If you mean to invade us, why make such a rout?
I say, little Boney, why don't you come out?
Yes, d—— you, why don't you come out?
In his cartoon called "Promised Horrors of the French Invasion; or, Forcible Reasons for Negotiating a Regicide Peace," Gillray painted the imaginary landing of the French in England. The ferocious legions are pouring from St. James's Palace, which is in flames, and they are marching past the clubs. The practice of patronizing democracy in the countries they had conquered has been carried out by handing over the Tories, the constitution, and the crown to the Foxite reformers and the Whig party. The chief hostility of the French troops is directed against the aristocratic clubs. An indiscriminate massacre of the members of White's is proceeding in the doorways, on the balconies, and wherever the republican levies have penetrated. The royal princes are stabbed and thrown into the street. A rivulet of blood is running. In the center of the picture is a tree of liberty. To this tree Pitt is bound, while Fox is lashing him.
The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver.
"You may have seen Gillray's famous print of him—in the old wig, in the stout, old, hideous Windsor uniform—as the King of Brobdingnag, peering at a little Gulliver, whom he holds up in his hand, whilst in the other he has an opera-glass, through which he surveys the pygmy? Our fathers chose to set up George as the type of a great king; and the little Gulliver was the great Napoleon."—Thackeray's "Four Georges".
The increasing venom of the English cartoons, and their frequent coarse personalities, caused no little uneasiness to Bonaparte, until they culminated in a famous cartoon by Gillray, "The Handwriting on the Wall," a broad satire on Belshazzar's feast, which was published August 24, 1803. The First Consul, his wife Josephine, and the members of the court are seated at table, consuming the good things of Old England. The palace of St. James, transfixed upon Napoleon's fork; the tower of London, which one of the convives is swallowing whole; the head of King George on a platter inscribed: "Oh, de beef of Old England!" A hand above holds out the scales of Justice, in which the legitimate crown of France weighs down the red cap with its attached chain—despotism misnamed liberty.
CHAPTER V
THE EMPEROR AT HIS APOGEE
For the next year parliamentary strife at home, fostered by Pitt's quarrel with the Addington ministry on the one hand and his opposition to Fox on the other, kept the cartoonists busy. They found time, however, to celebrate the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor in December, 1804. Gillray anticipated the event with a cartoon entitled "The Genius of France Nursing her Darling," in which the genius, depicted as a lady with blood-stained garments and a reeking spear, tosses an infant Napoleon, armed with a scepter, and vainly tries to check his cries with a rattle surmounted by a crown.
Rowlandson, Gillray's clever and more artistic contemporary, commemorated the event itself in a clever cartoon, "The Death of Madame République," published December 14, 1804. The moribund République lies stretched upon her death-bed, her nightcap adorned with the tricolored cockade. The Abbé Sièyes, in the rôle of doctor, is exhibiting the Emperor, portrayed as a newborn infant in long clothes. John Bull, spectacles on nose, is regarding the altered conditions with visible astonishment. "Pray, Mr. Abbé Sièyes, what was the cause of the poor lady's death? She seemed at one time in a tolerable thriving way." "She died in childbed, Mr. Bull, after giving birth to this little Emperor!"