My name is Mingotti,
If you worship me notti,
You shall all go to potti.
The closing years of the reign of George II., under the vigorous administration of the first William Pitt, witnessed a calm in the domestic politics of the country, which presented a strange contrast to the agitation of the previous period. Faction seemed to have hidden its head, and there was comparatively little employment for the caricaturist. But this calm lasted only a short time after that king’s death, and the new reign was ushered in by indications of approaching political agitation of the most violent description, in which satirists who had hitherto contented themselves with other subjects were tempted to embark in the strife of politics. Among these was Hogarth, whose discomforts as a political caricaturist we shall have to describe in our next chapter.
No. 200. Fox on Boots.
Perhaps no name ever provoked a greater amount of caricature and satirical abuse than that of Lord Bute, who, through the favour of the Princess of Wales, ruled supreme at court during the first period of the reign of George III. Bute had taken into the ministry, as his confidential colleague, Fox—the Henry Fox who became subsequently the first Lord Holland, a man who had enriched himself enormously with the money of the nation, and these two appeared to be aiming at the establishment of arbitrary power in the place of constitutional government. Fox was usually represented in the caricatures with the head and tail of the animal represented by his name rather strongly developed; while Bute was drawn, as a very bad pun upon his name, in the garb of a Scotchman, wearing two large boots, or sometimes a single boot of still greater magnitude. In these caricatures Bute and Fox are generally coupled together. Thus, a little before the resignation of the duke of Newcastle in 1762, there appeared a caricature entitled “The State Nursery,” in which the various members of the ministry, as it was then formed under Lord Bute’s influence, are represented as engaged in childish games. Fox, as the whipper-in of parliamentary majorities, is riding, armed with his whip, on Bute’s shoulders (see our cut No. 200), while the duke of Newcastle performs the more menial service of rocking the cradle. In the rhymes which accompany this caricature, the first of these groups is described as follows (Fox was commonly spoken of in satire by the title of Volpone)—
First you see old sly Volpone-y,
Riding on the shoulders brawny
Of the muckle favourite Sawny;