CHAPTER V ON SOME FURTHER SUPPRESSED PLATES, ETCHINGS, AND WOOD ENGRAVINGS BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK
IN Chapter III. we have incidentally considered the suppressed grotesque border to the etching of “The Last Song” by George Cruikshank in the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. In this chapter we shall treat of certain other suppressions to which the “inimitable” George’s work was subjected.
The first to which I shall direct your attention has a curious and romantic history attaching to it, instinct with the rough and brutal methods of our immediate ancestors. It is a highly-coloured etched broadside published in 1815, the very year of the tragic death of the gifted and ill-fated Gillray, whose mantle, as political caricaturist, was now fallen upon his brilliant young contemporary. {60} These were the days of hard hitting, of reckless charges, of imprisonment for libel, of dramatic political episodes, and the wonder is that George Cruikshank escaped the fates of the Burdetts, the Hones, and the Hobhouses of the period. The fact is that George was a very shrewd young man and had a very shrewd idea of how far it was safe to go. Indeed, in this partially suppressed cartoon we find him upon the very verge of recklessness and only drawing back from danger just in the nick of time.
I have spoken of the partial suppression of this broadside, and in this partial cancellation it is differentiated from all others with which we have hitherto dealt. Brutal enough as is the satire as we see it, there is a brutality curiously hidden within, which, unsuspected by the uninitiated, proves to what astounding lengths satire of that period was sometimes ready to go.
Before dealing in detail with this “Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggar’s Petition” it will be as well to relate the circumstances which led up to its perpetration.
Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, born {61} 1771, was perhaps the best hated of all the royal personages of the period then in England, and this notwithstanding the fact that he was a man of conspicuous bravery. He was, for a few years after Queen Victoria’s accession, next heir to the throne of England. Later he ascended the throne of Hanover under the regulations of the Salic law, and gained the affection of his people, proving himself a wise and beneficent ruler. Probably William IV. put his character into a nutshell when he said: “Ernest is not such a bad fellow, but if any one has a corn he is sure to tread on it.”
However that may be, there is no doubt that there is hardly a crime in the whole decalogue which was not at one time or another laid at his door, and not the least among these was the crime of murder.
To quote the succinct account of this affair given in the Dictionary of National Biography:—“On the night of 31st May 1810 the duke was found in his apartments in St. James’s Palace with a terrible wound in his head, which would have been mortal had not the assassin’s weapon struck against the duke’s sword. Shortly afterwards his {62} valet, Sellis,[17] was found dead in his bed with his throat cut. On hearing the evidence of the surgeons and other witnesses, the coroner’s jury returned a verdict that Sellis had committed suicide after attempting to assassinate the duke. The absence of any reasonable motive... caused this event to be greatly discussed, and democratic journalists did not hesitate to hint that he really murdered Sellis.” One of these, Henry White, was sentenced in 1815 to fifteen months’ imprisonment and a fine of £200 for publishing the rumour. The story again cropped up in 1832, when the duke had made himself particularly obnoxious to the radical press, and was exploited by a pamphleteer named Phillips. The duke prosecuted him, and he was promptly found guilty and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.
[17] Not Serres, as Reid has it in his descriptive account of Cruikshank’s works. The keeper of the prints evidently confused the name of the valet with that of Mrs. Olive Serres, who later on called herself Princess Olive of Cumberland, and claimed to be the duke’s legitimate daughter.
Notwithstanding this, there was little abatement in the persecution of the duke. Even Lord Brougham in the House of Lords sneeringly called {63} him to his face “the illustrious duke—illustrious only by courtesy.” I take up a few consecutive numbers of that venomous little contemporary paper, Figaro in London, and find week by week some very plain speaking. Here are a few examples:—