French Caricature of Corpulent General Galas, who defeated a French Convoy, 1635.
From the accession of William and Mary we notice a change in the subjects treated by caricaturists. If religion continued for a time to be the principal theme, there was more variety in its treatment. Sects became more distinct; the Quakers arose; the divergence between the doctrines of Luther and Calvin was more marked, and gave rise to much discussion; High Church and Low Church renewed their endless contest; the Baptists became an important denomination; deism began to be the whispered, and became soon the vaunted faith of men of the world; even the voice of the Jew was occasionally heard, timidly asking for a small share of his natural rights. It is interesting to note in the popular broadsheets and satirical pictures how quickly the human mind began to exert its powers when an overshadowing and immediate fear of pope and king in league against liberty had been removed by the flight of James II. and the happy accession of William III.
Political caricature rapidly assumed prominence, though, as long as Louis XIV. remained on the throne of France, the chief aim of politics was to create safeguards against the possible return of the Catholic Stuarts. The accession of Queen Anne, the career of Bolingbroke and Harley, the splendid exploits of Marlborough, the early conflicts of Whig and Tory, the attempts of the Pretenders, the peaceful accession of George I.—all these are exhibited in broadsheets and satirical prints still preserved in more than one collection. Louis XIV., his pomps and his vanities, his misfortunes and his mistresses, furnished subjects for hundreds of caricatures both in England and Holland. It was on a Dutch caricature of 1695 that the famous retort occurs of the Duc de Luxembourg to an exclamation of the Prince of Orange. The prince impatiently said, after a defeat, "Shall I, then, never be able to beat that hunchback?" Luxembourg replied to the person reporting this, "How does he know that my back is hunched? He has never seen it." Interspersed with political satires, we observe an increasing number upon social and literary subjects. The transactions of learned societies were now important enough to be caricatured, and the public was entertained with burlesque discourses, illustrated, upon "The Invention of Samplers," "The Migration of Cuckoos," "The Eunuch's Child," "A New Method of teaching Learned Men how to write Unintelligibly." There was an essay, also, "proving by arguments philosophical that Millers, though falsely so reputed, yet in reality are not thieves, with an intervening argument that Taylors likewise are not so."
A Quaker Meeting, 1710—Aminidel exhorting Friends to support Sacheverell.
A strange episode in the conflict between Whig and Tory was the career of Sacheverell, a clergyman who preached such extreme doctrines concerning royal and ecclesiastical prerogative that he was formally censured by a Whig Parliament, and thus lifted into a preposterous importance. During his triumphal tour, which Dr. Johnson remembered as one of the events of his earliest childhood, he was escorted by voluntary guards that numbered from one thousand to four thousand mounted men, wearing the Tory badges of white knots edged with gold, and in their hats three leaves of gilt laurel. The picture of the Quaker meeting reflects upon the alliance alleged to have existed between the high Tories and the Quakers, both having an interest in the removal of disabilities, and hence making common cause. A curious relic of this brief delirium is a paragraph in the Grub Street Journal of 1736, which records the death of Dame Box, a woman so zealous for the Church that when Sacheverell was relieved of censure she clothed herself in white, kept the clothes all her life, and was buried in them. As long as Dr. Sacheverell lived she went to London once a year, and carried a present of a dozen larks to that "high-flying priest."
The flight of the Huguenots from France, in 1685 and 1686, enriched Holland, England, and the American colonies with the élite of the French people. Holland being nearest to France, and honored above all lands for nearly a century as the refuge of people persecuted for opinions' sake, received at first the greatest number, especially of the class who could live by intellectual pursuits. The rarest of all rarities in the way of caricature, "the diamond of the pictorial library," is a series of burlesque portraits, produced in Holland in 1686, of the twenty-four persons most guilty of procuring the revocation of the wise edict of Henry IV., which secured to French Protestants the right to practice their religion. The work was entitled "La Procession Monacale conduite par Louis XIV. pour la Conversion des Protestans de son Royaume." The king, accordingly, leads the way, his face a sun in a monk's cowl, in allusion to his adoption of the sun as a device. Madame De Maintenon, his married mistress, hideously caricatured, follows. Père la Chaise, and all the ecclesiastics near the court who were reputed to have urged on the ignorant old king to this superlative folly, had their place in the procession. Several of the faces are executed with a freedom and power not common in any age, but at that period only possible to a French hand. Two specimens are given on the following page.
Louis XIV., as the caricature collections alone would suffice to show, was the conspicuous man of that painful period. The caricaturists avenged human nature. No man of the time called forth so many efforts of the satiric pencil, nor was there ever a person better adapted to the satirist's purpose, for he furnished precisely those contrasts which satire can exhibit most effectively. He stood five feet four in his stockings, but his shoe-maker put four inches of leather under his heels, and his wig-maker six inches of other people's hair upon his head, which gave him an imposing altitude. The beginning of his reign was prosperous enough to give some slight excuse for the most richly developed arrogance seen in the world since Xerxes lashed the Hellespont, but the last third of his reign was a collapse that could easily be made to seem ludicrous. There were very obvious contrasts in those years between the splendors of his barbaric court and the disgraceful defeats of his armies, between the opinion he cherished of himself and the contempt in which he was held abroad, between the adulations of his courtiers and the execrations of France, between the mass-attending and the morals of the court.