In January 1821 William Hone published a new satire, The Political Showman – At Home! In it he reflects on the role which the press had played in undermining the government’s attempts to subvert the constitution since 1819. The satire shows a printing press anthropomorphized into a circus ringmaster who is conducting the viewer through a menagerie of fantastical beasts which sport the heads of various members of the cabinet and the royal family. The ministers have now been tamed by the press and the power of the press will also finally bring about the downfall of ‘The Legitimate Vampire’, a huge man-eating monster which embodies the spirit of despotism.

Despite being the most well-considered and carefully executed of all the pamphlets Hone had produced, The Political Showman was also far less successful than his earlier publications. The sense of outrage and frustration which had engulfed Britain between Peterloo and the Queen’s trial was abating and with it went the public’s appetite for the kind of venomous radical satire which had been found in works such as The Political House.., Man in the Moon and The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder. By early 1821 Hone’s own motivation had also moved beyond purely political concerns and it likely that his decision to return to political satire was also motivated by his growing financial problems.

The success of Hone’s pamphlets made him a considerable amount of money but Hone, who throughout his life repeatedly demonstrated a positive talent for fiscal incontinence, contrived to spend all the money he could muster on feeding his passion for collecting books and prints. He recalled that “I used to go to my cashier for £5 or £10 at a time generally to buy old prints and curious books; at last, asking for money, he said there were no funds. I insisted; ‘I must have the books I have been looking at’”. By the end of 1820, Hone’s most successful year as a publisher, he was forced to pledge his book collection for a loan. When he defaulted on the repayments of the loan the following year his entire library of 1,171 books was hurried into auction.

Hone’s workload from the winter of 1820 onwards seems to have been increasingly dictated by these financial pressures and despite the fact that there was a notable cooling off in the numbers of political pamphlets being produced by other radical publishers during this period, Hone kept up a grueling schedule of work. As well as writing new satires, he was also still publishing new editions of his most successful pamphlets, revising and reissuing updated versions of some of his works from the 1810s and conducting exhaustive research for a planned multi-volume history of parody.

Two months later he published another pamphlet; The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong! This partial revision of Daniel Defoe’s Jure Divino launched an attack on concept of autocratic monarchy and an established church which earned Hone critical applause from the pages of the Examiner and other liberally-minded journals but was even less commercially successful than its predecessor. That it is remembered at all today is probably thanks only to the two stunning woodcuts which Cruikshank was able to produce for the cover and back page of the pamphlet.

By this point Hone’s relationship with Cruikshank was reaching a crisis point. In January 1821 Hone, whose patience was no doubt shortened by fatigue, was becoming increasingly irked by his young friend’s hedonistic lifestyle. Initially Hone tried pleading with Cruikshank to “foreswear late hours, blue ruin and dollies” and become “a man of business” but the 28 year old artist responded bluntly by telling Hone to “go to hell” and to “go teach my Granny to suck eggs”. He would later write an exasperated letter in which he recalled that Cruikshank had turned up at his house late one evening to request that Hone use his influence with the city Alderman to secure the dismissal of a watchman with whom Cruikshank had fought a drunken brawl during the previous night’s carousing. When the request was refused Cruikshank obnoxiously sat blowing “clouds of smoke over me and my books... for a couple of hours, demanded entrance to my wife’s bedroom to shave and smarten himself for an evening party, took possession of my best Brandenburg pumps, damned me... [and]... otherwise decomposed the wanted order of my mind and household and manifested what I had long suspected, that he is by no means friendly to Reform!”

Hone and Cruikshank’s professional relationship would endure for long enough to produce one more illustrated pamphlet in August 1821 but their friendship has run its course. The subject of Hone’s final pamphlet was to be Dr John Stoddart and the members of the Constitutional Association – A group which had been founded in December 1820 by wealthy Tories who were disgruntled by the government’s failure to crack down on the radical press and who pledged to provide funds for private prosecutions against reformist publications. In Hone’s eyes the Constitutional Association had the resources and the backing to emerge as a successor to the Crown prosecutors which had almost succeeded in silencing London’s radical satirists in the 1810s.

A Slap At Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang rendered the Constitutional Association, whose headquarters were located on Bridge Street in Blackfriars, a laughing stock just as effectively as Hone’s earlier pamphlets had undermined Sidmouth’s gagging acts and the dignity of the King. Hone revels in pointing out the hypocrisy of loyalist journalists who demanded that their political opponents be prosecuted for publishing libels which were no different from those they themselves were using to attack the reformists and slander the Queen. They were, Hone wrote, “like the hacknied procuress who, to effect her designs upon innocence, pretends an extraordinary affection for virtue... What an insolent appeal from the minions of power, and the overgorged feeders upon the public wealth, to their fellow parasites and gluttons!” Hone then goes on to point out that both Stoddart and Robert Southey, the ultra-conservative poet laureate and Constitutional Association member, had published pro-Jacobin material in their youth which would be considered libelous and that they too risked transportation to Botany Bay.

After failing to indict Hone on a charge of seditious libel the Constitutional Association would go on to waste large amounts of time and money harassing other radical publishers in an attempt to use private wealth to silence the popular press. In the end their efforts were a costly failure -- The Association secured just four convictions and only one sentence at a time when print shops and publishers were still carrying on a healthy trade in anti-government material.

As the recession and political upheaval of the post-war years gradually gave way to the prosperity of the 1820s public interest in radical satire rapidly began to wane. The violence which erupted at the funeral of Queen Caroline in September 1821 was the last incident to really capture the imaginations of the satirists and the remarkable single plate prints which George Cruikshank produced on this subject were amongst the last anti-government satires he produced before government bribes finally convinced him to pursue a more lucrative career producing humorous social satires and book illustrations. The political landscape also changed significantly after 1821, as many of the villains of the Regency-era retired from politics or was able to demonstrate their liberal credentials by offering support to republican revolutionaries in Latin America and Greece. Even the King, who increasingly confined himself to the seclusion of Windsor castle, ceased to be a figure of public mockery.

By the summer of 1821 William Hone, who had worked tirelessly and without rest since 1819, had reached the point of physical and mental breakdown. Out walking one day in September 1821 Hone claimed that he saw the disembodied upper half of his own body floating down the opposite side of Fleet Street and on a number of occasions he refused to enter his own house as he believed it to be surrounded by a huge wall of fire. Suffering from hallucinations, feelings of intense agoraphobia and paranoia, Hone spent more and more time confined to his study and to his books until one night, on hearing the clock of St Paul’s strike 2am, he looked up to his window and saw a “haggard” and “ferocious” face glaring through at the writing on his desk “as though it chiefly desired to be acquainted with the books that lay upon it”. Hone later recalled that in this, the final and most terrifying of his visions, it seemed as though an incubus had been summoned up to steal away his life's work.

Although Hone’s health gradually began to improve as the pressures upon him eased in the early 1820s, he would never again return to the world of political satire. Writing in 1824 he opined that he was “weary of strife” and that he believed that his once famous sense of humour had now left him. He became a successful auctioneer for a while before returning to antiquarian research and popular literature in a series of highly successful books on the origins and oddities of British culture. It is however for his political satires for which Hone is rightly remembered today.

“Another of Mr. Hone’s happy illustrations of public feeling has just appeared called The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder, a National Toy... We wish to heaven, the government would be as droll at as cheap a rate”. Examiner 20^th August 1820

Shortly after the publication of The Man in the Moon, George III died and the Regent came to the throne. George had always been an unpopular figure; hated for his drinking, womanizing and his profligacy. Public opinion of the Prince of Wales hit a new low in 1793 when it became common knowledge that he had managed to accumulate debts of £630,000 (equivalent to about £57 million today) and that, in order to avoid the unseemly spectacle of the future heir to the throne being declared bankrupt, was expecting the taxpayer to step in and discharge his debts. Although the Pitt Ministry was willing to throw George a financial lifeline, this came with the caveat that he must marry a suitable bride who, it was hoped, would have a stabilizing influence on the rakish Prince.

In fact the marriage proved to be a disaster from the second George and his bride-to-be; Princess Caroline Amelia of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, set eyes upon each other. The Prince’s reaction to Caroline fell slightly short of physical repulsion and he spent the days leading up to the wedding complaining voraciously about his fiancée’s boorish manners, crude sense of humour and poor personal hygiene. The feeling of antipathy was virulently reciprocated by Caroline, who noted that the Prince was much fatter and uglier than his portraits suggested and who felt that he fell far short of her expectations of manly behavior. In perhaps what is one of the most succinct and accurate observations of George that has ever been made she described him as a man who “would make an excellent hairdresser but nothing else”.

At the wedding the Prince, who had drunk so much brandy beforehand that he had to be helped down the aisle, starred mournfully at his mistress Lady Jersey and often seemed on the verge of tears. Later that night Caroline would watch as the hopelessly drunk Prince collapsed into the fireplace of their honeymoon suite and passed out.

The wedding was consummated and within nine months the Princess gave birth to a daughter; Charlotte, but by this point the couple were already effectively separated. In 1806 George persuaded his Whig allies in government to begin an investigation into Caroline’s private life in order to find appropriate grounds for divorce; however the Whig Ministry collapsed before the case could be brought to trail and a new Tory Government dismissed all charges against Caroline the following year.

George’s ascent to the Regency in 1811 effectively meant the Caroline was shut out of London society. Tired of being publically snubbed and humiliated by her husband and of having her private life raked over by the London press, Caroline eventually agreed to leave the country in 1814 in exchange for an annual allowance of £35,000 (£2.1 million today). Despite this George remained determined to press ahead with a divorce and in 1818 he ordered a new commission of enquiry to investigate rumours that Caroline was having an affair with her Italian manservant Bartolomeo Pergami. The government duly dispatched the so-called ‘Milan Commission’ to travel to Italy in order to interview various members of Caroline’s household and gather evidence for a potential divorce hearing. Caroline appears to have been genuinely worried about the outcome of Milan Commission’s investigations and 1819 she let it be known that she would consider divorce in exchange for an increased annuity and the title of Duchess of Cornwall. However the death of George III in January 1820 appears to have strengthened Caroline’s resolve to return to England and challenge George to either make her Queen, or give her a generous settlement to remain abroad.

Caroline had always been popular in Britain and she enjoyed a triumphal entry into London in June, as tens of thousands of people came out to line the streets from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich. Meanwhile the government, acting on the evidence of the Milan Commission, passed the Bill of Pains and Penalties which summarily stripped Caroline of the title of Queen Consort and sought to rig the impending divorce trail by forbidding her lawyers to cite the King’s numerous infidelities in their defence.

It was the glaring injustice of the political establishment’s efforts to subvert the judicial system which aroused the anger of many Britons. Wherever the Queen went she was met by large crowds of admirers whilst the King was publically hissed on a number of occasions and resorted to travelling in public with Wellington, in the hope that public respect for the Iron Duke would prevent further indignities being heaped on him by the London crowds. In the summer of 1820 print shops and publishers began turning out scores of pro and anti-Caroline images, picking over every aspect of the trail and the evidence both for and against the Queen in minute detail. By mid-summer 1820 the divorce trial had become a national obsession and it was at this point that William Hone decided to re-enter the political fray.

After publishing The Political A-Apple Pie in January 1820 Hone had placed an advertisement in The Times which announced that his career as a political pamphleteer was to be put on hiatus in order to allow him to fully devote himself to a long-planned work on the history of parody. Indeed, Hone later claimed, he only took up political publishing again six months later because he was approached directly by representatives of the Queen. Whilst out wondering the streets of London looking for inspiration for his latest work Hone recalled “I wandered off towards Pentonville, and stopped and looked absently into the window of a little fancy toy shop. There was a toy, ‘The Matrimonial Ladder’. I saw at once what I could do with it, and went home and wrote ‘The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder’”. F.W. Hackwood, William Hone, His Life and Times, (1912) pp. 236-7.

Hone uses the device of the ladder to plot a simple linear history of Caroline’s unhappy marriage. The first side begins with ‘Qualification’, a simple depiction of the hedonistic lifestyle which led to the debts which forced George to marry and ends with ‘Emigration’ in which a weeping Caroline is driven abroad. The reverse side depicts Caroline in the ascendency, beginning with her ‘Remigration’ to the shores of Great Britain and ending, ultimately it was hoped, in her ‘Coronation’ and the ‘Degradation’ of George IV. A further representation of the ladder was printed on the frontispiece to the pamphlet. This time a defiant Caroline sits atop the ladder and stares down a prostrate George.

Once again the success of the pamphlet, which outsold even the Political House and which may have achieved as many as 500,000 copies, can in no small part be attributed to the quality of Cruikshank’s engravings which are arguably amongst the finest he produced in woodblock. Each page of the pamphlet describes a step on the ladder and is accompanied by an illustration. One of the finest of these being ‘Qualification’ which, in something of a homage to Gillray’s A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion, Cruikshank depicts the monarch as a bloated and debauched youth who is surrounded by images which hint at his dissolute lifestyle. In another, ‘Remigration’ Cruikshank recalls his own earlier work which cast George as ‘The Prince of Whales’; a bloated sea creature who attempts to use his considerable bulk to deter Caroline from returning to claim her rights as Queen.

One historian and Hone biographer has concluded that “The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder puts the King himself on trial -- but not before the court of venal hirelings and placemen that was to judge Caroline in the Lords... [they] might swallow the legal nostrum that ‘The King can do no wrong’, but George IV has been judged by his subjects. Whatever punishment George can inflict on his wife is nothing compared to ‘a mockery that shall never die: The curses of hate and the hisses of scorn’... No King can shield himself from ‘The Laughter of triumph, the jeers of the world’. (B. Wilson The Laughter of Triumph, 2005, p.327.

As Cruikshank himself would surmise in the print Advice from the Other World, Or, A Peep at the Magic Lantern, published in August 1820; The King had been ‘weighed in the balance and found wanting’.

This Cruikshank satire sums up the confrontation between the establishment and the radical press which took place during December 1819 and January 1820.

It's supposedly a loyalist satire but Cruikshank's depiction of George IV as a muscular hero strains reality to such a degree that the print's loyalism is subverted and the viewer is once again invited to laugh at the hapless monarch. The plebians are the radicals and are identified by the British Museum catalogue as follows; On the far left stand Preston, Watson and Thistlewood under the banner 'Blood and Plunder'. To their right are Carlile, Cobbett -- who is clutching Tom Paine's bones, and Wooler -- who is shown as a personification of his publication The Black Dwarf. Next come the more respectable reformists; the aged Major Cartwright, John Cam Hobhouse, Sir Francis Burdett and Alderman Waithman. Finally Hone, the true hero of the piece, stands on the far right carrying a bludgeon labelled 'parody' and another bearing the names of the Political House and Man in the Moon. Behind him lurks Cruikshank himself carrying a bag of caricatures.

As far as I know this is one of the few single sheet prints that offers a comprehensive set of images of the leading reformists and radicals.

William Hone’s imprisonment and trial in 1817 had broken his health and brought his family to verge of bankruptcy and yet he willingly put his head back in the noose and launch another assault on the government just two years later. At the time he was probably unaware of just how close he came to being prosecuted again. Shortly after the Political House was released in December 1819 the Regent personally attended a Privy Council meeting, threw a copy on the table and demanded the Hone be prosecuted for sedition. Luckily wiser heads, or at least heads which remembered how Hone had run rings around his prosecutors in the previous trails, prevailed in persuading George not to attempt to have Hone arrested.

When looking at these images and reading through the pamphlets of the time I can't help but feeling that by 1819 Britain must have seemed like a country which was on the verge of a major crisis, if not outright revolution. On the one hand you have large numbers of ordinary Britons who are experiencing huge socio-economic problems as a result of the severe recession which followed the Napoleonic Wars and who are unable to voice their dissatisfaction legitimately because they are completely disenfranchised by a corrupt and antiquated electoral system. On the other hand you have a small oligarch of wealthy land-owners who make up the 5% or so of the country which are entitled to vote; who occupy all the positions of power and influence; and who seem determined to do whatever is necessary to protect their privileged positions. Taking all this into a account there's little wonder that Hone's pamphlets found such a ready audience.

This leads us nicely into the Political “A, Apple Pie” which was released in late January 1820. In this case ammunition for the reformers cause was provided by the publication of the results of a journalistic investigation into the numerous salaried offices which the Crown was entitled to dispense with. These offices, or places as they were more commonly known, were often relics from the middle ages (e.g. ‘Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland’), which served no practical purpose but which still carried generous salaries and which could therefore be used as a form of bribery to reward MPs how voted with the government. An anonymous author published a comprehensive list of government offices in early 1820, including details of the current post-holder and their salary, under the title of the Extraordinary Red Book. Hone then took the Red Book's revelations a step further by transforming what was an important, but rather dull list of names, titles and salaries, into a piece of entertaining satire which was accessible to a much wider audience. Once again Cruikshank's woodcuts were completely integral to the pamphlet's appeal.

Hone and Cruikshank show the wealth of the nation as a large pie and the depict various ministers, placemen and even the Prince Regent's obese mistress Lady Hertford, taking their allotted pieces until, ultimately, all John Bull is left with is the empty dish.

To be Continued -

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Next up is A Political Christmas Carol which was released either in late December 1819 or early January 1820.

It's a short pamphlet and in some instances was included as a light-hearted addendum to The Man in the Moon.

Hone re-writes 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' as an attack on Lord Castlereagh. Castlereagh was perhaps the most frequent target of Hone's satire as, along with Lord Sidmouth and George Canning, he was one of the chief architects of the various pieces of repressive legislation which were introduced in Britain in the years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and as foreign secretary had also negotiated the Quadruple Alliance which aligned Britain with the absolutist monarchies of Russia, Prussia and Austria.

The caricature of the Foreign Secretary which was developed by Hone in The Political House and other pamphlets became so deeply rooted in the public mind that even loyalist pamphleteers felt obliged to copy it in order to ensure that there readers, who wouldn't have had access to expensive official portraits of men like Castlereagh, could recognise pictures of him. Thus in the loyalist The Men in the Moon, or, The Devil to Pay Castlereagh still carried the cat-o-nine-tails which Hone and Cruikshank had given him in order to remind their readers of the harsh code of corporal punishment he had imposed on the military during his time as Secretary for War.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Next: Political A Apple Pie