Whigs! who have with Bennet whined,
Hasten now to raise the wind,
For a Knight’s dismissed.
In the same year another skit at the Whig party appeared. The allusions it contains are to Lord Grey, who eventually passed the Reform Bill, Joseph Hume, the political economist and exposer of Parliamentary corruption; R. Carlile, the publisher of Tom Paine’s, and other advanced Radical works; Leigh Hunt, part proprietor of the Examiner, who had been imprisoned for calling the Prince Regent a “Fat Adonis of Fifty”; Henry Hunt, who had suffered a long imprisonment for attending a meeting at Manchester to agitate for the Reform of the House of Commons, in 1819; and Henry Brougham, afterwards Lord Chancellor, who was instrumental in eventually passing that measure.
Whigs whom Fox and Petty led,
Whigs who under Lord Grey fled,
Welcome, though three in a bed,
To the Treasury:
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour—
Starve the Tories out of power—