The Motion (for the Removal of Sir Robert Walpole).
The downfall of Sir Robert Walpole, after holding office for twenty years, was preceded by an animated fire of caricature, in which the adherents of Walpole held their own. The specimen given above, entitled "The Motion," was reduced from one of the most famous caricatures of the reign of George II., and one of the most finely wrought of the century.[21] Horace Walpole, son of the great minister, wrote from Florence that the picture had "diverted him extremely," and that the likenesses were "admirable." To us the picture says nothing until it is explained; but every London apprentice of the period recognized Whitehall and the Treasury, toward which the Opposition was driving with such furious haste, and could distinguish most of the personages exhibited. A few days before this caricature appeared, Sandys, who was styled the motion-maker, from the frequency of his attempts to array the House of Commons against the Walpole ministry, moved once more an address to the king, that he would be pleased to remove Sir Robert Walpole from his presence and councils forever. The debate upon this motion was long and most vehement, and though the ministry triumphed, it was one of those bloody victories which presage overthrow. On the same day a similar "motion" was made in the House of Lords by Lord Carteret, where an equally violent discussion was followed by a vote sustaining the ministry. The exultation of the Walpole party inspired this famous caricature, in which we see the Opposition peers trying to reach office in a lordly coach and six, and the Commons trudging toward the same goal on foot, their leader, Pulteney, wheeling a load of Opposition newspapers, and leading his followers by the nose. Every politician of note on the side of the Opposition is in the picture: Lord Chesterfield is the postilion; the Duke of Argyll the coachman; Lord Carteret the gentleman inside the coach, who, becoming conscious of the breakdown, cries, "Let me get out!" Bubb Dodington is the spaniel between the coachman's legs; the footman behind the coach is Lord Cobham, and the outrider Lord Lyttelton. On the side of the Commons there is Sandys, dropping in despair his favorite, often-defeated "Place Bill," and exclaiming, "I thought what would come of putting him on the box?" Much of the humor and point of the picture is lost to us, because the peculiar relations of the persons portrayed to the public, to their party, and to one another can not now be perfectly recalled.
Edition after edition of "The Motion" appeared, one of which was so arranged that it could be fitted to the frame of a lady's fan, a common device at the time. The Opposition retorted with a parody of the picture, which they styled "The Reason," in which Walpole figures as the coachman, driving the coach of state to destruction. Another parody was called "The Motive," in which the king was the passenger and Walpole the driver. Then followed "A Consequence of the Motion," "Motion upon Motion," "The Grounds," and others. The Walpole party surpassed their opponents in caricature; but caricature is powerless to turn back a genuine tide of public feeling, and a year later Sir Robert was honorably shelved in the House of Lords.
From this time forward the history of Europe is recorded or burlesqued in the comic pictures of the shop-window; not merely the conspicuous part played in it by ministers and kings, but the foibles, the fashions, the passions, the vices, the credulities, the whims, of each generation. The British rage for the Italian opera, the enormous sums paid to the singers, the bearish manners of Handel, the mania for gaming, the audacity of highwaymen, and the impositions upon popular credulity no more escape the satirist's pencil than Braddock's defeat, the Queen of Hungary's loss of Silesia, or William Pitt's timely, and also his ill-timed, fits of the gout. Nor were the abuses of the Church overlooked. One picture, entitled "The Fat Pluralist and his Lean Curates," published in 1733, exhibited a corpulent dignitary of the Church in a chariot drawn by six meagre and wretched curates. The portly priest carries under one arm a large church, and a cathedral under the other, while at his feet are two sucking pigs, a hen, and a goose, which he has taken as tithe from a farmyard in the distance. "The Church," says the pluralist, "was made for me, not I for the Church;" and under the wheels of the coach is a book marked "The Thirty-nine Articles." One starving curate cries, piteously, "Lord, be merciful to us poor curates!" to which another responds, "And send us more comfortable livings!" It required a century of satire and remonstrance to get that one monstrous abuse of the Church Ring reduced to proportions approaching decency. Corruption in the city of New York in the darkest days of Tweed was less universal, less systematic, less remote from remedy, than that of the Government of Great Britain under the least incapable of its four Georges. It was merely more decorous.
Antiquaries Puzzled. (London, 1756.)
A specimen of the harmless, good-humored satire aimed at the zealous antiquaries of the last century is given above. This picture may have suggested to Mr. Dickens the familiar scene in "Pickwick" where the roving members of the Pickwick Club discover the stone commemorative of Bill Stumps. The mysterious inscription in the picture is, "Beneath this stone reposeth Claud Coster, tripe-seller of Impington, as doth his consort Jane."