[THE COURT]
If the word "amazing" had not lost most of its significance through overwork since August, 1914, we should be inclined to apply it to the frankness with which Royalty and the Court were criticized and discussed by the Press in the 'forties and 'fifties. Punch, as we have seen, took a leading hand in the game, though he contrived to combine loyalty to the person of the Queen with the most outspoken attacks on the exercise of Court patronage and the extravagance of courtiers. But he did not stop here. The Prince Consort was mercilessly ridiculed for his Germanism, his notions of sport, his passion for tailoring, and, most serious offence of all, his alleged intervention in high politics. After ten years of anti-Albertianism, Punch dropped, to a considerable extent at any rate, the game of baiting the Prince, cordially admitted his services in connexion with the Exhibition of 1851, and for the rest of the period surveyed in our first volume granted him a comparative immunity from hostile criticism.
The change, or conversion, was not due to expediency or to a change of editorship or of the staff. It had already begun several years before the death, in 1857, of Punch's most democratic contributor, Douglas Jerrold. It was typical of a change in the enlightened middle-class opinion of which Punch was the mirror. The Monarchy had gained in popularity, and though there was no great revulsion of feeling about the Prince until after his death, he had earned respect by his active interest in education and philanthropy and the sagacity in counsel which was most freely acknowledged by those who came in closest contact with him. The charges of undue intervention and interference were effectually dealt with by Ministers at the time, though Punch failed to acknowledge his vindication, and the Life of Lord Beaconsfield shows that a much stronger case can be made out against the Queen on this count when she was no longer able to rely on the advice of the Prince.
The change in Punch's conception of his rôle as regards the Court did not come in the twinkling of an eye. But from 1858 onwards he is less of the licensed Court Jester, more of the unofficial Laureate. The old Punch, who had his eye on Tsars and Kaisers (like the Skibbereen Eagle) and autocrats is not dead yet. He has a tremendous fling in the "Essence of Parliament" in July, 1858, à propos of a contemplated revision of the Prayer-book:—
Lord Stanhope, a Peer exceedingly well entitled to be heard upon any such subject, then obtained an Address for cutting out of our Prayer Books the savage and abject forms of worship which our forefathers, at certain moments of excitement, thought it well to prescribe on certain anniversaries, as Guy Fawkes Day, the Martyrdom Day, and Oak Apple Day. When one reflects that the people who composed such things adulated the dirty old coward and fool, James the First; looked on while the body of the greatest of our English kings (except Alfred)—we mean, of course, King Oliver the First, and unfortunately the Only—was dragged from its grave to the gallows; and ecstatically murmured the Nunc dimittis when the friend of Nelly Gwynn, by no means his worst friend, returned to betray the public honour of England, and debauch that of her private life; one only wonders that such ecclesiastical profanities have been tolerated so long. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of London, Oxford, and Cashel, expressed the sentiments that might be expected from enlightened gentlemen; but the offensive services found defenders in the poor old Bishop of Bangor, in the Bishop of St. Asaph, who has Mr. Punch's royal licence henceforth to sign himself A Sap, and in a brace of foolish Peers, called Marlborough and Duncannon: opposition which was the only thing wanting to show that every man of decent intellect feels alike on the subject.
Marriage of the Princess Royal
The disparaging allusion earlier in the same year to Prince Albert's Prize Pig and the attack on the bestowal of a K.C.B. on Colonel Charles Beaumont Phipps, the Prince Consort's Treasurer and Equerry to the Queen, are quite eclipsed by this explosion. But Punch was always ready to speak disrespectfully of a dictator. Constitutional monarchy he could respect and even admire, as Herbert Spencer said of the moderate proficiency of an amateur billiard-player. The new voice, the voice of the unofficial Laureate, had already been heard in his "Epithalamium" on the Princess Royal in 1858, over whose engagement, when it was first announced, he had been far from enthusiastic:—