 August 1821; Examiner 2 September 1821. The graves of Honey and Joyce can still be seen in Hammersmith Church: see https://flickeringlamps.com/2014/07/09/fallen-comrades-caroline-of-brunswicks-life-and-death-in-hammersmith/

[18] Eric Partridge, Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang, Sixth Edition (Taylor and Francis, 2006), 54.

Queen Caroline in Caricature – August 2020

Posted on August 21, 2020 by Dr Fallon

Ian Haywood, University of Roehampton

Figure 1. William Hone and George Cruikshank, *The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder: A National Toy* (15 August 1820). Wilhelm Busch Museum.

Queen Caroline’s eagerly anticipated trial for adultery began in the House of Lords on 17 August 1820. It is no understatement to say that the eyes and ears of the nation were focused on this bizarre but compelling spectacle. The event generated an unprecedented degree of publicity, media attention and public scrutiny. A few days before the proceedings opened, newspapers published an open letter from Caroline to the king (which was probably penned by William Cobbett) in which she denounced the Bill of Pains and Penalties as ‘a perversion and mockery of the laws’ (Times, 14 August 1820). She condemned the government’s ‘unprovoked and unparalleled persecution’ as the culmination of a ‘malignant and unrelenting’ campaign which began when the king (then Prince of Wales) followed his own ‘inclinations’ and abandoned her in 1796 after less than a year of marriage. Any follower of her story would know that the word ‘inclination’ was a reference to the king’s separation letter which had also been widely reproduced and which anchored this controversy in an earlier, foundational period of political and social unrest, the revolutionary 1790s. Seen in this longer framework, the trial was a highly symbolic illustration of the British state’s ‘unrelenting’ resistance to democratic reform. Caroline’s supporters sensed that the tide of history was on their side,[1] and their leverage over popular public opinion went into overdrive. The scale and intensity of the campaign increased dramatically, with daily massed protests outside parliament and constant reporting of the trial in a range of formats including newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and whole books.[2] Significantly, caricature also stepped up a gear.

Two days before the trial opened, William Hone and George Cruikshank published their illustrated pamphlet The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder (Figure 1).[3] Hone and Cruikshank had invented this new satirical genre the previous year when they responded to the Peterloo massacre with the phenomenally successful Political House that Jack Built. To broaden the appeal of caricature, they borrowed the populist visual style and reprographic technique of emblem books and fairy tales, using wood-engraving to enable the simultaneous printing of image and letter-press text. This also kept the price down to the relatively inexpensive one shilling, and although this was beyond most working-class consumers, the new format was a smash hit with the middle classes who could now enjoy up to twenty vignettes for the price of one single-sheet caricature. As we shall see, the textual element of the new genre was also deceptively complex and multi-layered, comprising a sub-title, a literary epigraph, and a playful, parodic narrative. For the Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder, Hone and Cruikshank went one step further (pun intended) and provided at no extra cost another, simplified version of the satire they called a ‘toy’ (Figure 2). This was a small, stiff, cardboard ladder which resembled in every respect a children’s plaything, though its cultural allusiveness was, as we might expect, decidedly more nuanced.

Figure 2. The ‘toy’ version of the *Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder*. Special Collections, Adelphi University. Author’s photographs.

The delightful cover design of the pamphlet was firmly in step (forgive the second and last pun) with the defiant public mood. It shows a triumphal Caroline sitting cross-armed on top of a stepladder, the rungs of which are inscribed with 14 different stages of matrimony. She looks down on the pitiful figure of George who has tumbled backwards after breaking the penultimate downward step called ‘Coronation’. The clear message is that George will get his comeuppance (come-downance?) for his misdemeanours: in other words, moral and satirical logic dictates that justice will prevail, even if this means comically flirting with seditious iconography. In advance of the trial opening, the image not only declares Caroline’s innocence but exacts its own populist punishment on the errant monarch. In the event, the conclusion of the controversy was far less sanguine, but that could not have been foreseen in the summer of 1820. In cinematic terms, the design is both a trailer and a spoiler as it gives away the (happy) ending. With this reassuring denouement in place, the reader-viewer could enjoy this refreshing satirical review of what was by now a familiar, hagiographic story of an injured, elevated woman.

The use of the step ladder as the central symbol shows Cruikshank’s brilliance in revitalising and repurposing familiar visual motifs. He drew on two well-known precedents. The most obvious precursor was the Matrimonial Ladder, an existing genre in polite Georgian culture which reminded the middle classes about the pitfalls of marriage.[4] Cruikshank was almost certainly parodying decorous versions of this moralistic device such as a greeting card sold by Rudolph Ackermann which shares some of the same ‘-tion’ suffixed abstract nouns on the rungs (Figure 3).[5] But the more important point is that the pyramidal structure of the step ladder provided a symmetrical, bathetic, two-stage narrative: a rise and fall of the fortunes of the protagonists with a pivot point at the apex. For this schema to work, one has to imagine walking up one side of the ladder and down the other, an unlikely procedure in reality but nevertheless one that distinguished the step ladder from the regular, linear ladder which requires a reverse or backward motion to descend. In its non-satirical guise, the turning point is not especially dramatic (‘Dissension’, ‘Rumination’) and the squabbling wife and husband are kept separated in the borders. When the genre was transferred to caricature, Hone and Cruikshank abandoned such polite restraint.

Figure 3. This greeting card depicting a Matrimonial Ladder was sold by Rudolph Ackermann from his Repository of the Arts shop on the Strand, c. 1814-18. Victoria and Albert Museum.

To adapt this format for Caroline’s more tempestuous, tendentious, and cyclical story, Cruikshank moved the players centre stage where they could confront each other directly. This is most clear in the redacted ‘toy’ version where Caroline and George inhabit the rectangular black spaces of the Ackermann design. The incremental rise and fall of the original sequence (from ‘Admiration’ to ‘Separation’) is also disrupted to take account of the more complex, iterative, and confrontational structure of the royal marriage in which Caroline suffers at least three separations (from husband, daughter and country) on the upward slope. Contrastingly, her fortunes are in the ascendant on the downward side after she returns to Britain. It is this moment, the switch from ‘Emigration’ to ‘Remigration’, which forms the apex of the ladder and her transformation from victim to heroine. It is also the beginning of the end for George who suffers one humiliation after another, terminating in an empty coronation and the ‘Degradation’ of a becoming a national clown chastised by Britannia. Unlike the even-handed symmetry of the Ackermann ladder in which both participants suffer equally, Cruikshank’s partisan narrative has a clear winner and loser.

The other source that Cruikshank drew on was the political ladder, a motif used in numerous satirical prints from the late eighteenth century onwards.[6] In Popular Frenzy; or, the Demolition of St Stephs Chapel (1784), for example, we see the House of Commons under attack from William Pitt and his Tory ministers (Figure 4). In their bid to unseat the Fox-North Coalition, the Tories use a siege ladder whose rungs are inscribed with the word ‘Address’, a reference to the popular national support for this constitutional coup. In this pro-Whig print, the clear implication is that populism is a manipulative political tool which whips up public opinion into reactionary hysteria, anarchy, or ‘Frenzy’, but it is also important to remember that Addresses were one of the main levers of support for Caroline: one political party’s unruly ‘mob’ is another’s democratic base. The print also evokes a key moment in British political history when the Tories began their long period of rule, the consequences of which were still being unravelled in 1820. In this respect, Cruikshank’s ladder may also allude to another recent injustice which he helped to expose: the execution of hundreds of people for unwitting banknote forgery.[7] The cover design for a satirical pamphlet called Satan’s Bank Note (1819) shows Castlereagh as a hangman standing on a step ladder (Figure 5). The devil sitting on the gallows echoes Caroline’s position atop the matrimonial ladder, and the parallel provides a wittily diabolical analogy for her power over a king who mistreats his subjects.

Figure 4. *Popular Frenzy; or, the Demolition of St Stephs Chapel* (1784). British Museum Satires 6438.

Figure 5. *Satan’s Bank Note* (c.1819) British Museum Satires 14206.

Like the Political House that Jack Built, the Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder spawned a host of imitations by supporters and opponents, and Cruikshank was even paid handsomely enough to produce an anti-radical response to his own design, The Radical Ladder.[8] The huge success of the illustrated pamphlet genre shows that the public appreciated this new, rich interplay between satirical image and text. Illustration was not yet regarded as subservient or secondary to the text, and its evolving status can be seen in the subtitle of the Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder which refers somewhat confusingly (for modern eyes) to ‘scenes’, ‘illustrations in verse’ and ‘cuts’. The phrase ‘illustrations in verse’ implies that the primary appeal of the satire was visual, but another aspect of the cover design shows the importance of textual agency. The dominant visual image of the ladder is flanked by two quotations which embed the pamphlet in both reportage and literary tradition. The first is taken from one of the Queen’s widely disseminated replies to the thousands of Addresses sent to her and stresses the radical unity between her cause and the British people. The second is from Act 3 Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in which the disreputable Pompey Bum is about to be sent to jail for visiting a brothel. The two quotations amplify and deepen the image’s depiction of heroinism and villainy. As the queen is elevated to a national icon of political justice, the king is further degraded and humiliated by the national bard.

On the inside pages, this textual interplay is enhanced by the addition of the main narrative. There is no knowing if readers consumed the images or texts first, though my hunch is for the former, especially as we know that hand-coloured versions of the pamphlets were available. But regardless of which way round the page was read, the process of decoding each component and fitting the whole together like a puzzle must have provided hours of illuminating entertainment. ‘Accusation’ and ‘Publication’, the two most up-to-date scenes, are particularly rewarding in this respect. Unlike the depictions of these two stages in the ‘toy’, which are limited to exquisite slapstick confrontations between Caroline and George, the pamphlet scenes are much richer extrapolations of government’s machinations against Caroline. Though reduced in scale, the sophistication and detail of these designs comes close to evoking the virtuosity and spectacular effects of single-print caricatures.

Figure 6. William Hone and George Cruikshank, ‘Accusation’. From *The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder*.

‘Accusation’ (Figure 6) reimagines George as a watchman standing outside the door of one of Caroline’s residences. He holds a pole on top of which is a green bag entitled ‘Beware of the Report of a Bad House’; in other words, this is a house of ill-repute and Caroline is little better than a prostitute. On the other side of the king is his lantern containing a leech, a reference to Sir John Leach who led the ‘Milan Commission’ into Caroline’s guilt. George’s pole bisects the scene and gives an antithetical emphasis to the right-hand side of the image which contains Caroline’s defiant response. Backed by her two lawyers Henry Brougham and Thomas Denman, she leans out of an open window and puts a torch marked ‘Defence’ to the green bag. Although her face is stern, her reticule or string-drawn purse which dangles over the window sill has a face which smiles at the viewer. This minor detail is the punctum of the cartoon as it is a self-reflexive nod towards the power of satire which simultaneously condenses and rebuts the sexual slurs against Caroline. The grinning visage, reminiscent of Momus the god of mockery, hints at the presence of a mischievous pun on the idea that reticules or ‘ridicules’ were evidence of loose morals. As the text declares, with lashings of genital innuendo, ‘his wife held her ridicule at his “Report”’ – a witticism that gains added force and poignancy from the obscene slang term ‘Burning Shame’ that hovers prominently over the image.[9] The spry purse also evokes her refusal to be bought off with a £50,000 allowance. For all his attempts to perform masculine authority, George is upstaged by an assertive woman who wields the torch of justice and the carnivalesque weapon of ‘ridicule’.

The two quotations from Cymbeline add further levels of irony and interpretation to this already rich melange. The first, ‘I will kill thee, if thou dost deny/Thou hast made me a cuckold’ is spoken by Posthumus Leonatus in Act 2 Scene 4. He is reacting to Iachimo’s claim that, in response to a bet, he has slept with Leonatus’s wife Imogen. Leonatus’s Othello-like credulity and rage about his wife’s alleged infidelity is a subtle comment on George’s calculating and hypocritical determination to discredit and dishonour his wife. As he admits to himself, the church will not grant a divorce ‘If my own hands are dirty’ – which of course they are, stained indelibly by filthy lucre (the original, mercenary reason for the marriage, as shown in ‘Qualification’ and ‘Declaration’) and serial adultery (as shown in ‘Alteration’). In other words, he does not even ‘qualify’ to be a Shakespearean wife-killer. The other quotation, from Act 3 Scene 2, links to the xenophobic attacks on the Italian witnesses who were called to testify against Caroline. The stereotype of the avaricious, shifty and treacherous Italian achieved prominence in the first few weeks of the trial when her ex-servant Theodore Majocchi repeatedly answered Brougham’s questions with ‘Non mi ricordo’ (I don’t remember), a refrain that became the unofficial logo of the proceedings and the title of another Hone-Cruikshank pamphlet.[10] To rub in the point, the lines in Cymbeline are spoken by the loyal servant Pisanio who refuses to believe the allegations against Imogen. Pisanio’s next words can easily be applied to the idealized Caroline: ‘Disloyal! No:/She’s punish’d for her truth, and undergoes,/More goddess-like than wife-like, such assaults’.[11]

Figure 7. William Hone and George Cruikshank, ‘Publication’. From *The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder*.

The theme of disloyalty is given a startling new twist in the next episode, ‘Publication’ (Figure 7). The scene shows George as a pantomime Guy Fawkes figure, breaking into a building which houses Caroline and planting a huge green bag of allegedly explosive evidence. He is accompanied in his nocturnal skulduggery by a disabled and demoralized Cupid, and he carries a conspiratorial dark lantern containing a leech (Leach) and a bunch of matches. Caroline peers down at him through a lorgnette from a window above the door. She does not appear distressed as the building is protected by Albion Life Assurance (a real company founded in 1805, but the allegorical significance of its patriotic name is what counts). She is also protected by the celestial eye of knowledge which encloses a printing press, the cherished symbol of freedom of expression and, according to the text, the ‘MORAL SUN’ of the nation. This motif echoes earlier satirical depictions of the Gunpowder Plot in which divine beams of light expose Fawkes’s treachery.[12] And even though Fawkes’s reputation shifted in the Romantic period from arch national traitor to heroic (if over-zealous) martyr for religious and political rights, the king’s self-interested motives hardly qualify for this liberal reinterpretation.[13] George is a danger to the nation and the enemy of the free press. Although the epigraph from a well-known speech by Sheridan points a finger at the ‘venal House of Peers’, the image targets the king alone.[14]

The final point to note about this scene is the punning title. To begin with, there are two conspicuous but antithetical references at play: the first is to the discredited ‘publication’ of the secret inquiry into Caroline’s affairs; the second is to the elevated mission of the ‘fearless’ free press which ‘guards, alike, the people and their throne’. There is also a third meaning waiting in the wings: the threat of Caroline’s legal team to publish the ‘recrimination’ or evidence of the king’s sexual indiscretions, including his first marriage. As Ben Wilson notes, although the word ‘recrimination’ is ‘conspicuously absent’ from the named rungs of the matrimonial ladder, the satire itself stands in for the judicial process and bares all.[15]

This takes us to a fourth connotation, the publication of the pamphlet itself. Satire was not routinely associated with the free press, even though it was clearly an important constituent, and the inviolable symbol of the hand-operated printing press evokes text rather than visual image. This is one reason why caricature was so self-reflexive, constantly defining, exploring, and promoting its unique brand. To be sure, some of this rhetoric was self-puffery, but in Hone and Cruikshank’s case there is little doubt that their success was the result of a self-propelling innovation in form.[16] By the end of the first week of its publication, according to the Examiner (20 August), the Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder was already in its 12^th edition. The Examiner was full of praise for ‘another of Mr. Hone’s happy illustrations of public feeling’. The language is revealing: ‘illustration’ here can mean both visualization and enhancement. In an advert for the pamphlet in the same issue, the key word is ‘embellished’: ‘The most extensively embellished, and most rapidly selling production ever issued from the press’. In addition, ‘Orders from the country…will be punctually executed, and Placards for doors and shop-windows enclosed’. Exposure was key to the success of caricature: it relocated high politics to the ‘shop window’ and the gaze of the viewing public.

[1] One polemic argued that ‘the millions who compose the civilized and unbiassed part of mankind’ must ensure ‘the destruction of the prevailing system, by an adequate reform of parliament’ (Charles Maclean, The Triumph of Public Opinion (T. and J. Allman, 1820), 2).

[2] The free borrowing of newspaper text made the recirculation of news stories easier. Caroline’s trial could be followed on a daily, weekly, or monthly cycle, depending on the type of publication, or a combination of all three. Less ephemeral modes of publication also proliferated, including bound, serialized and multivolume trial reports, though it was not always clear where the initial information came from. Radical publishers seized their opportunity to cash in: see, for example, John Fairburn’s Whole Proceedings on the Trial of Her Majesty, originally in weekly parts, then 2 volumes, then 3 volumes with a reprint of the 1806 Delicate Investigation.

[3] The full text is reproduced with a useful introduction in Benjamin Colbert, ed. British Satire 1785-1840: Collected Satires III: Complete Longer Satires (2003; London: Routledge, 2016).

[4] Hone claimed that he got the idea for the pamphlet after seeing a toy Matrimonial Ladder in the window of a ‘little fancy shop’, and that he was offered £500 by the government to suppress it. See Frederick W. M. Hackwood, William Hone: His Life and Times (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 236-7.

[5] For example, ‘Acceptation’ and ‘Declaration’. For an eighteenth-century example, see Hymen’s Ladder (c.1770-90), British Museum 1983, U.2187. The genre remained popular will into the nineteenth century: a mid-1820s print by the caricature publisher Thomas McLean is also in the British Museum collection, and Cruikshank collaborated on a Matrimonial Ladder as late as 1843 (British Museum 1859 0316 804). See also Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790-1822 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 172-6.

[6] In addition to the examples discussed here, Gillray’s Apotheosis of Hoche (1798; British Museum Satires 9156) is one of the more audacious parodies of Jacob’s biblical ladder.

[7] See Hone and Cruikshank’s Bank Restriction Note and Bank Restriction Barometer, British Museum Satires 13198, 13199. I cover this topic in Romanticism and Caricature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Chapter 2, ‘Lethal Money’.

[8] British Museum Satires 13895. The radical publisher Thomas Dolby was a prolific producer of these pamphlets: some of my favourites are The Queen and Magna Charta and A Total Eclipse (both illustrated by Robert Cruikshank), and Jack and the Queen Killers. The main loyalist publisher was W. Wright: see, for example, The New Pilgrim’s Progress.

[9] According to Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London: S. Hooper, 1795), the term refers to ‘a lighted candle stuck into the private parts of a woman’ (23).

[10] Hone’s peddling of anti-Italian xenophobia was probably tactical and commercial as, like most liberals and radicals, he was a supporter of the European revolutionary struggles that were taking place in Italy and Spain in 1820, and in radical analysis a degraded national character was attributed to a corrupt political system. On the wider picture, see Will Bowers, The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture 1815-23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). The Caroline controversy was actually cited by rebel leaders to aid their cause (Jane Robins, Rebel Queen: How the Trial of Caroline Brought England to the Brink of Revolution (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 144-45).

[11] There is no space here to pursue the Shakespearean parallels further, but the ironies proliferate depending on the allocation of roles. For example, anti-Carolinites could have focused on Cymbeline’s treacherous queen rather than the victimized Imogen; on the other hand, Iachimo’s seedy spying on the sleeping Imogen evokes the trial’s lubricious obsession with Caroline’s love life.

[12] See: The Guy Faux of 1770 (British Museum Satires 41); James Sayers, A New Leaf for an Old Book of Common Prayer 1807 (British Museum Satires 10739); James Gillray, The Pillar of the Constitution 1807 (British Museum Satires 10738).

[13] See Frederick Burwick, ‘Staging Protest and Repression: Guy Fawkes in Post-Peterloo Performance’, in Michael Demson and Regina Hewitt, eds. Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-Making during the Romantic Era (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 100-119.

[14] Sheridan’s speech occurred in 1810 during a debate about proposals to restrict the reporting of parliamentary proceedings (Annual Register (1810): 37-8). In the full speech, Sheridan praised the power of the free press to ‘shake down corruption from its height, and bury it beneath the ruins of those abuses it was meant to shelter’, an apt sentiment for the Caroline controversy.

[15] Ben Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph: William Hone and the Fight for the Free Press (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 326.

[16] See the article ‘Political Publications in Wood-Cuts and Verse’ in the Examiner (24 December 1820) which celebrates Hone’s pamphlets as ‘a new feature in the history and publication of English politics’.

Queen Caroline in Caricature – July 1820

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Dr Fallon

Ian Haywood, University of Roehampton

Figure 1. William Heath, *The Pageantry put off or the Raree Show adjourned* (S. W. Fores, 13 July 1820). British Museum.

Throughout June and July 1820, the Caroline controversy gathered pace. Unable to prevent her re-entering Britain after her long exile (see the June post), the government tried once again to persuade Caroline to renounce her claim to the throne. The veteran Tory MP and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce was assigned to the task and repeated the offer of a £50,000 allowance in return for Caroline leaving the country. The queen was in no mood to compromise: buoyed up by the huge popular support for her cause, she rejected the bribe for a second time. According to radical journalist William Cobbett, who was angling to become Caroline’s speech writer, Wilberforce’s dejected deputation were ‘hooted, and were actually spitten upon, by such masses of people as are seen no where but in London’. Cobbett cited this charivari in a letter to the queen as evidence that her ‘strength and safety lie in public opinion’.[1] Cobbett’s overtures did not go unheeded, and by the time her trial began in August, the tone of Caroline’s campaign had become markedly more militant and class-conscious.[2]

Caroline’s steadfastness massively raised the stakes of the dispute. Under George IV’s direction, the government launched legal proceedings against Caroline. To divorce his wife and rescind her royal title, the king needed evidence that she had committed adultery. This had been tried before with no success – the ‘Delicate Investigation’ of 1806 had exonerated her from the charge of giving birth to an illegitimate child – but the so-called ‘Milan Commission’ had been gathering evidence of Caroline’s affair with her Italian steward Bartolomeo Bergami for several years. In late June 1820, this evidence was delivered in several customary green bags to a Secret Committee of the House of Lords, and on 6 July the Bill of Pains and Penalties was given its first reading. This procedure was a public relations disaster for the government and was met with widespread revulsion and ridicule. The infamous green bags were regarded by many as icons of subterfuge and despotism, their reputation indelibly stained by previous prosecutions of radicals for sedition. Unsurprisingly, the green bags feature prominently in caricatures, most famously George Cruikshank’s hilarious Ah! sure such a pair was never seen so justly form’d to meet by nature (23 June 1820), used as the masthead for these posts. Perhaps responding to the Examiner’s quip that ‘If the King has a Green Bag, the Queen might have one too’,[3] Cruikshank expresses his disdain for the whole affair in a relatively even-handed manner, but in most satirical prints the bags are bulging repositories of corruption, cowardice, and conniving. As is so often the case, the satire works through magnification and hyperbole, swelling the size of the bags to encompass and entrap the culprits in their own chicanery.

The Bill of Pains and Penalties, the central public document of the controversy, was also an easy target for ridicule. The Examiner dubbed it the ‘Bill of Divorce and Degradation’ (2 July 1820). A typically resourceful intervention came from William Hone, who published an alternative version of the Bill in which a parallel text compared the queen’s alleged ‘licentious’ and ‘disgraceful’ shenanigans to the king’s multiple sexual indiscretions and moral failings (Figure 2). The comic effect of these ‘dropt clauses’ resembles a satirical mirror in which an official narrative is inverted: see for example Robert Cruikshank’s Reflection: To be or not to be? (11 February 1820) in which the king sees Caroline’s reflection rather than his own in the looking glass.[4] Like many other pro-Caroline publications, Hone’s pamphlet also traces the origins of the problem back to the separation of 1796, the point at which George broke his marriage vows and set in train this travesty of a royal romance. The constant reiteration of the queen’s heroic-tragic story is one of the most distinctive cultural features of the crisis.[5] Her narrative became a template for social and political injustice, but also for resistance to persecution. She was a wronged woman, but also a strong woman. The main source of that strength, as she emphasised in her replies to the Addresses that poured in from around the country, was her connection with the people.

Figure 2. William Hone, *Dropt Clauses Out of the Bill Against the Queen* (1820). Special Collections, Adelphi University. The satirical cartoon juxtaposes the king and queen’s response to being smeared in blacking liquid: while Caroline repels the stain and remains pristine white, the king cannot be bleached.

Historians have identified Caroline’s adoption of the role of stereotypically vulnerable woman in need of (male) protection as a fatal weakness in her campaign, but this analysis underestimates the dissemination of proto-feminist imagery which shows the queen as sublimely powerful.[6] Due to its hyperbolic methodology, caricature was a particularly potent source of this empowering iconography. In the June post, we looked at Caroline’s pose of martial valour in Robert Cruikshank’s The Secret Insult!. For this post, we can turn to William Heath’s The Pageantry put off or the Raree Show adjourned, published by Samuel Fores on 13 July 1820.[7] Heath was responding to the government’s announcement on 12 July that the Coronation – the ‘raree show’ or children’s peep-show of the title – was to be postponed for a whole year until August 1821. This news arrived only a few days after the first reading of the Bill of Pains and Penalties and represented a mini-triumph for Caroline’s cause (it also put in place, ironically, the denouement of her story). To amplify this sense of success, Heath’s queen is transformed into a quasi-divine entity resembling one of the female personifications (Liberty. Justice, Britannia) who support her in other prints and satires.[8] Unlike The Secret Insult! or Robert Cruikshank’s Public Opinion (published a few weeks earlier, and which shows a seated Caroline outweighing the cabinet in the scales of justice [Figure 3]),[9] Caroline is unaccompanied, active, and in total command. Heath’s scene has all the trappings of a theatrical deus ex machina: her sudden, radiant appearance from a cloud startles and cows the king and his cabinet, and the shock symbolically dislodges the crown from the king’s head. Her dress is covered in astrological symbols to enhance her mystique, and she is literally elevated. But the crucial and most radical visual detail is the least spectacular: separating the two halves of the print is the queen’s wand, inscribed with the words ‘Vox Populi’ or voice of the people. It is this lightning rod of opposition and protest which empowers her and connects her to popular protest.

Figure 3. Robert Cruikshank, *Public Opinion* (William Benbow, June 1820). British Museum.

Her scolding words are also a subtle but highly effective rallying cry for her thousands of female supporters.[10] While the nation’s leaders scatter in stunned silence, Caroline declaims to the king,

That Cap becomes you not alone off with the Bauble tread it under foot. ‘tis not the time for Pageantry & Waste, while thousands starve for Want? & while your Royal Mistress suffer Scorn, Reproach & Persecution, from the Dastard Hands of Secret Enemies.

The first half of this speech is taken from Act 5 Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and it is no coincidence that these are the words of Petruchio commanding obedience from his erstwhile ‘shrew’ wife Katherina. As Jonathan Bate and David Francis Taylor have shown, Shakespeare was a constant source of inspiration for caricaturists,[11] and Heath’s quotation is a brilliant example of how carefully and strategically satirical artists chose their quotations. Given that Caroline’s predicament was often compared to that of Anne Boleyn or Catherine of Aragon, supporters and satirists more commonly cited Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, but Heath clearly wanted to overturn the stereotype of the saintly female victim.[12] Of course, the cultural richness of this inversion of gender roles only works if the viewer recognises the Shakespearean allusion, but given the popularity of Georgian theatre at all social levels, there is every reason to suppose that the joke met its mark.[13]

The ideological work of the Shakespeare quotation does not end with the subversion of gender roles. It is also a mischievous reference to the postponed coronation, repurposing Shakespeare’s text into a seditious anticipation of the king’s downfall. In the play, Petruchio’s command ‘off with that bauble tread it under foot’ chastises stereotypical female vanity, but in the caricature the ‘bauble’ refers to the king’s dislodged crown, a visual omen of either a popular republican uprising or Caroline’s constitutional usurpation. Moreover, Caroline’s expressed sympathy for the ‘thousands’ who ‘starve and want’ introduces a new tone of class-consciousness into the rebuke. If Caroline ever did come to power, this is how radicals imagined (or wanted to imagine) she would act.[14] Put another way, she would be paying back her dues for the people’s support.

The final point to note on the print’s utilization of Shakespeare is that it also subverted illustrations of the play. The Taming of the Shrew was included in Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and its attendant printed outputs,[15] and there were several other illustrated versions of the play published subsequently. While there is no evidence of direct borrowing, it is illuminating to postulate ways in which the caricature is in dialogue with this burgeoning field of visual imagery. Robert Smirke’s design for the ‘taming’ of Katherina in Act 5 Scene 2 of the play (Figure 4) is a good example of the ideal of compliant femininity which Heath undermines and challenges. Like Caroline, Katherina stands on the left of the scene, admonishing Bianca and the widow in full view of the approving male gaze. In his gender reversal of this interaction, Heath may have drawn on an earlier illustration by Edward Francis Burney (cousin of Fanny Burney). His design for Act 3, Scene 2 (Figure 5) shows Petruchio brandishing his sword to protect Katherina. His pose and chivalric words – ‘Fear not, sweet wench they shall not touch thee/I’ll buckle thee against a million’ – may resonate strongly with the popular support for Caroline as a victim, but in Heath’s print the roles are switched and it is the queen who assumes Petruchio’s militant stance, defending women and the nation against malevolent male rulers. The ‘million’ are also transmuted into the liberating force of the ‘vox populi’.

Figure 4. Robert Smirke, artist’s proof of an illustration for Act 5 Scene 2 of *The Taming of the Shrew* (1821). British Museum.

Figure 5. Edward Francis Burney, illustration of Act 3 Scene 2 of *The Taming of the Shrew* (1805). British Museum.

The barely visible inscription on Caroline’s wand may seem a rather lightweight signifier in comparison to the Shakespeare quotation, but the talismanic term releases into the image a cacophony of radical ‘voices’ from the surrounding print culture.[16] Mention has already been made of the prolific number of supportive Addresses which poured in from all around the country, and it is worth adding that these were immediately recirculated in the press, usually accompanied by Caroline’s replies. The Addresses were also presented in person by formal delegations and processions, and the vast crowds that marched from central London to Caroline’s residence in Brandenbugh House in west London were a spectacular material demonstration of ‘popular feeling’ in action.[17] Accompanying this deafening chorus was a wide variety of popular political genres: songs, ballads, prayers, skits, broadsides and poems, many of which circulated across different media. The final section of this post will consider some demotic texts which interact with Heath’s caricature in intriguing and instructive ways, adding new layers of meaning and further enriching its cultural and political agency.

On 12 July 1820, the day before Heath’s print was published, the latest issue of Thomas Wooler’s radical periodical Black Dwarf appeared on the newsstands blazoning a sensational headline story, ‘The Portals of Revolution Opened’. The article argues that the government’s prosecution of Caroline risked provoking a full-blown constitutional crisis and, even worse, ‘all the horrors of a military revolution, and its attendant destruction of all civil rights’ (40). To avert this disaster, ministers needed to listen to the inviolable voice of the people: as an earlier issue of the paper put it, ‘The people will be heard, for through them operates the voice of eternal justice’ (14 June). One of the most populist sources of this democratic voice was a series of declamatory street posters or placards, and in its 12 July edition Black Dwarf republished a placard entitled ‘Glorious Deeds of Women!!!’ (Figure 6).[18] The text positions Caroline as the latest in a long line of patriotic political women stretching back to republican Rome. It is striking that the roll call becomes increasingly violent as it progresses, citing the famous Biblical stories of Jael and Esther, both of whom assassinated tyrants to save the Jewish people, and the more recent example of Charlotte Corday who murdered the Jacobin leader Marat.[19] Heath’s depiction of a militant Caroline may well have been influenced by this clamorous evocation of powerful women, especially when we remember that all three heroines were widely represented in art history.[20] Seen from this tyrannicidal perspective, Caroline’s wand resembles Jael’s hammer and spike, poised to ‘bring down the corrupt conspirators’ in a feminized coup d’etat. Like numerous other satirical responses to the Caroline debacle, the story of a persecuted queen is reimagined as righteous conquest over a ‘corrupt’ ruler.

Figure 6. ‘Glorious Deeds of Women!!!’ From *Black Dwarf* (12 July 1820). British Library.

Heath’s decision to make Caroline a godlike figure may also have been a response to popular poetic rhetoric.[21] A prime example of her elevation to semi-divine status is the song ‘Britons Claim her as Your Queen!! An Address from Britannia’, which appeared in the two-penny A Collection of New and Popular Songs, Dedicated to Queen Caroline of England (1820). This anthology declared its impeccable radical credentials by opening with Samuel Bamford’s alternative national anthem, ‘God Save the Queen’. The editor explains that Bamford, the ‘Burns of Lancashire’, was languishing in Lincoln jail for ‘having attended the Meeting at Manchester’. Peterloo was a constant reference point in radical discourse throughout the Caroline controversy, providing a precedent and pretext for both oppression and resistance. Ideally, Caroline would be the providential healer of the nation:

O God! Her foes confound,
And save the Queen!
O, may she purer rise…[22]

In a broadside version of the song, Caroline’s glorification is even more pronounced: ‘Let Virtue’s sacred rays/Round her unsullied blaze’.[23] Bamford gives Caroline a sublime aura, but in ‘Britons claim her as your Queen!!’ her role is apocalyptic:

Now’s the day and now’s the hour,
Chase away the clouds that low’r,
Crush at once the villain’s power
Who dares insult his Queen!

Justice strikes th’avenging blow!
Rids Caroline of every foe,
Forever may she reign! (9-10)

The revolutionary message is strengthened by the tune, ‘Scots who hae wi’ Wallace bled’, the unofficial anthem of Scottish nationalism. The original words were written by Robert Burns in 1793 and expressed his outrage at the government’s persecution of radical activism. The incendiary final stanza echoes Justice’s ‘avenging blow!’ in ‘Britons claim her as your Queen!!’:

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in ev’ry foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!
Let us do or die![24]

This interlocking and dynamically interleaved set of texts shows that the ‘vox populi’ encompassed a wide range of sources from both the past and present. The wand that Caroline wields in Heath’s caricature is a tribute to a rich tradition of radical writing and representation that reaches back to the Jacobin 1790s. Her elevation to the muse of ‘eternal justice’ mobilized an array of popular textual and visual genres spanning the whole of the Romantic era.

No one could have predicted this bizarre alliance a year earlier. When Percy Shelley concluded his unpublished Peterloo sonnet ‘England in 1819’ with a vision of a ‘phantom’ that ‘may/ Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day’, he could never have foreseen who would answer that call.[25] For Cobbett, writing in late July 1820, ‘the Queen’s cause naturally allies itself with that of the Radicals’.[26] But as this post has shown, ‘the Queen’s cause’ was a complex, collective articulation of multiple grievances. If the queen spoke for the people, they spoke through her.[27] Caricature was the only artistic genre which could give this reciprocal relationship a compelling and entertaining visual form.

See exhibition at the Lewis Walpole Library:

https://exhibits-new.library.yale.edu/s/trialbymedia/page/intro

[1] William Cobbett, History of the Regency and Reign of King George the Fourth (London: William Cobbett, 1830), para. 432. The Examiner reported that Wilberforce the ‘head kneeler’ was ‘much hissed and abused’ (16 July 1820).

[2] For an account of Cobbett’s role as Caroline’s speech writer, see James Grande, William Cobbett, the Press, and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792-1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), Chapter 5.

[3] Examiner, 11 June 1820.

[4] British Museum Satires 13661.

[5] Probably the most iconic example of this narrative is William Hone and George Cruikshank’s The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder, which will be looked at in a later post.

[6] For Thomas Lacqueur, Caroline’s cause was ‘rendered harmless by being transformed into melodrama, farce, and romance’ and a ‘politically safe version of the story as domestic melodrama and royalist fantasy’ (‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV,’ Journal of Modern History (September 1982): 417-466, 418, 465).

[7] British Museum Satires 13759.

[8] See, for example, The Queen that Jack Found, Tenth Edition (London: John Fairburn, 1 July 1820). The cover shows Britannia and Wisdom shielding a bust of Caroline (represented as Innocence) under the light of Truth.

[9] British Museum Satires undescribed.

[10] According to Anna Clarke, the 25 Addresses from women contained around 70,000 signatures from all social classes (Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 200). Inflated rhetoric was commonplace: for example, the women of an inner London constituency waxed lyrical about Caroline’s ‘great soul’ which ‘shone resplendent, through the clouds gathered around you at St Omers’ (To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty: The dutiful tender of the loyalty, homage, and respect of the under-signed, the Married Females resident in the Parish of St Mary-le-Bone). Heath’s caricature literalizes this trope of sublime radiance.

[11] Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730-1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); David Francis Taylor, The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760-1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018).

[12] For example, see the epigraph from Henry VIII in the poem ‘Who are the accusers of the Queen?’ by ‘Vox Populi’, Black Dwarf, 14 June 1820. See also J. Lewis Marks’s caricature King Henry VIII (1820), British Museum Satires 13829.

[13] See David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Frederick Burwick, British Drama of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

[14] In early July Caroline was still being cautious about revealing her politics. Her reply to an Address from Nottingham which complained that ‘pale misery, want, and disease, infest the poor man’s dwelling’ was that ‘I cannot mix political animosities with my just cause’ (Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 8 July 1820). In this respect, Heath’s print was nudging her towards a more radical stance.

[15] Examples of the Shakespeare Gallery illustrations can be viewed on the website of the Romantic Illustration Network (https://romanticillustrationnetwork.com/shakespeare-gallery/).

[16] In addition to the literary examples considered here, it is worth noting the very literal way in which the vox populi intervened in the political process. In his pamphlet The King’s Treatment of the Queen Shortly Stated to the People of the England, William Hone describes gleefully how the ‘animating, soul-inspiring cheers of the people’ assembled outside parliament disrupted Castlereagh’s opening of the green bags: ‘No wonder that at that moment the Minister turned pale…that very moment public opinion pronounced its verdict on the whole proceeding’ (21).

[17] Some examples of these processions will be looked at in future posts. According to Cobbett, the crowd usually made a point of stopping before St James’ Palace so that the King could not ignore the vox populi, the ‘sound of their voices…in shouts to have made him hear had he been in the clouds’ (History of the Regency, 439). The phrase ‘popular feeling’ comes from William Hazlitt’s oft-cited description of the controversy as ‘the only question I have ever known that excited a thorough popular feeling. It struck its roots into the heart of the nation; it took possession of every house or cottage in the kingdom’ (The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe. 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–4), 20: 136).

[18] The Examiner regarded these placards as ‘open and effective appeals to the people’ (30 July 1820) and credited Cobbett with the idea.

[19] For the story of Jael and Sisera, see Judges 5: 24-26; for Esther and Ahasuerus, see Esther 7: 1-10.

[20] For Jael and Esther, see Susan L. Smith, The Power of Women: A ‘Topos’ in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Some of the best known paintings are: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Jael and Sisera (c. 1620); Haman Begging Mercy (c.1635), attributed to Rembrandt; and Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793).

[21] For a study of the response of Romantic poets to the Caroline affair, see John Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), Chapters 8-10.

[22] A Collection of New and Popular Songs, Dedicated to Queen Caroline of England (Newcastle: J. Marshall, 1820). Further page references are given in parentheses.

[23] A broadside version exists in the Special Collections of Adelphi University, Long Island.

[24] The Complete Works of Robert Burns (Boston: Philips, Sampson and Company, 1853), 286.

[25] Shelley: Poetical Works ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 574.

[26] Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 29 July 1820, 574-5.

[27] This was the radical interpretation of the voice of the people, but as Anna Clarke explains, the idea was ideologically contested: royalists and moderates argued that parliament was the vox populi, not the ‘mob’, while the Whigs preferred to define the middle class as ‘the people’, hedged between the two extremes (Scandal, 196).

Queen Caroline in Caricature: June 1820

Posted on June 5, 2020 by Dr Fallon

Ian Haywood, University of Roehampton

Image: Robert Cruikshank, *The Secret Insult* (**Museum** **Wilhelm** **Busch**)

On this day (5 June) exactly two hundred years ago, one of the most high-profile political and sexual scandals in British history burst onto the cultural scene. The focus of this unprecedented media storm was Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of the new king George IV, previously the Prince of Wales and Prince Regent.[1]

The pair had married in 1795 when George agreed a deal with parliament to pay off enormous gambling debts – amounting to millions of pounds today – in return for reforming his rakish ways. The marriage was a disaster: George was drunk during the wedding ceremony, and there were rumours that Caroline’s standards of hygiene were not of the highest (though typically, this criticism did not apply to the Prince). Moreover, George was already illicitly married to Maria Fitzherbert, and his mistress Lady Jersey was appointed as Caroline’s bedchamber lady. Though Caroline conceived her daughter Charlotte, George insisted on a separation, a decision that would come back to haunt him.

From 1796 until 1820, the royal couple led independent lives, but George launched several undercover investigations to try to expose Caroline’s allegedly promiscuous lifestyle, and he restricted her access to Princess Charlotte. In 1814 Caroline want into exile and only discovered the news of Charlotte’s death in 1817 by accident. When George III died in January 1820, Caroline asserted her claim to be the lawful Queen of Britain and announced her intention to return to England. The king was horrified and determined to stop her. But how to manage this dilemma? The country was in a state of political unrest, and the Queen was already regarded by many people as an injured wife and mother. Her cause was an ideal opportunity to rally anti-government protest in the wake of the Peterloo massacre, the draconian Six Acts against freedom of speech, and the executions of the Cato Street conspirators. Undeterred, and against the advice of his ministers, George had Caroline’s name struck off the Church of England liturgy and demanded a solution.

Just as their relationship had begun with a royal bribe, George assumed Caroline could be bought off and sent a delegation to intercept her journey through northern France. During the weekend of 3-4 June 1820, Lord Hutchinson and the rising Whig star Henry Brougham met with Caroline in the town of St Omer. They offered her an allowance of £50,000 per annum (an increase of £15,000 on her existing stipend) in return for the renunciation of her claim and permanent exile. If she refused, she was threatened with prosecution for adultery. Caroline rejected the offer, resumed her journey to Calais, and arrived at Dover on 5 June 1820. Huge crowds of ecstatic fans welcomed her return and she was mobbed all the way to London.

For the remainder of the year, her story dominated the press and Romantic print culture. The media explosion was unprecedented: millions of words appeared in newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, trial reports, Addresses, prayers, poems, broadsides and placards.[2] Caroline’s persecution seemed to capture the imagination of the whole country. The Times summed up the public mood in its report of her homecoming: ‘The Queen of England is at present every thing with every body’ (7 July 1820). Caroline represented a new force in British politics: public opinion.[3] Though the vast majority of the population had no vote, they were able to express their views through the ‘fourth estate’ of the press and traditional ‘out-door’ methods of agitation such as petitioning, Addresses, rallies, processions, charivari, threat-letters, window-smashing and effigy-burning. The flagrant hypocrisy and double standards of the accusations against Caroline’s sexual morality revived feminist arguments which had been dormant since the ‘Jacobin’ 1790s,[4] and the dubious legality of the trial was seized on by liberals and radicals as a prime example of political corruption. Lacking any independent access to the corridors of power, Caroline knew that her only chance of success was to appeal directly to the power of the people and the vox populi.

The mobilization of a popular front of oppositional Romantic politics and print was remarkable in its scale and intensity, and central to its success was the contribution that visual culture played in Caroline’s rise to political celebrity. In addition to the wide circulation of engraved portraits, medallions and other visual memorabilia, her story was a field-day for the caricaturists. Hundreds of satirical prints and illustrated pamphlets appeared in her favour, and after the collapse of her trial in late 1820 her opponents also turned to caricature to enhance their counter-offensive.

There were numerous reasons for the popularity and efficacy of Georgian caricature. It was a unique art form which combined political reportage with unbridled and entertaining fantasy; it was able to respond quickly and memorably to political events and it operated outside of conventional aesthetic and ethical norms. This imaginative freedom created a parallel visual universe in which public figures re-enacted and reconfigured newsworthy incidents according to a satirical logic of inversion, irony. allusion and parody.[5] The result was a compelling debunking of official ideology and the stripping away of polite codes of reverence and respect that frequently shielded and mystified social and political power. This anarchic tendency was often balanced by an apparent championing of an identifiable cause or faction, though on closer inspection this advocacy could prove to be unstable, and the consumer of caricatures had to be on their guard for surprises and traps.

The power of Carolinite caricature can be illustrated by looking at the response to her arrival in Britain. Within days of her spectacular ‘remigration’, Robert Cruikshank’s The Secret Insult; or Bribery and Corruption rejected!!! was published by the radical activist William Benbow. This collaboration reflected the significant role that radical publishers played in defining Caroline’s satirical identity. The field was led by the formidable partnership of William Hone and Robert’s more famous brother George Cruikshank, closely followed by the now-forgotten John Fairburn, Thomas Dolby, Benbow and John Cahuac.[6] The Secret Insult is a striking, proto-feminist idealization of Caroline’s authority, presence and prowess. In order to make her homecoming more mythic and symbolic, Cruikshank transplants the St Omer incident to a reimagined arrival on the shores of Britain. Instead of the cheering crowds of Dover, the scene fantasizes a stand-off between the forces of good and evil which is more reminiscent of an invasion tableau, except that the usual roles are reversed and it is the defenders who are in the wrong. The confrontation is semiotically and sartorially polarized into two trios: on the right side we see the proud, stern, virtuous, magisterial and upright figures of a modestly-attired Caroline, her advisor Alderman Wood in Roman armour and (not to be ignored) a patriotic frigate; on the left side, the compromised, obsequious, cringing, untrustworthy, cowardly and evasive figures of a cowed Hutchinson and a Brougham who has his back to the viewer and is confessing his discomfort to the devil.

The textual components of the print indicate its political sympathies and typically bring into play a range of allegorical, cultural and topical allusions: Wood’s ‘Shield for the Innocent’ and fiery sword of justice are stock emblems which glorify (even to the point of being tongue-in-cheek) Caroline’s elevated and iconic status; ‘The Wooden Walls of England’ inscribed on the frigate refers to a popular patriotic naval song and reflects Caroline’s alarming popularity with the rank-and-file of the armed forces;[7] the scroll of ‘Lawful Claims’ in her left hand countermands the forthcoming ‘Bill of Pains and Penalties’ against her; and the speech bubbles reduce the fastidious press reports of St Omer and Dover into populist soundbites. In response to Hutchinson’s fawning offer to ‘change your name & livery & retire to some distant part of the earth w[h]ere you may never be seen or heard any more; & if 50,000£ pr annum will not satisfy you, what will?’ – the latter an example of the ‘excessive profligacy of the age we live in’ according to the Times – Caroline simply replies ‘Nothing but a Crown!’[8] The retort gains added, if ironic force, from the echo of Proverbs 12.4: ‘A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband;/ But she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones’.[9] This sums up the opposing sides of her case and highlights how she is forced to defy patriarchal norms in order to conform to them and achieve her rightful place as the king’s consort.

Compared to the emissary’s flaccid money bags, she has the same columnal, phallic solidity as her (ludicrously classicized) protector Alderman Wood. Brougham’s embarrassed and unchivalrous back-turning suggests a radical mistrust of ‘secret’ Whig motives and backroom deals. In this respect the title of the print is actually something of a self-referring or self-cancelling misnomer as the whole ‘secret’ escapade was widely reported in the press, including the publication of supposedly confidential documents. Indeed, Caroline demanded to see the offer in writing and thereby initiated a recirculating paper trail that rebutted the notorious obscurity of the government’s Committee of Secrecy and its much-lampooned Green Bags of evidence. As the only uncaricatured figure in the scene, Caroline embodies the open, masculine qualities of civic republicanism: even though her motives are self-aggrandising and ambitious, it is clearly her duty to re-enter Britain and restore its moral and political fibre, sweeping away Old Corruption and its disreputable practices. She is the new broom (Brougham) of British politics. In the words of John Fairburn’s broadside On the Return of Queen Caroline to England,

Not fifty thousand pounds, nor fifty more,
Nor all the wealth that Britain has in store,
Could tempt the mind, in conscious virtue bold,
To barter innocence for sordid gold.[10]

The tension between the legal and moral definitions of ‘innocence’ would eventually prove to be Caroline’s undoing. Her controversy raised but could not resolve the protracted issues of women’s rights and freedoms in a patriarchal society. But for all its limitations and blind spots, the gender politics of the campaign was one of its enduring legacies. As the Examiner opined, ‘adultery is either a crime in every body, or it is not’ and the paper even hinted that a guilty verdict would expose the double standard: ‘men, generally speaking, indulge themselves as they please, and yet demand all the while fidelity from the women’ (11 June 1820). The controversy politicised many women and gave a voice to their concerns. This is the reason why the St Omer episode is so important, as it set the stage for female defiance, resistance and self-assertion.

William Hone hoped that ‘the answer of her Majesty were put into the hands of every man and woman in England – never was a finer compliment paid to the English nation’.[11] This was a vision of a democratic public sphere which Hone himself went some way to achieving through his own cheap publications, including his phenomenally successful illustrated satirical pamphlets. Though the popularity and social reach of caricature is still hotly disputed by scholars, visual satire made a unique contribution to the formation of public opinion in the Caroline affair. The sheer volume of prints that appeared, and their remarkable resourcefulness in creating new iterations of the key episodes in the controversy, is a fitting ‘compliment’ to the Golden Age of British caricature.

For more information, see the History Hub’s video on the Queen Caroline affair, presented by Dr Katie Carpenter in the Parliamentary Archives:

[1] A good recent biography is Jane Robins, Rebel Queen: How the Trial of Caroline Brought England to the Brink of Revolution (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006).

[2] According to Thomas Lacquer, the Caroline controversy was ‘popular as no previous political movement had been…the sheer volume of propaganda was staggering…[and it] saturated the whole country’ (‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV’, Journal of Modern History (September 1982): 417-466, 429-30. Malcolm Chase agrees: ‘Queenite literature arguably constituted the greatest publishing phenomenon of the early nineteenth century’ (1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 179.

[3] For Dror Wahrmann, public opinion in the Caroline controversy was regarded as ‘the ultimate key to the political process – an omnipotent, infallible, supreme arbiter’ (‘Public opinion, violence, and the limits of constitutional politics’, in James Vernon, ed. Re-Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 83-122, 90).

[4] Anna Clarke, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), Chapter 8; Kristin Flieger Samuelian, Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal and Monarchy in Print, 1780-1821 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Chapter 4.

[5] Ian Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David Francis Taylor, The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760-1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018).

[6] In subsequent posts I will look at prints and publications by all these figures.

[7] A version by Henry Green was printed in 1773: see http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?&action=GET&textsid=34845 Accessed 3/6/20. The irony of course is that the vaunted British navy’s function was to keep invaders out. On 15 June, just four days after The Secret Insult was published, the Third Regiment of Guards mutinied in Caroline’s favour. The Duke of Wellington declared: ‘Thus, in one of the most critical moments that ever occurred in this country, we and the public have reason to doubt in the fidelity of the troops, the only security we have, not only against revolution but for the property and life of every individual in the country who has anything to lose’ (cited in Robins, Rebel Queen, 128).

[8] According to the Times (6 June), Caroline replied, ‘My determination is soon formed: I shall set out instantly for England — it is in London, and London alone, that I shall consent to consider any proposals.’ William Hone added an even more defiant flourish: ‘Go – inform your Master – that in London, and in London alone, I will consent to consider of any proposal of the King of England’ (The King’s Treatment of the Queen Shortly Stated to the People of the England (London: William Hone, 1820), 20).

[9] The Bible: Authorized Version (London: British and Foreign Bible Society,1963) 520.

[10] A copy is pasted into a collection of Carolinite broadsides in the British Library.

[11] Hone, the King’s Treatment of the Queen, 20.

George Cruikshank, *Ah! sure such a pair was never seen so justly form’d to meet by natutre* (**Museum** **Wilhelm** **Busch**)

In conversation with… Ian Hislop

Posted on May 9, 2016 by marylshannon

Ian Hislop, satirist, broadcaster, historian, and editor of Private Eye, chats to Roehampton’s Dr Mary L. Shannon about his new radio play ‘Trial by Laughter’ (co-written with Nick Newman) which dramatizes the trial of William Hone for libel in 1817, press freedom, and the importance of satirical images in the nineteenth century.

Click here to access the podcast and to get the full story.

Mary L. Shannon and Ian Hislop Private Eye

CFP. Abusing Power: The Visual Politics of Satire

Posted on April 13, 2016 by marylshannon

Abusing Power: The Visual Politics of Satire
23rd Sep 2016 9:00am – 24th Sep 2016 6:00pm
Brighton Museum and Pavilion

A conference organised by the University of Brighton in association with the Royal Pavilion and Brighton Museum. Abstracts due: 9th May 2016

http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/c21/events/events-calendar2/abusing-power-the-visual-politics-of-satire

Speakers include:

Steve Bell, political cartoonist
Martin Rowson, political cartoonist
Professor Ian Haywood, University of Roehampton
The Curator of the Cartoon Museum, London
The Curator of Fine Art at the Royal Pavilion Museums

In January 2015, 12 of France’s most familiar cartoonists were shot dead in Paris. The aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo raises significant questions about the status and the potential impact of an image and gives this conference a political urgency. The events in Paris underline both the power of the political cartoonist and the dangers of causing offence to political and religious sensibilities.

In 1820, George Cruikshank and his brother Robert were summoned to Brighton Pavilion by George IV, in an attempt to buy them off from reproducing their salacious satirical cartoons. They were paid off, but continued to produce scurrilous images of the royal family and political figures. The Royal Pavilion now houses one of the best collections of Cruikshank, Hogarth and Gillray in the world, three of the most eminent caricaturists in visual history.

The city of Brighton and the University have a long history of association with cartoon and caricature. This conference offers the opportunity to celebrate the rich history of caricature and cartoons associated with Brighton and to address the important ethical questions that now confront the contemporary cartoonist. It celebrates the rich collections of Cruikshank, Gillray and Hogarth at the Brighton Pavilion and brings together the expertise of practitioners, curators, academic historians and cultural analysts. The conference draws upon the research expertise of the University, on the curatorial experience of museum staff and on cartoonists who currently practice.

This conference is organised by three research groupings from the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Brighton, the Centre for Applied Philosophy Politics and Ethics, the Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories and C21: Research in Twenty-First Century Writings, which allows for the interdisciplinary focus that the subject merits.

We invite proposals (c300 words) for both papers and panels on topics which may include, but are not limited to:

Comedy and ethics – what are the responsibilities of a cartoonist? || The curation of cartoons – what should be kept? || How far can you go? Are there limits to what a cartoonist can lampoon? || The legacies of Cruikshank, Gillray and Hogarth || Religion and caricature || Representations of history through cartoon || The impact of caricature on popular ideas of politics || Celebrity and caricature || In what contexts does satire flourish and why? || Is satire necessary?

DEADLINE: Email your proposal and short bio to C21Writings@brighton.ac.uk by 9th May 2016

Hone and Cruikshank: BBC Radio 4 Drama by Ian Hislop ‘Trial by Laughter’ now on iplayer

Posted on March 1, 2016 by marylshannon

BBC Radio 4 drama ‘Trial by Laughter’ is now available on iplayer for just over 20 days.

Written by Ian Hislop (the editor of Private Eye and a team captain on ‘Have I got News for You’) and his long-term collaborator Nick Newman (a satirical cartoonist for The Sunday Times and Private Eye), ‘Trial by Laughter’ is a comedy drama based on the real transcripts of the trial of William Hone in 1817.

William Hone is the forgotten hero of free speech in Britain. He was a bookseller, publisher, printshop-owner and satirist – George Cruikshank was his friend and collaborator . In 1817, he stood trial for ‘impious blasphemy and seditious libel’. His crime was to be funny. Worse than that he was funny by parodying religious texts. And worst of all, he was funny about the despotic government and the libidinous monarchy.

Original music by Conrad Nelson
Director/Producer Gary Brown

For clips, the cast list, and background information on the trial, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071h2x6.

Click here to read Nick Newman’s article on Cruikshank and Hone for the BBC website.

For information on the William Hone collection at Adelphi University, USA, see http://libraries.adelphi.edu/archives-and-special-collections/special-collectionsfinding-aids/hone-collection/.

Image of the Month: Caricature of Darwin and the crew of the Beagle

Posted on January 8, 2016 by marylshannon

Lot 10, ‘English Literature, History, Childrens’ Books and Illustrations’ Sale, 15 December 2015, Sotheby’s London. Earle, Augustus (attrib.) CARICATURE GROUP PORTRAIT ON BOARD HMS BEAGLE Watercolour, entitled “Quarter Deck of a Man of War on Diskivery [sic] or interesting Scenes on an Interesting Voyage”, depicting Darwin together with ten other figures, all crew members of HMS Beagle, including Robert FitzRoy and three other officers, shipboard with fossils, botanical and mineralogical specimens, some with captions, several figures with nautical and surveying instruments, each figure with a speech bubble with words written above in black ink, single sheet (340 x 205 mm), watercolour and ink on paper (Whatman Mill watermark, undated), [Bahía Blanca, Argentina, on or around 24 September, 1832]; some creasing and light staining, mounted. http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/english-literature-history-childrens-books-illustrations-l15408/lot.10.html

Last month, Sotheby’s in London sold for £52,500 the only known painting of the naturalist Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle.

The watercolour, painted by Augustus Earle (1793–1838) was offered in the English Literature, History, Children’s Books and Illustrations sale in London. Darwin (giving a long-winded description of an insect), Captain Robert Fitzroy, and various officers and sailors are all depicted: it captures the bustle of Darwin’s historic expedition, while the speech bubbles hint at in-jokes and standing jokes from the voyage. An officer, thought to be 1st Lt John Clements Wickham, complains: “There is no such thing as walking the deck for all these cursed specimens!”

A zoomable digital image of the caricature is available on Sotheby’s website, along with an article on the caricature on Sotheby’s rare books blog Bibliofile.

CFP: ‘Romanticism and the Arts’ SAMLA, Durham, North Carolina, USA (13-15 Nov. 2015)

Posted on February 18, 2015 by marylshannon

Call for Papers
‘Romanticism and the Arts’
an affiliated session of the Keats-Shelley Association of America South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference
Durham, North Carolina, USA (13-15 Nov. 2015)
Deadline: 15 May 2015

This panel seeks papers related to second-generation Romantic-era British writers and/or their literary circles, so proposals addressing the works of John Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt will receive priority. Proposals that engage with the conference theme (“In Concert: Literature and the Other Arts”) are especially welcome. Subjects to be considered might include (but are not limited to) Romantic literature in relation to music, concerts, songs, painting, engravings, caricatures, drawings, panoramas, book arts, calligraphy, dance, theatre, opera, architecture, sculpture, china, pottery, ceramics, textiles, and, in later contexts, electronic art, film, and photography.

Please send a 250-word abstract, bio or CV (one page only), and audio-visual requests to Ben P. Robertson, Troy University, (bprobertson@troy.edu) by 15 May 2015.

CFP – “Visual Print Culture in Europe 1500-1850”, Venice, December 2015

Posted on February 3, 2015 by marylshannon

Visual Print Culture in Europe: techniques, genres, imagery and markets in a comparative perspective, 1500-1850

University of Warwick at: Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice, Italy

December 5-6, 2015

Call for Papers – closing date June 1, 2015

Under Napoleon’s Empire we find London acting as a hub for printing caricatures of Napoleon in a range of languages, and with a number of distinctive styles. The above print, Die Universalmonarchie, for example, claims to have been published by Boydell & Co. in London in 1815, but the Boydells were based at Cheapside, not – as the print states – at Pall Mall (once the location of the late Josiah Boydell’s famous Shakespeare Gallery). The publication information would seem to be spurious and the British Museum suggests that it was likely published in Paris. Is this print, then, German, French, or even possibly English? Who exactly is its market? How far is its imagery tailored to a particular “national” audience and in what ways might it be distinctively comprehensible to such an audience? Besides London, what other European hubs were important, at what moments and why?

‘Visual Print Culture in Europe 1500-1850’ aims to draw together scholars with a range of disciplinary skills to discuss the methods, representational forms, and distribution of and audience for visual print media in Europe between 1500 and 1850. Its seeks to de-nationalize the study of visual print culture, and to explore the extent to which interactions between engravers and printers, artists and consumers in Europe, and a range of common representational practices produced a genuinely European visual print culture – with local modulations, but nonetheless with a common core.

Papers can draw on a range of disciplinary backgrounds in exploring the exchange of techniques and processes, the analysis of imagery, and the identification of markets, and in analysing the conditions under which particular generic forms crossed or failed to cross national boundaries. Although the emphasis is on European visual print culture, the impact of that culture on, and its interaction with, the wider world is also of interest.

The conference language will be English.

The Conference will be held at the University of Warwick’s Palazzo and conference centre in Venice, December 5-6, 2015.

The Conference organisers, acting under the European History Research Centre are:
Mark Philp, History, EHRC Director, Warwick (mark.philp@warwick.ac.uk)
Kate Astbury, French Studies, Warwick
Mark Knights, History, Warwick
David Taylor, English, Warwick

Proposals for papers should be submitted to t.smith.2@warwick.ac.uk by June 1^st 2015 but please feel free to contact Mark Philp in advance with any queries.

The conference may be able to provide some financial assistance to those whose home institutions are unable to support their attendance, especially postgraduate students.