A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering in the Old Days: Showing the State of Political Parties and Party Warfare at the Hustings and in the House of Commons from the Stuarts to Queen VictoriaGrego, Joseph
History
A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering in the Old Days: Showing the State of Political Parties and Party Warfare at the Hustings and in the House of Commons from the Stuarts to Queen Victoria
Grego, Joseph
Great Britain -- Politics and government; Great Britain. Parliament -- Election
Other caricatures appeared on the same subject, which excited, as
usual, the largest share of public interest during the elections
throughout the country. One of these first appeared, in compliment
to the Scottish Rebellion, the latest novelty of the time, as “The
Jaco-Independo-Rebello-Plaido.” In this version the business of the
election is represented to take place before Westminster Hall, as a
further allusion to the Jacobites and Lord Lovat’s trial there. The two
parties and their respective head-quarters, established at taverns,
are represented, and above all hovers the power of Destruction, always
pictured as an important agent of “the other side,” according to the
respective allegations of the contending parties. The Devil, in the
present instance, is made “to take care of his own,” and has a stock of
halters and axes for the rebels. “I have the Fee in my hands,” saith
the Evil One. One side is appropriated to Ministerialists at the sign
of Jolly Bacchus and the (Rabbit) Warren. Two persons are leaning from
the first-floor window, and exhorting those with votes to “Give the
Devil his due”--_i.e._ the Jacobites. The most prominent figure is a
butcher; and no doubt, according to Mr. F. G. Stephens’s suggestion,
the person thus implied is Mr. Butcher, the Duke of Bedford’s agent,
and a less distinguished person than the “Cumberland Duke” pictured in
the “Two-Shilling Butcher.” He is waving a scroll endorsed, “Trentham
and Warren.” The butcher agent is surrounded by partisans; Admiral Sir
Peter Warren’s sailors (a Lascar among them) are asserting “bludgeon
law;” the people are pushing to the Governmental head-quarters, crying
“No independency” and “No Pretender,” as if the terms were synonymous;
a Frenchman may be identified in the crowd; and a person is offering
the butcher a paper, “They squeak.” The head-quarters of the opposite
party is shown as a Jacobite house. The flag displayed is adorned with
the figure of an owl dressed in a full wig and a counsellor’s bands,
and indicates “Morgan’s Ghost,” the Morgan thus favoured having been
a Jacobite barrister who had the misfortune to be implicated in the
abortive rising of 1745 in the interests of the Pretender, which cost
Morgan his life. The adherents rallying round this questionable house,
intended as a reflection upon the Association of Independent Electors
of Westminster, who were stigmatized as friends of the Jacobites,
are dressed for the most part in plaids, and wear Scotch bonnets, to
imply their Jacobite sympathies. This caricature was republished,
with the hustings at Covent Garden substituted for Westminster Hall,
and the Devil very civilly giving place to the figure of an angel,
with the legend “Faithful to King and country.” The title was changed
to “The Humours of the Westminster Election; or, the Scald Miserable
Independent Electors in the Suds,” 1747, with the following lines:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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