A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering 36

A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering 36

“Were you in effigy to burn

Each treacherous statesman in his turn,

What better would Britannia be,

Whilst the proud knaves themselves are free?

Knaves have brought disgrace upon her!

Have bought her votes and sold her Honour!”

 

[Illustration: BURNING A PRIME MINISTER IN EFFIGY. 1756. (FROM DR.

NEWTON’S COLLECTION.)]

 

The following manifesto explains the object of this publication, an

appeal “Against Corruption,” and directed to securing the purity of

elections against Ministerial bribery. The subject of the squib was

evidently suggested by the Guy Fawkes processions of November. It

appeared at the time when the Newcastle and Fox administration was near

its fall and after those expensive elections in which the duke had

spent enormous sums in bribery.

 

“Who can call to remembrance without abhorrence the behaviour

of a Whiggish Ministry, who, neglecting everything else but

the business of Bribery and Corruption, reduced the credit of

the Nation and themselves to so low an ebb, that at length

they were obliged to import Hessian and Hanoverian Troops to

support an immense unconstitutional standing army, in defending

them and their measures at home; whilst our perfidious enemies

ravaged and distressed our wretched Colonies in every other

part of the globe. Now it would be well for England if the

several Tory or motley administrations since that time could

demonstrate that they have spent less time and treasure in

the same destructive employment. As a tree is known by its

fruit, so is a bad minister by his attempting to influence

Electors, or even to gain a Majority of the Elected by any

other means than the justice of his measures; otherwise the use

of a national Council is superseded; and when a King is thus

deprived of the disinterested deliberations of his people in

Parliament, the authors of the undue influence are certainly

guilty of Treason in the strictest sense of the word.”

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VI.

 

JOHN WILKES AS A POPULAR REPRESENTATIVE.

 

 

In the whole history of electioneering no figure is more conspicuous

than that of John Wilkes, the quondam patriot, who was by the attacks

of others brought into a prominence which neither his abilities nor

character justified.

 

Hogarth commenced hostilities against Wilkes, Churchill (_The North

Briton_), and Beardmore (_The Monitor_) by attacking their publications

incidentally in that unfortunate attempt at political satire of his,

christened “The Times,” Plate I. (1762). It will be remembered that

the figure of the artist’s patron, Lord Bute, is there glorified as a

Scotch husbandman engaged in extinguishing a general conflagration;

while a frenzied man, intended to personify the Duke of Newcastle,

is driving a wheel-barrow filled with _Monitors_ and _North Britons_

against the legs of the zealous Scot, who, unmoved, continues his

exertions to subdue the threatened ruin of the State. Pitt and Lord

Temple are further assailed--not too cleverly--in this view of the

“Times.” On this provocation, Wilkes and Churchill naturally took up

the cudgels in their own defence, and certainly gave Hogarth cause

for irritation. He prepared the second plate of “The Times,” with a

further pictorial castigation of his now-declared adversaries, but was

induced to reconsider the policy of publishing the plate, and thus

giving greater offence; consequently it was not until thirty years

later, when the quarrel was almost forgotten, and the opponents had

long been at rest,[49] that the world was favoured with a view of this

equally laboured satire, when it was published by the Boydells at

their Shakespeare Gallery, with the collected works of W. Hogarth (May

29, 1790). George III., Bute, Temple, Lord Mansfield, and others, are

introduced in this version, but the portion which is pointed at Wilkes,

in continuation of this “rough bout of clever men clumsily throwing

dirt at each other,” as it has been described, is the figurement of

Miss Fanny, of “Cock-lane ghost” notoriety, pilloried and held up

to infamy side by side with Wilkes, whose offence is indicated as

“Defamation.” On his breast is pinned a copy of the _North Briton_,

the No. 17 which was specially devoted to a base attack upon Hogarth.

This incendiary publication is already threatened with flames from

the penitential candle held by “Miss Fanny,” his shrouded companion

in disgrace. Indignities are showered upon Wilkes in allusion to his

involved circumstances; his empty pockets are turned inside out, a

school-boy is watering his legs, a woman is trundling a mop over his

head, and he is generally regarded with derisive contempt by the crowd.

 

The crowning effort of Hogarth’s revenge for the abuse showered upon

him by both Wilkes and Churchill was the famous etching in which

the popular favourite is pilloried to all time as the type and very

personification of everything false and sinister, and yet most lifelike

as to resemblance; for Wilkes was himself so cynically candid as to

admit in after-life that he was “growing more like his portrait every

day.” The famous likeness represents Wilkes seated in a chair at a low

table, on which is an inkstand and the _North Briton_, Nos. 17 and 45;

he is holding the staff, topped with an inverted vessel to simulate

the cap of liberty. Attitude and features are alike expressive, and,

as Mr. Stephens has described it, “he leers and squints as if in

mockery of his own pretences to patriotism.” When brought up from the

Tower, to which Lord Bute’s party had ventured to commit him for the

attack in the _North Briton_, No. 45, Wilkes was tried at Westminster,

before Chief Justice Pratt--subsequently eulogized as “the champion of

Freedom and Justice,” and better known to fame as Lord Camden,--who

caused the prisoner to be discharged, to the frantic delight of the

populace. It was on this occasion that Hogarth secured his opportunity

of sketching the idol of the people and the thorn of the Court. In a

note prefixed to “An Epistle to William Hogarth,” by Churchill, it is

averred that when Mr. Wilkes was the second time brought from the Tower

to Westminster Hall, Hogarth skulked behind a screen in the corner of

the gallery of the Common Pleas; and while Lord Chief Justice Pratt

was enforcing the great principles of the Constitution, the painter

was employed in caricaturing the prisoner. So popular was this print,

issued at one shilling, that Nichols mentions “nearly four thousand

copies were worked off in a few weeks.” “The Epistle” referred to

was provoked by the etching of John Wilkes, “Drawn from the Life.”

Hogarth is said to have felt severely the retort which the vigorous and

“bruising” Churchill thought proper to make.

 

[Illustration: JOHN WILKES, A PATRIOT. AFTER HOGARTH.]

 

“Lurking, most ruffian-like, behind a screen,

So plac’d all things to see, himself unseen,

Virtue, with due contempt, saw Hogarth stand,

The murd’rous pencil in his palsied hand;” etc.

 

To this pasquinade, which revelled audaciously in the realms of libel,

and was otherwise a false and indefensible attack on the artist’s

private life, Hogarth characteristically replied with his graver; but

not to lose time, while his mind was heated by the attack, he utilized

a plate on which was already engraved his own portrait and his dog,

after the painting now in the National Gallery, and burnishing out

those parts which were in his way, he engraved--

 

“The Bruiser, C. Churchill (once the Revd.!), in the character

of a Russian Hercules, regaling himself after having kill’d the

monster Caricatura that so sorely gall’d his virtuous friend,

the Heaven-born WILKES.

 

“‘But he had a Club this Dragon to drub,

Or he had ne’er don’t I warrant ye.’”

 

(_Dragon of Wantley._)

 

[Illustration: A BEAR-LEADER. HOGARTH, CHURCHHILL, AND WILKES.]

 

This plate was issued at 1_s._ _6d._, and seems to have gone through

various alterations and additions from first to last. On the palette

which first displayed the mystifying “line of beauty,” was substituted

two designs of a figurative nature--the one having reference to

Pitt, his resignation and annual pension, and his city supporters,

represented by the emblematic civic guardians, Gog and Magog; the

other a group further applying to the castigation of the designer’s

foes. Hogarth is armed with a triple whip, with which he is lustily

chastising a big dancing bear, Churchill, held bound and muzzled, as

not only the artist but the ministry and the Scotch faction would

have rejoiced to have effected; the Bruiser to the clerical ruffles

and bands has incongruously added the modish laced hat of a man about

town; the other end of the rope, by which Hogarth has secured the bear

through the muzzle, is fastened round an ape, intended to personify

Wilkes. This animal is wearing a wig exactly similar to that shown on

Wilkes’s head in the too-famous etching; the _North Briton_ is in his

left hand; the spear, topped with the inevitable cap of liberty, is

turned into a hobby-horse, to infer, according to Mr. F. G. Stephen’s

account, “that Wilkes used Liberty to get his own ends, which not more

than a child progresses on its ‘cock-horse’ did he really obtain.” The

face of the fiddling personage, who is making the music for this pretty

caper, is a featureless blank; he wears a ribbon of knighthood, and it

is understood that Earl Temple is the person intended.

 

Other uncomplimentary allusions to Wilkes and his proceedings appear

in the _Public Advertiser_, where is a woodcut of an execution, I.W.,

and M.P., with a “Toast”--“May loyalists walk easily in their Boots

[a reference to Lord Bute], and malcontents die like Wilks in their

shells.”

 

The notoriety of John Wilkes was much assisted by the ill-advised and

clumsy conduct of the ministry, which elected to make a martyr of the

man whose career proves him to have been but a sham patriot, and, who,

if unnoticed, was totally without weight or consequence. On April 30,

1763, Wilkes found himself, in spite of the Habeas Corpus granted by

the Common Pleas, conducted to the Tower on a warrant, signed by the

Earls of Egremont and Halifax as Privy Councillors and Secretaries of