“Now greeting, hooting, and abuse,
To each man’s party prove of use,
And mud, and stones, and waving hats,
And broken heads, and putrid cats
Are offerings made to aid the cause
Of order, government, and laws.”
(The Election Day.)
There appeared in 1819 “A Political Squib on the Westminster Election, Covent Garden” (March 3), by G. Cruikshank. This etching forms the frontispiece to a tract published April 20, 1819, for Bengo, print-dealer, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. The somewhat mystifying title of the election squib is “Patriot Allegory, Anarchical Fable, and Licentious Parody,” and it purports to be written by Peregrine Castigator. G. Cruikshank has availed himself of that long-suffering animal, the British Lion; in this instance the monarch of the beasts personates the successful candidate, the Hon. George Lamb being figured as the lion. He is exhibited standing under the city gate, beneath a portcullis, wreathed with laurels; his tail is lashed in anger, while the unsuccessful candidates, as an additional ignominy to their defeat, are travestied as the heads of a hydra trampled beneath their political victor. John Cam Hobhouse (W) polled 3,861, and was beaten by G. Lamb (C) with 4,465 votes. T. T. Wooler, the revolutionary publisher, for whom Cruikshank was working in 1815, is personified as the “Black Dwarf,” as his whilom ally ever after represented him; his duck’s-head cap is made to exclaim, “Cartwright and ’38!!!” the next individual says, “Quack! quack! quack!”—an allusion to the small minority of votes polled by the Radical candidate at the Westminster election for 1819, vice Romilly deceased, when 8,364 votes were registered, and only 38 of these for Cartwright.
THE LAW’S DELAY. READING THE RIOT ACT. 1820. BY G. CRUIKSHANK.
Showing the advantage and comfort of waiting the specified time after reading the Riot Act to a Radical mob; or a British magistrate in the discharge of his duty, and the people of England in the discharge of theirs! See speeches of the Opposition—Passim.
[Page 334.
Major Cartwright, the “Drum-major of Sedition” of the ministerial satirists, was one of the Radical reformers who laboured actively for the reform of parliamentary abuses. He put up for Westminster in the Radical interest in 1818 and 1819, but seems to have had no support. In 1820, Major Cartwright addressed a petition to the House of Commons for the purpose of disclosing “that ninety-seven Lords usurped two hundred seats in the Commons-House in violation of our Laws and Liberties.”
“Resolved. That it is a high infringement upon our Liberties and Privileges for Lords of Parliament to concern themselves in the Elections of members to serve for the Commons.” (Journals at the commencement of every Session.)
How far the measure of reform was needed in the corrupt system of boroughmongering is clearly demonstrated by Major Cartwright’s—