Podcast transcript
'I ONLY GOT ONE LITTLE PEEP': GEORGE III'S FAMILY AND SATIRICAL PRINTS
Hello and welcome to a podcast from Royal Collection Trust. Today's lecture at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace is given by Kate Heard, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at Royal Collection Trust. In this lecture we will hear Kate examine the complex relationship between George III, his family and the satirists who made a living poking fun at the establishment. Other talks and lectures within our events programme can be found using our What's on guide on our website.
High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson has proved a wonderful chance to put on display some of the finest prints and drawings by Thomas Rowlandson in the Royal Collection.
Today, I would like to talk a little bit about the works by Rowlandson in the Collection before focusing on one of the central themes of the exhibition – the royal collecting of satirical prints during the reigns of George III and George IV. Why did the monarchs who were so often the butt of the caricaturists' jokes form such an important and comprehensive collection of the very works that ridiculed them?
Thomas Rowlandson was born in London in 1757. The son of a bankrupt textile merchant, he was brought up by his aunt and uncle, wealthy silk weavers. Rowlandson's life would prove every bit as dramatic as his works, of which he could have been, and sometimes was, a subject. His proficiency as an artist was clear from an early stage and he was sent to the Royal
Academy, where his studies were sponsored by his aunt. At the Academy, he clearly excelled at sculpture, for which he was awarded a silver medal in 1777. He had travelled to Paris a few years earlier to study with the respected French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle.
And so, when Rowlandson left the Academy in 1778, he found work as a designer and etcher of satirical prints. How he became involved with the print trade is unclear, but it may have been through his tutor John Hamilton Mortimer, himself a satirical printmaker. Early prints include Italian Affectation, a satire of the Italian opera singer Gaspare Pacchierotti and a companion, which was published in 1780.
At the age of twenty-six, Rowlandson began to work with the publisher who would make him one of the best-known satirical printmakers of the age. This was William Humphrey, a printseller and publisher based in Old Bond Street, and the brother of Hannah Humphrey,
James Gillray's patron. The project which appears to have brought Rowlandson and
Humphrey together is a series of prints on the Election of 1784. This was one of the high points of the long-running rivalry between the Whig Charles James Fox and the Tory, William
Pitt, who were vying for control of government. During the course of the election campaign,
Rowlandson produced numerous prints for Humphrey capturing the canvassing on the part of the candidates for the hotly-contested Westminster borough, and particularly enjoying the reputedly scandalous conduct of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who campaigned for
Fox, and Albinia, Countess of Buckinghamshire, who campaigned for Pitt. Rowlandson was one of the most prolific satirists who produced prints on the Westminster election, and his reputation began to rise as a result. By 1793, the publisher Samuel William Fores was using the fact that his shop stocked 'all Rowlandson's works' as a key selling point for his business.
Rowlandson's numerous political prints prompt the question of his own political allegiances – in fact, it seems that, like most contemporary satirical printmakers, his work did not favour one party, and his personal views are not known. In early 1784, he produced both The
Champion of the People, which supported Fox, and The Covent Garden Nightmare, which attacked Fox. We know that he was paid on occasion to produce propaganda – such as The
Contrast of 1792, which was circulated in bulk around the country in an attempt to prevent the spread of Revolutionary ideas from France.
As a political satirist, Rowlandson needed to work fast to keep up with current affairs, as what was topical one day would be out of date a few days later. He worked at a prodigious rate – in 1809 he produced 27 satires on the scandalous affair of the Duke of York and Mrs
Mary Ann Clark in just 44 days. But this was not the entirety of his output: at the same time as he was producing political prints, he was making social satires – humorous illustrations of everyday life, which had a much longer shelf-life. And he also produced thousands of drawings, many of them for sale to collectors for framing and hanging, or for pasting into albums. Many of these are topographical scenes, not intended to be comical but nonetheless showing Rowlandson's lightness of touch and humorous outlook on life. Two of his most important drawings are in the Royal Collection and are featured in the exhibition. Showing military reviews, they were purchased by the Prince of Wales already framed for hanging at one of his residences.
Much of Rowlandson's frenetic activity must have been due to his financial situation.
Supported by his aunt after his father's bankruptcy, he inherited her modest fortune in 1789, which he promptly drank and gambled away as part of a fast set of artists and actors. By 1799, he was living in dismal lodgings, and on the verge of penury. It was at this point that the fashionable London publisher Rudolph Ackermann stepped forward to offer Rowlandson work as a book illustrator. For Ackermann, Rowlandson was a well-respected, fashionable illustrator, whose work on books would add to their appeal. For Rowlandson, Ackermann offered an additional source of income.
When Rowlandson died, on 21 April 1827, his days of poverty were clearly past. He left a large collection of prints and drawings by himself and by others, which was sold by the auctioneer Samuel Leigh Sotheby in 1828. His entire estate, which came to £2985 17s 11d after all payments had been deducted, was left to Elizabeth Winter, who had lived with him for at least twenty years and who was sometimes referred to as 'Mrs Rowlandson' although they do not appear to have been married. Thomas Rowlandson left behind him a vast output of thousands of prints and drawings, numerous illustrated books, and a legacy of humorous illustration which would prove perennially popular in the succeeding years. Among the most enthusiastic collectors of his and other satirists' works were George III and his family. But they were often also the butt of cruel satirical prints. Why did they form such a large and important collection? For the rest of this lecture, I would like to look at the royal family as collectors of satirical prints, by Rowlandson and by other artists, to try to discover something of their interests and concerns.
Satirical representations of the royal family ranged from the gentle to the vicious. At the soft end of the scale were such works as The Prince’s Bow which mocked the extravagant bow the
Prince of Wales gave at the trial of Warren Hastings, a copy of which the Prince himself purchased in 1790. And we know that he purchased a print of Rowlandson’s Money Lenders, the earliest comment on his increasing debts, a month after its publication in November 1784.
Such satires were probably even seen as flattering by a young buck who was enjoying making his mark as a leader of London fashionable society. His debts did not worry him, and at least every one had noticed the bow. Others members of the family were also the target of gently humorous barbs: in Taking Physick or the News of Shooting the King of Sweden, Gillray has great fun imagining the king and the queen disturbed on the toilet by William Pitt, who brings news of a royal assassination. The humour lies in the transposing of the enthroned couple to these less regal seats (albeit still with a coat of arms behind them), and also in the capturing of the
King’s famous use of 'what what' in conversation: ‘What! Shot? What what what! Shot! Shot! shot!’ he exclaims in horror. Gillray famously criticised the King's ability to appreciate art in his A Connoisseur examining a Cooper of 1792. Said to be Gillray's riposte to a slight by the
King, who had dismissed some of the artist's drawings, the print shows a myopic George III examining a miniature by the light of a candle. It is no coincidence that the miniature depicts
Oliver Cromwell. Despite this slur on the royal ability to appreciate art, Fanny Burney records a wonderful example of George III enjoying a satirical print in March 1788, when she and some friends were looking at Henry Bunbury’s Propagation of a Lie over tea
'This I had produced here a month ago, to show to our tea-party, and just as it was in the
hands of Colonel Welbred, His Majesty entered the room; and, after looking at it a little while,
with much entertainment, he took it away to show it to the Queen and Princesses.'
The astonishing thing is that the King should not have enjoyed the Propagation of a Lie at all as it is thought to refer to the illicit and illegal marriage of the Prince of Wales to Maria
Fitzherbert. Either the King did not care or, more likely, he was not aware of the subtext. It would be surprising, too, for Burney and her friends to be consciously looking at a subversive print and Bunbury's comment on the Prince's duplicity may not have been widely known at court.
Other members of the family, too, came under fire. After the Prince Regent, the greatest sufferer was probably Frederick, Duke of York, who lost his position as Commander-in-Chief of the British army in the wake of an ill-judged affair with Mrs Mary Ann Clarke. In 1809, three years after the affair had ended, it transpired that the Duke had signed lists of army commissions to which Mrs Clarke had added names in return for payment. A parliamentary enquiry raked over the affair in graphic detail, with the couple's love letters read out in
Parliament and the Duke forced to resign his commission, although it was decided that he had not known that names had been added to the lists and was cleared of wrongdoing in connection which his office. Mrs Clarke didn't help matters: spotting an attempt to make money, she attempted to sell her memoirs and her former lover's letters, and had to be paid to desist. The whole episode provided fodder for the satirists and their publishers. Thomas
Tegg, a cut-price printseller who published Rowlandson's prints on the affair, issued so many satires about the Duke that he provided a titlepage so they could be bound as books. In
Rowlandson's The Statue to be disposed of, published just after the Duke's resignation, Tegg inserts a cheeky advertisement that a new caricature on Mrs Clarke will be issued every day from his Caricature Warehouse in Cheapside. Indeed, the writer Charles Lamb noted that
'thousands' of caricatures about the Duke were pasted 'in every blind alley'.
At the other end of the scale were truly shocking depictions of members of the royal family, many of them by James Gillray. Gillray was an exact contemporary and acquaintance of
Rowlandson, with whom he is known to have had an occasional drink. He appears to have developed a particular hatred of Queen Charlotte, who he often placed in poses implying a sexual relationship with the politician William Pitt. No such relationship existed, and Gillray was simply commenting on the political alliance between the two in deeply offensive terms.
In Sin, Death and the Devil of 1792, the Queen is depicted as a semi-naked, gnarled serpent, shielding Pitt’s crotch with her hand. Although we have no contemporary account of its reception, this print is said, believably, to have caused great offence at court. We have no knowledge of the way in which The Hopes of the Party was viewed but, with its graphic depiction of the hanging of Pitt and the Queen, and its intimation of sexual intercourse between the couple, it can hardly have been any more warmly received in royal circles.
And there was no escaping these satirical prints for members of the royal family. A number of the printsellers who sold them were based right around the royal palaces. Hannah Humphrey had started out in Old Bond Street but in 1797 moved to a shop in St James’s Street, where she was also landlady to the acerbic James Gillray. Humphrey was a familiar enough figure to be acknowledged by the Duke of Clarence, as she recorded with some pride in a letter to
Gillray: ‘His Highness of Clarence did me the honour of asking me how I did as we were walking on the Steine [at Brighton] tho he had two noblemen with him’. Humphrey had published a number of satires on Clarence's relationship with the actress Maria Jordan, but he clearly bore her no grudge. William Holland, who was imprisoned in 1793 for selling seditious pamphlets, traded from No. 50 Oxford Street until 1802 when he moved to Cockspur Street.
Holland’s great rival Samuel Fores, who was a particular thorn in the side of the Prince
Regent, had a shop in Piccadilly which he claimed was ‘the largest in the kingdom’. At one point Thomas Rowlandson had lodgings in Pall Mall, only three doors away from Carlton
House.
Satirists did not remain outside the palace walls. In 1787, the humorous printmaker Henry Bunbury was made equerry to the Duke of York, an appointment which appears to have caused some disquiet at court, as Fanny Burney recorded:
‘So now we may all be caricatured at his leisure! He is made another of the Equerries to the
Duke. A man with such a turn, and with talents so inimitable in displaying it, was rather a
dangerous character to be brought within a Court!’
Printsellers did not simply set up shop near the court to rile the Royal Family, although this must have been an amusing consequence of their location. They were here because this was where their market was: satirical prints were eagerly collected and discussed by members of high society. Although they are often seen as a popular and populist art form, it is now acknowledged that their cost, 1 shilling plain and 2 shillings coloured when a footman earned £8 a year, made satirical prints too expensive for the majority of society, and that they were produced in smallish print runs of around 500 at a time. The language of satirical prints, too, suggests a well-educated audience, familiar with the world of high art. Thomas Rowlandson’s
Covent Garden Night-Mare, which mocks the politician Charles James Fox, relies on its audience knowing Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare, which had recently been exhibited at the Royal Academy. And the joke in his Learned Scotchman or the Magistrate’s Mistake assumes that Rowlandson’s audience knows Latin, and laughs at those who do not. The Prince Regent and his family were not just surrounded by printsellers’ shops, but by courtiers who owned, discussed and giggled at the prints which mocked them .
If satirical prints were too expensive for the man in the street to own, there was nothing to stop him enjoying the joke, as printsellers adorned the windows of their shops with regularly changing displays of the latest satires. In September 1786, Sophie von la Roche, a German visitor to London, noted that she ‘saw a number of people standing near an engraver’s, in front of some caricatures, the subject of which was the life and marriage of the Prince of
Wales; they are sold to the public’. A French visitor to London, Louis-Sebastién Mercier suggested that the display of such satires was so common as to have little effect:
'Such images are displayed in great numbers in the windows of all the printsellers, where [….] passers-by continually stop to look at them. Oh well! You walk up, you look, you smile, shrug and think no more about it. Even those who are satirised walk up, look, and go on their way laughing. All of this does no harm, neither paintings nor books.'
The crowds that gathered to enjoy the latest satires were often the victim of thieves, who took advantage of the distraction provided by the prints to pick pockets. Charles Holland, a sugar-broker’s clerk, had his handkerchief stolen in August 1802. ‘I was looking at a caricature shop, [at] the corner of Billiter lane’ he explained to the Old Bailey ‘I felt my handkerchief drawn out of my pocket’. He was one of many to lose his handkerchief in this way; the numerous Old Bailey records for such crimes are vivid evidence for the distractions offered by the changing displays.
Despite the offence that was taken at many of the caricatures displayed in the printseller’s windows, members of the royal family were also eager collectors of satirical prints. The earliest collector we are aware of is George III, who is recorded as having 582 caricatures in his library at Buckingham House. These certainly included Doctor Convex and Lady Concave and
A Master of the Ceremonies introducing a Partner, both by Rowlandson. The King's son George, later George IV, was a major collector. On his death 2750 caricatures were recorded in the
Royal Library. We think that the Duke of York, employer of Henry Bunbury, was probably a collector of caricature, although our knowledge of his collection and its formation is currently very fragmentary. Other royal collections of caricature are now in other institutions – those which belonged to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of George III, are today at Greiz in Germany and number some 450 sheets.
Although the means by which George III acquired caricatures, and his interests in this field, are unrecorded, rich archival material provides much evidence for George IV’s purchases in this area, as Prince of Wales, Prince Regent and king. His expenditure on prints was prodigious: Robert Gray, secretary to the Prince of Wales’s commissioners, lamented in 1809 that ‘each quarter produces fresh bills for jewellery, prints and various articles.’ And these bills could come to huge amounts. Between December 1797 and October 1799, for example, the Prince spent £1,430.8.0 with one print dealer alone. A bill of 10 September 1799 was typical of his expenditure: the Prince purchased three genre prints, five portraits, a landscape, a set of plates on Chinese costume, and 53 prints described as ‘various humorous’, spending
£11 and 19s. If this sounds relatively restrained, he had spent £10 and 9s with the same printseller the previous day and would spend a further £25 a fortnight later. All in all, in
September 1799, the Prince paid just over £45 for prints from this particular dealer. To put this in to context, he had spent the equivalent of a year’s rent for a gentleman’s set of rooms in a nice part of London, in one month, with one business. Little wonder that the Prince found himself deeply and inextricably in debt, nor that his poor suppliers were reduced to begging him to pay bills years after they had been submitted.
Not all suppliers were entirely innocent, though. Henry Wigstead, a house painter who was a close friend of Rowlandson, and who sold satirical prints to the Prince stung him with a hefty mark-up: Bunbury’s Derby Diligence sold for a shilling on its issue in 1781, but Wigstead charged the Prince 2s for it in 1789. The architect Sir John Soane, who was auditing the accounts, was aware of the discrepancies, noting that ‘The Painter’s Bills, by Henry Wigstead, amounting to £599.11.5 are overcharged in price £22.4.4½.’. If a set of gentleman’s rooms cost around £40 for the year, Wigstead’s excess charge was a significant sum of money.
Bills survive for the Prince’s purchase of caricatures from specialist sellers including James
Bretherton (his earliest recorded print purchase), Hannah, William and George Humphrey and William Holland. The Prince also bought caricatures from more general print dealers such as Colnaghi and Co, the fashionable London printsellers who even have a walk on part in
Vanity Fair, and John Raphael Smith, a printmaker and friend of Thomas Rowlandson who in
1787 sent ‘various caricature prints’ by Rowlandson and others from his shop in Bond Street.
The bills suggest that the Prince held standing orders with the major dealers and was normally supplied with a representative selection of caricatures rather than choosing prints individually.
Hannah Humphrey, who supplied the Prince from 1803, issued annual bills, suggesting a formal arrangement for the supply of prints. William Holland clearly sold the Prince prints ready-pasted into albums (labelled ‘Caricatures’), and in 1794 he issued an advertisement for bound volumes ‘like those he has had the honour to make up for their Royal Highnesses the
Prince of Wales and the Duke of York’. Holland’s receipt for sales to the Prince of Wales includes numerous Rowlandsons, many of which were bound into “a Whole sheet volume” which was almost entirely devoted to Rowlandson’s works. This album included La Place
Victoire and Dressing for a Birthday, both of which are included in the exhibition. Dressing for a
Birthday even retains the price paid, 7 shillings and sixpence, inscribed in the top left corner.
As well as being stored in albums and portfolios, caricatures may have been pasted to screens and walls. The Prince Regent had a print room, with prints and decorative borders pasted directly to the wall, although we don’t know where this was, or what sort of prints it showed.
It may have been a caricature print room like that which survives at Calke Abbey in
Derbyshire. The Prince, too, owned at least one screen pasted with caricatures, which was recorded in a store at Carlton House in 1826. This screen has not been traced, but another from the Royal Collection is in the exhibition, showing us how bright and inventive such pieces of furniture were. More likely to have been kept discreetly in a volume or portfolio is the Prince’s recorded collection of pornographic satires. Firm evidence of the existence of this body of material comes from Queen Victoria who described
‘the many vy improper & indecent [prints] – entirely collected (& wh. [Prince Albert] told me,
I remember[,] there [were] quantities of the most dreadfully obscene character-) by Geo IVth!! Who seemed to delight in them - & those he had destroyed’
This section of the collection would certainly have included works by Rowlandson, who was a prolific and inventive pornographer. It is a pity that the Victorian destruction of this aspect of his work meant we couldn't examine it in the exhibition.
As well as collecting satirical prints, the Prince even paid for a set to be produced as propaganda. In 1788, George III became unwell for the first time and was unable to govern the country. Opinion was divided about what should be done. The Prince felt that he should be appointed regent in his father’s place. He was closely allied to the Whig party, and the
Whigs supported his claim, seeing a chance to increase their influence. But others opposed the Prince’s appointment. Tories, who had been favoured by George III, were alarmed at the thought of the Whig party gaining in power. They favoured the appointment of the earnest
William Pitt, an ally of the King, who also had the backing of Queen Charlotte. The Prince’s extravagant lifestyle, filled with drunken parties and affairs, too, counted against his claim. He was not seen as a mature enough figure to take on the regency. As The Times put it, the
Prince ‘at all times would prefer a girl and bottle to politics and a sermon’ – a point painfully made by Rowlandson and his publisher Samuel Fores in the sarcastically-titled Filial Piety which showed a drunken prince dancing into his father’s sick room with his cronies, interrupting a bishop who is giving the King communion. The shocking nature of this print is hard to appreciate today. It appears to be the only depiction of the King when he was unwell – normally his illness was referred to but not shown in any way.
In the face of this opposition, the Prince ran a careful campaign to promote his claim, employing satirical printmakers to make prints which were to be sent by ‘mail coach &c to every town throughout the Kingdom’. His chosen artists were Thomas Rowlandson and his friend Henry Wigstead and each print was designed by Wigstead (in consultation with the
Prince’s staff at Carlton House) and etched by Rowlandson. Each was issued under a different pseudonym, probably in an attempt to hide the common source. The prints probably included
The Prospect before Us which shows Pitt as a hanger-on of Queen Charlotte, who is seen trampling on her ‘son’s right’ to pay her bills. Another was The Times, which showed the
Prince guided by Britannia, Liberty and Justice to a throne supported by Virtue, Patriotism,
Public Safety and the Voice of the People. But Rowlandson was not just working in support of the Prince’s campaign to be made Regent in this period: at the same time he produced Filial
Piety, as we have seen, a damning indictment of the young prince’s ambitions and unsuitability for rule. He was probably also responsible for the spoof of The Times, A Touch on the Times, which showed the Prince ascending to a corrupt and flawed throne. Whether the Prince knew that ‘his’ artist was working behind his back in such a way is not clear. Rowlandson clearly felt he could get away with it. And he must have made a tidy sum working for both sides at the same time.
Although the Prince was happy to employ satirists for his own purpose, he wasn’t at all happy when he was the butt of the joke. The Prince’s attempts to suppress critical prints were at times frantic, and largely unsuccessful. Prosecution of images (unlike words) was complicated and in 1812, the Solicitor General noted of a Cruikshank:
‘This is a most indecent and imprudent print but it would require so much of difficult
explanation in stating it as a libel that it does not appear to us advisable to make it the
subject of a criminal prosecution’
More damagingly, printmakers and printsellers realised that attempted suppression was a selling point, and seem to have paid little attention to the agreements they made with the
Prince. The publisher Samuel Fores, always a thorn in the Prince’s side, issued this poster in
1820, advertising his scurrilous A Peep into Windsor Castle as a ‘suppressed poem’, clearly believing that this would increase sales. This wonderful poster is a rare survival of the advertisements which would have been pasted to walls, and is a recent acquisition by the
Royal Collection.
There is evidence to suggest that the Prince attempted to suppress prints throughout his life. In 1788, John Wilkes sent his daughter Polly, ‘two most extraordinary prints for which the Prince’s solicitor is prosecuting Fores’, and Princess Charlotte noted her father’s attempts at suppression in 1812.
Most evidence for suppression, however, dates from after the Prince’s accession as
George IV in 1820. At this point, he appears entirely to have lost patience with the satirical printmakers and done everything he could to stop their attacks. This was probably partly because what he could stomach as Prince he felt was beneath his dignity as monarch, and partly because the severity of attacks increased at this time. From 1820, George IV was vilified on a number of fronts. As an adulterer, as an unsuitable monarch, and for the scandalous prosecution of his estranged wife, Caroline, who provided an excited country with a wild spectacle as she returned from exile on the continent at her husband’s accession to claim her place as Queen. George IV wouldn’t have her anywhere near him and instead of offering her the crown put her on trial for adultery and misconduct, hoping that their marriage would be annulled. The bill against her did not pass and Caroline was popularly regarded as a wronged woman and the King as a vicious bully. But the tide turned: she was jeered when she was refused entry to the Coronation, and a popular ditty circulating at the time begged ‘Most gracious Queen, we thee implore / To go away and sin no more; / But, if that effort be too great, / To go away, at any rate’.
The campaign of suppression launched on George IV’s accession in 1820 is well documented, and was clearly undertaken on two fronts. The Treasury Solicitor gathered evidence of seditious prints (many of them related to the trial of Queen Caroline) in preparation for prosecution. At the same time, the Prince’s unofficial censor, Joseph Calkin bribed publishers to stop prints being issued, and obtained signed agreements to refrain from criticising the Prince from a number of publishers. Calkin is a fascinating and somewhat shadowy figure, a violinist in George IV’s state band who gained the position of bookseller to the royal family by marrying the previous bookseller’s widow – the business operated from premises at 118 Pall Mall, and he was therefore a neighbour of both the Prince and a number of the printsellers he was trying to gag. And we know that he was responsible for the destruction of George IV’s collection of pornographic prints after his death. While the
Treasury Solicitor tried to halt the tide of criticism of the Queen Caroline affair, Calkin's job appears to have been to stop prints attacking the King’s relationship with his last mistress
Lady Conyngham,
At least one printseller, John Johnston, appears to have turned royal informer and was paid for ‘information conveyed’, as well as to suppress pictorial and poetic criticism of the
King in his Bon Ton Magazine. The bribery approach was open to abuse, as the inscription ‘Recd for Paper & Printing & also for destroying’ on a satire by Rowlandson, Burning the Books, made clear. In the same vein, the publisher John Lewis Marks wrote to Calkin on 4 September
1820, enclosing a prospectus for AMOROSO, King of Little Britain; or the Progress of Love. A
Delicious Poem:
'The inclosed is a proposal of a new Poem I intent shortly to publish, ie as soon as Plates are
ready for it – Therefore if you will be kind enough to call on me tomorrow morning, I shall be
glad as I shall not Advertise or send out the Perspectives till I have your opinion on it’
Although couched in deferential tones, the letter shows that Marks is in control of the situation, and it is unclear whether he really planned to publish his poem, or whether this was an easy means of making money. After a number of other payments, he accepted the large sum of £75 in November 1820 ‘for three sketches relinquished, and I hereby pledge myself not to engrave or publish any Caracature with the name of Cuningham introduced from the date hereof’. Despite this assurance, Marks continued to produce caricatures against the King and the Conynghams, and to be paid handsomely to suppress them.
But what of Thomas Rowlandson and his relationship with the royal family? We have seen that he lampooned the Prince Regent and the Duke of York, but was happy to work for the Prince if he was paid to do so. Like many of his colleagues, he treated the royal family as the source of satirical material, commenting on a betting scandal in which the Prince had been implicated in 1791, on the King's loss of America, on the Queen's supposed grasping nature.
But in comparison with Gillray and Cruikshank, his two main colleagues, Rowlandson was relatively kind to the royal family, his satires gentle rather than sharp, and his criticisms of them infrequent. He preferred lampooning politicians such as Charles James Fox and William
Pitt, and Britain's main enemy, Napoleon Bonaparte, who he portrayed as a diminutive figure, and derided as 'little Boney'. It seems partly that Rowlandson's character was different from that of Gillray – he drew satire from amusement rather than fury and had a gentler sense of humour. And it was also, partly, an accident of timing. As the satirists stepped up their criticisms of the Prince Regent when he became King in 1820, Rowlandson was coming to the end of his working life. He was increasingly unwell, and had turned more and more to social satires: people struggling into corsets, unable to resist one last drop of punch, yawning their way through an opera performance. Such works, which were not tied to current affairs, had a much wider appeal and a longer shelf life. They probably generated more money for
Rowlandson than political satire, and with less effort. Perhaps this is why the royal collection of Rowlandson's prints is so rich. We have seen that the Prince Regent's humour, while broad, failed when it came to criticisms of himself, and we know that George III was offended by Gillray's antics. But the prints of Thomas Rowlandson, with their gentle humour, and lack of strident criticism of the royal family were much more palatable, much more collectable. It seems that George III and George IV formed a large collection of his works, which was added to in the reign of Queen Victoria. And when the majority of the caricature prints in the Royal
Collection were sold to the Library of Congress in 1921, the Rowlandsons were kept behind, probably an acknowledgement of both their quality, and their less vicious subject-matter – at the time, the librarian at Windsor described Rowlandson's work as 'rather social than political'. And so we are able to display wonderful impressions of the prints of this master caricaturist, many of them collected by the very members of the royal family who had such a fraught relationship with the satirical printmakers of the day.
Thank you.