ENGLISH CARICATURE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.
It is part of the office of caricature to assist in destroying illusions
that have served their turn and become obstructive. As in Luther's time
it gave important aid to the reformers in breaking the spell of the
papacy, so now, when kingship broke down in Europe, the satiric pencil
had much to do with tearing away the veil of fiction which had so long
concealed the impotence of kings for nearly every thing but mischief.
[Illustration: A Caricature designed by Benjamin Franklin. (London,
1774.)
Explanation by Dr. Franklin: "The Colonies (that is, Britannia's limbs)
being severed from her, Britannia is seen lifting her eyes and mangled
stumps to heaven; her shield, which she is unable to wield, lies useless
by her side; her lance has pierced New England; the laurel branch has
fallen from the hand of Pennsylvania; the English oak has lost its head,
and stands a bare trunk, with a few withered branches: briers and thorns
are on the ground beneath it; the British ships have brooms at their
topmast heads, denoting their being on sale; and Britannia herself is
seen sliding off the world (no longer able to hold its balance), her
fragments overspread with the label, Date obolum Bellisario" (Give a
farthing to Belisarius).]
The fatal objection to the hereditary principle in the government of
nations is the importance which, to use Mr. Jefferson's words, it "heaps
upon idiots." Idiot is a harsh word to apply to a person so well
disposed as George III., King of England, to whom the violence of the
Revolutionary period was chiefly due; but when we think of the evil and
suffering from which Europe could have been saved if he had known a
little more or been a little less, we can not be surprised that
contemporaries should have summed him up with disrespectful brevity. But
for him, so far as short-sighted mortals can discern, the period of
bloody revolution could have been a period of peaceful reform. After
exasperating his subjects nearly to the point of rebellion, he
precipitated the independence of the American colonies, which, in turn,
brought on the French Revolution, and that issued in Napoleon Bonaparte,
whose sins France only finished expiating at Sedan.
It is true, there must have been in Great Britain myriads upon myriads
of such heads as that of King George to make his policy possible. But
suppose that, instead of placing himself at the head of the dull minds
in his empire, he had given the prestige of the crown to the bright and
independent souls! Suppose he had taken as kindly to Chatham, Burke,
Fox, Franklin, Price, Priestley, and Barre as he did to Bute, Dr.
Johnson, Addington, and Eldon!
And see how this heir to the first throne in Christendom was educated.
That period has been so laid bare by diaries and correspondence that we
can visit the orphan boy in his home at Carlton House, and listen to his
mother, the widowed Princess of Wales, as she describes his traits and
laments the defects of his training. Go back to the year 1752, and
imagine a drawing-room in a royal residence. The dinner hour then had
only got as far toward "to-morrow" as three in the afternoon, and
therefore by early candle-light of an October evening the drawing-room
may be supposed to be inhabited. The Princess of Wales, born a princess
of a petty German sovereignty, still a young mother, is dressed in
mourning, her husband being but a few months dead. Of the duties
belonging to royalty she had no ideas except those which had prevailed
from time immemorial at the court of absolute German sovereigns. Her
chief care was to preserve the morals of her children, and to have her
eldest son a king in reality as well as in name. "Be king" (_Sois roi_)
were favorite words with her, often repeated in the hearing of the heir
to the throne. She thought it infamy in a king to allow himself to be
ruled by ministers. There is no reason to doubt that she was an
honorable lady and affectionate mother. Horace Walpole's insinuation
that she instilled virtuous principles into the mind of her son because
she "feared a mistress," and that her intimacy with Lord Bute was a
criminal intrigue, dishonors Horace Walpole and human nature, but not
the mother of George III.
She has company this evening--Bubb Dodington, a gentleman of great
wealth and agreeable manners, who controlled six votes in the House of
Commons, and passed his life in scheming to buy a peerage with them, in
which, a year before his death, he succeeded, but left no heir to
inherit it. He was much in the confidence of the princess, and she had
sent for him to "spend the day" with her. Dinner is over, the two
ladies-in-waiting are present, and now the "children" enter to play a
few games of cards with their mother before going to bed. The children
are seven in number, of whom the eldest was George, Prince of Wales--a
boy of fourteen, of fresh complexion, sturdy and stout in form, and a
countenance open and agreeable, and wearing an expression of honesty.
Human nature rarely assumes a more pleasing form than that of a healthy,
innocent English boy of fourteen. He was such a boy as you may still see
in the play-grounds of Eton, only he was heavier, slower, and ruddier
than the average, and much more shy in company. He loved his horse, and
was exceedingly fond of rural sports; but when lesson-time came--but let
his mother speak on that point.
The old game of "comet" was the one which the lad usually preferred. The
company play at comet for small stakes, until the clock strikes nine,
when "the royal children" go to bed. Then the mother leaves her ladies,
and withdraws with her guest to the other end of the room, where she
indulges in a long, gossipy, confidential chat upon the subject nearest
her heart--her son, the presumptive heir to the throne. To show the
reader how she used to talk to confidants on such occasions, I will
glean a few sentences from her conversations:
"I like that the prince should amuse himself now and then at _small_
play; but princes should never play deep, both for the example, and
because it does not become them to win great sums. George's real
disposition, do you ask? You know him almost as well as I do. He is very
honest, but I wish he was a little more forward and less childish at his
age. I hope his preceptors will improve him. I really do not know what
they are teaching him, but, to speak freely, I am afraid not much. They
are in the country, and follow their diversions, and not much else that
I can discover."
Dodington remarked upon this that, for his part, he did not much regard
books; what _he_ most wished was that the prince should begin to acquire
knowledge of the world, and be informed of the general frame and nature
of the British Government and Constitution, and, without going into
minutiae, get some insight into the manner of doing public business.
"I am of your opinion," said the princess; "and his tutor, Stone, tells
me that when he talks with him on those subjects, he seems to give
proper attention, and makes pertinent remarks. I stick to the learning
as the chief point. You know how backward the children were, and I am
sure you do not think them much improved since. It may be that it is not
too late to acquire a competence. I am highly sensible how necessary it
is that the prince should keep company with men. I know that women can
not inform him; but if his education was in my power absolutely, to whom
could I address him? What company can I wish him to keep? What
friendships can I desire him to contract? Such is the universal
profligacy, such is the character and conduct of the young people of
distinction, that I am really afraid to have them near my children. I
shall even be in more pain for my daughters than I am for my sons, for
the behavior of the women is indecent, low, and much against their own
interest by making themselves so very cheap."
Three years passed. The prince was seventeen. Still the anxious mother
deplored the neglect of his education.
"His book-learning," said she to the same friend, "I am no judge of,
though I suppose it is small or useless; but I did hope he might have
been instructed in the general understanding of things. I once desired
Mr. Stone to inform the prince about the Constitution; but he declined
it to avoid giving jealousy to the Bishop of Norwich (official
educator). I mentioned it again, but he still declined it as not being
his province."
"Pray, madam," asked Dodington, "what _is_ his province?"
"I don't know, unless it is to go before the prince up-stairs, to walk
with him sometimes, seldomer to ride with him, and now and then to dine
with him. But when they do walk together, the prince generally takes
that time to think of his own affairs and say nothing."
The youth was, indeed, extremely indolent and stupid. At school he would
have been simply called a dunce, for at eleven he could not read English
with any fluency, and he could never have been induced to apply his mind
to study except by violence. He never had the slightest notion of what
Chatham, Burke, or Fox meant when they spoke of the Constitution. If Mr.
Stone had not been in dread of invading the Bishop of Norwich's
province, and if the bishop had not been a verbose and wearisome
formalist, their united powers could not have shown this young man the
unique and prodigious happiness of a constitutional king in governing
through responsible ministers. His "governor" during the last few years
of his minority was Lord Waldegrave, whose too brief memoirs confirm the
excellent report which contemporaries give of his mind and character.
Lord Waldegrave could make nothing of him. Speaking of the prince at
nineteen, he says he was "uncommonly full of princely prejudices,
contracted in the nursery and improved by the society of bedchamber
women and pages of the back-stairs." He found the heavy youth an
insufferable bore, and he was soon, as his relation, Horace Walpole,
relates, "thoroughly fatigued with the insipidity of his pupil." The
prince derived from his education only two ideas, one very good and the
other very bad. The first was that he must be a Good Boy and not keep a
mistress; the second was that he must be a king indeed.
An indolent and ignorant monarch who will not govern by ministers must
govern by favorites. He has no other alternative but abdication. A
favorite was at hand in the person of a poor Scotch lord who had married
one of the richest heiresses in Europe, the daughter of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu and her miserly husband. He had also, if we may believe
Lord Waldegrave, "a good person, fine legs, and a theatrical air of the
greatest importance." He was likewise fond of medals, engravings, and
flowers; he pensioned Dr. Johnson and the dramatist Home; he really
enjoyed some products of art, and was far from being either the
execrable or the ridiculous personage which he was esteemed by men whom
he kept from place. "Bute," said Prince Frederick, father of George
III., "you would make an excellent embassador in a small, proud little
court where there is nothing to do." He would have arranged the
ceremonials, superintended the plays, been gracious to artists and
musicians, smiled benignantly upon the court poet, bored the reigning
prince, enchanted the reigning princess, amused her children, and
ripened into a courtly and garrulous old Polonius, "full of wise saws
and modern instances." Above all, he would have upheld the prerogative
of the prince with stanch sincerity. _Sois roi!_
There is something in the Scotch character that causes it to relish
royal prerogative. To this hour there are in Scotland families that
cherish a kind of sentimental attachment to the memory of the Stuarts;
and we find Scotchmen as eminent as Hume, Carlyle, Lockhart, Scott,
Wilson--men of distinguished liberality in some provinces of
thought--unable to widen out into liberal politics. Bute was a lord as
well as a Scotchman, not as ignorant nor as vulgar as lords in that
generation usually were, but still subject to the lowering influences
that always beset a privileged order; predisposed, too, by temperament
to the worship of the picturesque, and now the cherished sharer of the
shy, proud, gloomy seclusion of the family upon which the hopes of an
empire were fixed. He showed them medals and pictures, he discoursed of
music and architecture--two of his most pronounced tastes--and he
nourished every princely prejudice which a wise tutor would have striven
to eradicate.
This unfortunate youth, dull offspring of the stimulated lust of ages,
was an apt pupil in the Jacobin theory of kingly authority. He was
caught one day reading the book written at the instance of the dethroned
James II. to justify his arbitrary policy; and there were so many other
signs of the heir to a constitutional throne being educated in
unconstitutional principles that Horace Walpole drew up a formal
remonstrance against it in the name of the Whig families. This document,
which was privately circulated, produced no effect. _Sois roi!_ That
remained the ruling thought in the mind of this ignorant, proud, moral
young man, about to fill a place which conferred more obstructive power
than any other in the world. If he had only been dissolute in that most
dissolute age, he could have been ruled through his vices; but being
strictly moral and temperate, he was, alas! always _himself_; and he had
at his back the great voiceless multitude, who know by instinct that
morality is the first interest of civilized human nature, and who honor
it supremely even in this crude, rudimentary form. "Your dad is safe on
his throne," said some boon companion of George IV., "as long as he is
faithful to that ugly old woman, your mother." And wise old Franklin
said, "If George III. had had a bad private character and John Wilkes a
good one, he might have turned the king out of his dominions." Such is
the mighty power of the mere indispensable rudiments of virtue, its mere
preliminary corporeal conditions. A chaste and temperate fool will carry
the day nine times in ten over profligate genius.
Riding in the park on an October day in 1760, a messenger delivered to
the prince a note from the _valet de chambre_ of his grandfather,
George II. The prince had coolly arranged with this valet, while yet the
king seemed firm in health, that at the moment of the old man's death he
should send him a note bearing a certain mark on the outside. The king,
a vigorous old man of seventy-seven, fell dead in his closet at seven in
the morning, and this note bore the preconcerted announcement of the
fact. The moral and steady young man, quietly remarking to his groom
that his horse was lame, turned about and gently rode back to Kew. Upon
dismounting he said to the man, "I have said this horse is lame; I
forbid you to say the contrary." At twenty-two years of age he was king.
Except that he married, a few months after, a pliant, adoring German
princess, his accession did not much change his mode of life. He still
lived in strict seclusion, shut in against expanding influences,
accessible at all times only to one man--him of the good legs and
Jacobin mind, Bute, progenitor of the Pope's recent conquest, and Mr.
Disraeli's hero, Lothair.
[Illustration: Lord Bute, 1768.]
[Illustration: Princess of Wales--Bute--George III.]
In the caricatures of the next fifty years we see the ghastly results.
His first important act was to repel from his counsels humiliating
superiority in the person of William Pitt, the darling of the nation,
the first minister of the world, and one of the three great orators of
all time. In his stead ruled a long monotony of servile incompetents,
beginning with Bute himself, continuing with Grenville, and coming at
last to Addington and Eldon, the king keeping far from his confidence
every man in England who had a gleam of public sense, or a touch of
independent spirit, or even a sound traditionary attachment to Whig
principles. An immovable obstructive to the true interest of his country
at every crisis, honoring the men whom the better sense of the nation
did not honor, and repressing the men whom wise contemporaries loved,
and whom posterity with unanimous voice pronounces the glory of England
in that age, he kept the country in bad humor during most of his reign,
put her wrong on every question of universal interest, lost the most
valuable and affectionate colonies a country ever had, kept Europe in a
broil for twenty-five years, and developed Napoleon Bonaparte into a
destructive lunatic by creating for him a succession of opportunities
for the display of his talent for beating armies which had no generals.
[Illustration: The Wire-master (Bute) and his Puppets. (London, 1767.)
"The power behind the throne greater than the throne itself."]
A large proportion of the very caricatures of the period have something
savage in them. A visitor to the library of the British Museum curious
in such matters is shown ten huge folio scrap-books full of caricatures
relating to this reign, most of them of great size and blazing with
color. From a gentleman who recently inspected these volumes we learn
some particulars showing the bad temper, bad manners, and bad morals of
that time, all three aggravated by a king whose morals were excellent.
One of the first to catch the eye of an American is a picture, of date
about 1765, called "A New Method of Macarony-making, as practiced in
_Boston_, North America," which represents two men tarring and
feathering another, who has a halter round his neck. Of the pictures
reflecting upon Lord Bute and the Princess of Wales nothing need be said
except that they are such as might be expected from the caricaturists of
that age. Many of the works of Gillray in the earlier years of George
III. were of such coarseness, extravagance, and brutality that the
exhibition of them nowadays would subject the vender to a prosecution by
the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Our informant adds: "Their
savageness and filth give one a very curious idea of the taste of our
grandfathers and our great-grandfathers, only our ancestors, male and
female, could hardly have been as bad as they are represented. Such
hideous faces, such deformed figures, such monstrous distortion and
debasement, such general ugliness and sensuality, oppress one with a
feeling of melancholy rather than exhilaration. You might as well be
merry over the doings of Swift's Yahoos, who are certainly not more
offensive than some of Gillray's men and women. Whether in home or
foreign politics, he is equally unscrupulous."
Charles James Fox was the _bete noire_ of Gillray. He delighted in
depicting him and his friends in as odious a light as possible, giving
him huge beetle-brows, heavy jaws, and a swarthy complexion. The famous
Westminster election, at which the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire won a
vote for Fox by giving a kiss to a butcher, supplied him with a rich
source of caricature. Fox is drawn riding on the back of the lady; and
again, sitting in a tap-room with the duchess on his knee; and in
another picture, hobnobbing with a coster-monger, while the duchess has
her shoes mended by a cobbler, and pays the cobbler's wife with a purse
of gold. Fox chops off the head of the king; he is a traitor, a
republican, a Jacobin, a confederate with the French, a forestaller, a
buyer-up of corn with which to feed the enemy, a sot, a gambler--every
thing that is bad. His very death-bed forms the subject of a brutal
caricature. The noblest traits of his political character are the points
satirized. His great crimes apparently are that he loved freedom abroad
as well as at home, that he strove for peace with France, and endeavored
to do justice to Ireland. For this he is depicted as the secret ally of
Bonaparte and as the instigator of Irish rebellion. The ghosts of Lord
Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, the Sheares brothers, Emmett, and other
Irish martyrs are made to pass before Fox's bed, and point to _him_ as
the cause of their rebellion and their fate. When Burke went over to the
Tories he then became the favorite of Gillray, who before had generally
represented him as a Jesuit, because he demanded justice for the
Catholics. Now he is the savior of his country, and the terror of Fox,
Sheridan, and Priestley. Sheridan is depicted as a blazing meteor with
an extremely rubicund nose. There is a picture of the Titans attempting
to scale heaven, in which George III. figures as a comical Jupiter
launching his thunder-bolts at the Whig Opposition. Queen Charlotte is
shown as a miracle of ugliness. The prodigality of the Prince of Wales,
who first appears as a handsome young man with long powdered hair,
totally unlike the high-shouldered, curly-wigged, royal Turveydrop of
later days, is contrasted in companion pictures with the alleged
parsimony of his parents. He is represented reveling with inordinately
fat but handsome women, who get drunk, hang round his neck, and indulge
in familiarities. The popular hope that marriage would reform him
suggested a large drawing, in which the slumbering prince is visited by
a descending angel in the likeness of the unhappy Caroline, at whose
approach a crowd of reprobates, male and female, hurry away into
darkness. Thomas Paine did not escape. In a picture entitled "The Rights
of Man; or, Tommy Paine, the Little American Taylor, taking the Measure
of the Crown for a New Pair of Revolution Breeches," he is represented
as the traditional starveling tailor, ragged and slippered, and armed
with an immense pair of shears. He crouches to take the measure of an
enormous crown, while uttering much irrelevant nonsense. This precious
work is "humbly dedicated to the Jacobin clubs of France and England."
Bound with such pictures as these are a vast number by inferior hands,
most of which are indescribable, the standard subjects being gluttony,
drunkenness, incontinence, and fashion, and these in their most
outrageous manifestations. They serve to show that a stupid king in that
age, besides corrupting Parliament and debauching the Press, could
demoralize the popular branch of art. The visitor, turning from this
collection of atrocities and ferocities, finds himself relenting toward
the unfortunate old king, and inclined to say that he was, after all,
only the head noodle of his kingdom. Every improvement was mercilessly
burlesqued--steam, gas, the purchase of the Elgin marbles; popular
prejudices were nearly always flattered, seldom rebuked; so that if the
caricatures were of any use at all in the promulgation of truth, they
served only as part of the ordeal that tested its vitality.
We do not find in this or in any other collection many satirical
pictures relating to the revolution which ended in the independence of
the American colonies. There was, however, one gentleman in London
during the earlier phases of the dispute who employed caricature and
burlesque on behalf of America with matchless skill. He is described in
the London Directory for 1770 in these words, "Franklin, Benjamin, Esq.,
agent for Philadelphia, Craven Street, Strand." The effective caricature
placed at the beginning of this chapter was one of the best of a long
series of efforts to avert the impending conflict. He loved his country
with the peculiar warmth that usually animates citizens who live in a
distant outlying province. His country, when he designed that caricature
and wrote the well-known burlesques in a similar taste, was not
Pennsylvania, nor America, nor England, but the great British Empire, to
which William Pitt, within Franklin's own life-time, seemed to have
given an ascendency over the nations of the earth similar to that which
Rome had once enjoyed. It was, however, only on the coast of North
America that Britain possessed colonies loyal and free, not won by
conquest nor by diplomacy, and therefore entitled to every right secured
by the British Constitution. Franklin loved and gloried in this great
country of which he was born a citizen. He deplored the measures that
threatened the severance of those colonies from the mother country, and
would have prevented the severance if the king's folly had been any
thing short of incurable. The most wonderful thing in the whole
controversy was that the argument, fact, and fun which Franklin wrote
and inspired, from 1765 to 1774, had only momentary influence on the
course of events. "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in
vain."
[Illustration: The Gouty Colossus, William Pitt (Lord Chatham), with One
Leg in London and the Other in New York. (London, 1766.)]
His twenty "Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One," published
three years before the caricature, inculcated the same lesson. A great
empire, he remarked, was in one particular like a great cake: it could
be most easily diminished at _the edges_. The person, therefore, who had
undertaken the task of reducing it should take care to begin at the
remotest provinces, and not till after they were lopped off cut up the
central portion. His twenty "Rules" are merely a humorous history of the
British colonial policy since the accession of George III.: Don't
incorporate your colonies with the mother country, quarter troops among
them, appoint for their governors broken gamblers and exhausted _roues_,
despise their voluntary grants, and harass them with novel taxes. By
such measures as these "you will act like a wise gingerbread baker, who,
to facilitate a division, cuts his dough half through at the places
where, when baked, he would have it broken to pieces." Franklin also
wrote a shorter burlesque, pompously headed, "An Edict of the King of
Prussia," in which that monarch was supposed to claim sovereign rights
over Great Britain on the ground that the island had been colonized by
Hengist, Horsa, and others, subjects of "our renowned ducal ancestors."
The edict, of course, ordains and commands precisely those absurd things
which the Government of Great Britain _had_ ordained and commanded since
the planting of the colonies. Iron, as the edict duly sets forth, had
been discovered in the island of Great Britain by "our colonists there,"
who, "_presuming_ that they had a natural right to make the best use
they could of the natural productions of their country," had erected
furnaces and forges for the manufacture of the same, to the detriment of
the manufacturers of Prussia. This must be instantly stopped, and all
the iron sent to Prussia to be manufactured. "And whereas the art and
mystery of making _hats_ has arrived at great perfection in Prussia,"
and "the islanders before mentioned, being in possession of wool,
beaver, and other furs, have presumptuously conceived they had a right
to take some advantage thereof by manufacturing the same into hats, to
the prejudice of our domestic manufacture," therefore we do hereby
forbid them to do so any more.
We call this piece a burlesque, but it was burlesque only in form.
Precisely such restrictions existed upon the industry of the American
colonists. It was part of the protective system of the age, and not much
more unjust than the parts of the same system to which the descendants
of those colonists have since subjected themselves.
An ignorant man at the head of a government, however honest he may be,
is liable to make fatal mistakes in the selection of his ministers. He
naturally dreads the close inspection of minds superior to his own. He
has always to be on his good behavior before them, which is irksome. He
shares the stock prejudices of mankind, one of which is a distrust of
practiced politicians. But as the poorest company of actors will get
through a comedy with less discredit than the best amateurs, so an
administration of "party hacks" will usually carry on a government with
less odious failure than an administration composed of better men
without experience in public business. George III. had, moreover, a
singularly unfortunate trait for a king who had to govern by party
leaders--his prejudices against individuals were inveterate. Lord
Waldegrave remarked "a kind of unhappiness in his temper" while he was
still a youth. "Whenever he is displeased, his anger does not break out
with heat and violence, but he becomes sullen and silent, and retires to
his closet, not to compose his mind by study and contemplation, but
merely to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill-humor." And
when he re-appeared, it was but too evident that he had not forgotten
the offense. He never forgot, he seldom forgave. "The same strength of
memory," as Earl Russell once wrote of him, "and the same _brooding
sullenness_ against those who opposed his will, which had been observed
in the boy, were manifest in the man."
[Illustration: The Mask (Coalition).]
This peculiarity of character always prevented the formation of a proper
ministry, and shortened the duration of every ministry which was
approximately proper. During the first ten years of his reign his
dislike of William Pitt, the natural chief of the Whig party, confused
every arrangement; and during the next twenty years the most cherished
object of his policy seemed to be to keep from power the natural
successor of that minister--Charles James Fox. The ascendency of both
those leaders was such that to exclude them from power was to paralyze
their own party, and prevent the free play of politics in the House of
Commons. It reduced the poor king at last to pit against Napoleon
Bonaparte a young rhetorician of defective health, William Pitt, the son
of the great minister.
[Illustration: Heads of Fox and North.
"In a committee on the sense of the nation, Moved, that for preventing
future disorders and dissensions, the _heads_ of the Mutiny Act be
brought in, and suffered to lie on the table to-morrow."--_Fox's Motion
in Parliament, February, 1784._]
That renowned "coalition" between Lord North and Mr. Fox in 1783, the
theme of countless caricatures and endless invective, illustrates the
confusing influence of the king. During the whole period of the American
Revolution, Lord North, as the head of the ministry, was obliged to
execute and defend the king's policy, much of which we now know he
disapproved. Naturally he would have been an ally of Fox years before,
and they could either have prevented or shortened the conflict. The
spell of the royal closet and the personal entreaties of the king
prevailed over his better judgment, and made him the antagonist of Fox.
At length, the war being at an end and North in retirement, England saw
these two men, whose nightly conflicts had been the morning news for ten
years, suddenly forming a "coalition," united in the administration, and
pledged to the same policy. As we trace the successive steps which led
to the alliance in the memoirs and diaries of the time, we discover that
it was not so much the coalition as the previous estrangement that was
unnatural. The public, however, could not be expected to see it in that
light, and an uproar greeted the reconciliation that greatly aided the
king in getting rid of the obnoxious Fox. The specimens of the
caricatures to which it gave rise, presented on this and the two
preceding pages, are two out of a great number still procurable.