PUNCH AND PEEL.
Arcades ambo.
READER.—God bless us, Mr. PUNCH! who is that tall, fair-haired, somewhat parrot-faced gentleman, smiling like a schoolboy over a mess of treacle, and now kissing the tips of his five fingers as gingerly as if he were doomed to kiss a nettle?
PUNCH.—That, Mr. Reader, is the great cotton-plant, Sir Robert Peel; and at this moment he has, in his own conceit, seized upon “the white wonder” of Victoria’s hand, and is kissing it with Saint James’s devotion.
READER.—What for, Mr. PUNCH?
PUNCH.—What for! At court, Mr. Reader, you always kiss when you obtain an honour. ‘Tis a very old fashion, sir—old as the court of King David. Well do I recollect what a smack Uriah gave to his majesty when he was appointed to the post which made Bathsheba a widow. Poor Uriah! as we say of the stag, that was when his horns were in the velvet.
READER.—You recollect it, Mr. PUNCH!—you at the court of King David!
PUNCH.—I, Mr. Reader, I!—and at every court, from the court of Cain in Mesopotamia to the court of Victoria in this present, flinty-hearted London; only the truth is, as I have travelled I have changed my name. Bless you, half the Proverbs given to Solomon are mine. What I have lost by keeping company with kings, not even Joseph Hume can calculate.
READER.—And are you really in court confidence at this moment?
PUNCH.—Am I? What! Hav’n’t you heard of the elections? Have you not heard the shouts Io Punch? Doesn’t my nose glow like coral—ar’n’t my chops radiant as a rainbow—hath not my hunch gone up at least two inches—am I not, from crown to toe-nails, brightened, sublimated? Like Alexander—he was a particular friend of mine, that same Alexander, and therefore stole many of my best sayings—I only know that I am mortal by two sensations—a yearning for loaves and fishes, and a love for Judy.
READER.—And you really take office under Peel?
PUNCH.—Ha! ha! ha! A good joke! Peel takes office under me. Ha! ha! I’m only thinking what sport I shall have with the bedchamber women. But out they must go. The constitution gives a minister the selection of his own petticoats; and therefore there sha’n’t be a yard of Welsh flannel about her Majesty that isn’t of my choice.
READER.—Do you really think that the royal bedchamber is in fact a third house of Parliament—that the affairs of the state are always to be put in the feminine gender?
PUNCH.—Most certainly: the ropes of the state rudder are nothing more than cap-ribbons; if the minister hav’n’t hold of them, what can he do with the ship? As for the debates in parliament, they have no more to do with the real affairs of the country than the gossip of the apple-women in Palace-yard. They’re made, like the maccaroni in Naples, for the poor to swallow; and so that they gulp down length, they think, poor fellows, they get strength. But for the real affairs of the country! Who shall tell what correspondence can be conveyed in a warming-pan, what intelligence—for
“There may be wisdom in a papillote”—
may be wrapt up in the curl-papers of the Crown? What subtle, sinister advice may, by a crafty disposition of royal pins, be given on the royal pincushion? What minister shall answer for the sound repose of Royalty, if he be not permitted to make Royalty’s bed? How shall he answer for the comely appearance of Royalty, if he do not, by his own delegated hands, lace Royalty’s stays? I shudder to think of it; but, without the key of the bedchamber, could my friend Peel be made responsible for the health of the Princess? Instead of the very best and most scrupulously-aired diaper, might not—by negligence or design, it matters not which—the Princess Royal be rolled in an Act of Parliament, wet from Hansard’s press?
READER.—Dreadful, soul perturbing suggestion! Go on, Mr. PUNCH.
PUNCH.—Not but what I think it—if their constitution will stand damp paper—an admirable way of rearing young princesses. Queen Elizabeth—my wife Judy was her wet nurse—was reared after that fashion.
READER.—David Hume says nothing of it.
PUNCH.—David Hume was one of the wonders of the earth—he was a lazy Scotchman; but had he searched the State Paper Office, he would have found the documents there—yes, the very Acts of Parliament—the very printed rollers. To those rollers Queen Elizabeth owed her knowledge of the English Constitution.
READER.—Explain—I can’t see how.
PUNCH.—Then you are very dull. Is not Parliament the assembled wisdom of the country?
READER.—By a fiction, Mr. PUNCH.
PUNCH—Very well, Mr. Reader; what’s all the world but a fiction? I say, the assembled wisdom; an Act of Parliament is the sifted wisdom of the wise—the essence of an essence. Very well; know you not the mystic, the medicinal effects of printer’s ink? The devil himself isn’t proof to a blister of printer’s ink. Well, you take an Act of Parliament—and what is it but the finest plaster of the finest brains—wet, reeking wet from the press. Eschewing diaper, you roll the Act round the royal infant; you roll it up and pin it in the conglomerated wisdom of the nation. Now, consider the tenderness of a baby’s cuticle; the pores are open, and a rapid and continual absorption takes place, so that long before the Royal infant cuts its first tooth, it has taken up into its system the whole body of the Statutes.
READER.—Might not some patriots object to the application of the wisdom of the country to so domestic a purpose?
PUNCH.—Such patriots are more squeamish than wise. Sir, how many grown up kings have we had, who have shown no more respect for the laws of the country, than if they had been swaddled in ‘em?
READER.—Do you think your friend Sir Robert is for statute rollers?
PUNCH.—I can answer for Sir Robert on every point. His first attack before he kisses hands—and he has, as you perceive, been practising this half-hour—will be upon the women of the bedchamber. The war with China—the price of sugar—the corn-laws—the fourteen new Bishops about to be hatched—timber—cotton—a property tax, and the penny post—all these matters and persons are of secondary importance to this greater question—whether the female who hands the Queen her gown shall think Lord Melbourne a “very pretty fellow in his day;” or whether she shall believe my friend Sir Robert to be as great a conjuror as Roger Bacon or the Wizard of the North—if the lady can look upon O’Connell and not call for burnt feathers or scream for sal volatile; or if she really thinks the Pope to be a woman with a naughty name, clothed in most exceptionable scarlet. It is whether Lady Mary thinks black, or Lady Clementina thinks white; whether her father who begot her voted with the Marquis of Londonderry or Earl Grey—that is the grand question to be solved, before my friend Sir Robert can condescend to be the saviour of his country. To have the privilege of making a batch of peers, or a handful of bishops is nothing, positively nothing—no, the crowning work is to manufacture a lady’s maid. What’s a mitre to a mob-cap—what the garters of a peer to the garters of the Lady Adeliza?
READER.—You are getting warm, Mr. PUNCH—very warm.
PUNCH.—I always do get warm when I talk of the delicious sex: for though now and then I thrash my wife before company, who shall imagine how cosy we are when we’re alone? Do you not remember that great axiom of Sir Robert’s—an axiom that should make Machiavelli howl with envy—that “the battle of the Constitution is to fought in the bedchamber.”
READER.—I remember it.
PUNCH.—That was a great sentence. Had Sir Robert known his true fame, he would never after have opened his mouth.
READER.—Has the Queen sent for Sir Robert yet?
PUNCH.—No: though I know he has staid at home these ten days, and answers every knock at the door himself, in expectation of a message.
READER.—They say the Queen doesn’t like Sir Robert.
PUNCH.—I’m also told that her Majesty has a great antipathy to physic—yet when the Constitution requires medicine, why—
READER.—Sir Robert must be swallowed.
PUNCH.—Exactly so. We shall have warm work of it, no doubt—but I fear nothing, when we have once got rid of the women. And then, we have a few such nice wenches of our own to place about her Majesty; the Queen shall take Conservatism as she might take measles—without knowing it.
READER.—And when, Mr. PUNCH—when you have got rid of the women, what do you and Sir Robert purpose then?
PUNCH.—I beg your pardon: we shall meet again next week: it’s now two o’clock. I have an appointment with half-a-dozen of my godsons; I have promised them all places in the new government, and they’re come to take their choice.
READER.—Do tell me this: Who has Peel selected for Commander of the Forces?
PUNCH.—Who? Colonel Sibthorp.
READER.—And who for Chancellor of the Exchequer?
PUNCH.—Mr. Henry Moreton Dyer!