Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 8

A burst of caricature heralded the coming triumph of the Puritans in 1640, the year of the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford. Many of the pictures recorded both the sufferings and the joyful deliverance of the Puritan clergymen. Thus we have in one of them a glowing account of the return of the three gentlemen whose ears furnished a repast for the Archbishop of Canterbury. They had been imprisoned for many years in the Channel Islands, from which they were conveyed to Dartmouth, and thence to London, hailed with acclamations of delight and welcome in every village through which they pa.s.sed. All the expenses of their long journey were paid for them, and presents of value were thrust upon them as they rode by. Within a few miles of London they were met by such a concourse of vehicles, hors.e.m.e.n, and people that it was with great difficulty they could travel a mile in an hour. But when at length, in the evening, they reached the city, ma.s.ses of enthusiastic people blocked the streets, crying, "Welcome home! welcome home!" and strewing flowers and rosemary before them. Thousands of the people carried torches, which rendered the streets lighter than the day. They were three hours in making their way through the crowd from Charing Cross to their lodgings in the city, a distance of a mile.

It was during the exaltation of the years preceding the civil war that such pictures appeared as the one here given, urging a union between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland against the foe of both.

This is copied from an original impression in the collection of the New York Historical Society.

The caricaturists pursued Laud and Strafford even to the scaffold. The archbishop was the author of a work ent.i.tled "Canons and Inst.i.tutions Ecclesiastical," in which he gave expression to his extreme High-church opinions. In 1640 the victorious House of Commons canceled the canons adopted from this work, and fined the clergy who had sat in the Convocation. A caricature quickly appeared, called "Archbishop Laud firing a Cannon," in which the cannon is represented as bursting, and its fragments endangering the clergymen standing near. Laud's committal to the Tower was the occasion of many broadsheets, one of which exhibits him fastened to a staple in a wall, with a long string of taunting stanzas below:

"Reader, I know thou canst not choose but smile To see a Bishop tide thus to a ring!

Yea, such a princely prelate, that ere while Could three at once in _Limbo patrum_ fling; Suspend by hundreds where his worship pleased, And them that preached too oft by silence eas'd;

"Made Laws and Canons, like a King (at least); Devis'd new oaths; forc'd men to sweare to lies!

Advanc'd his lordly power 'bove all the rest.

And then our Lazie Priests began to rise; But painfull ministers, which plide their place With diligence, went downe the wind apace.

"Our honest Round heads too then went to racke; The holy sisters into corners fled; Cobblers and Weavers preacht in Tubs for lacke Of better Pulpits; with a sacke instead Of Pulpit-cloth, hung round in decent wise, All which the spirit did for their good devise.

"Barnes, Cellers, Cole-holes, were their meeting-places, So sorely were these babes of Christ abus'd, Where he that most Church-government disgraces Is most esteem'd, and with most reverence us'd.

It being their sole intent religiously To rattle against the Bishops' dignity.

"Brother, saies one, what doe you thinke, I pray, Of these proud Prelates, which so lofty are?

Truly, saies he, meere Antichrists are they.

Thus as they parle, before they be aware, Perhaps a Pursuivant slips in behind, And makes 'em run like hares before the wind.

"A yeere agone 'tad been a hanging matter T'ave writ (nay, spoke) a word 'gainst little Will; But now the times are chang'd, men scorne to flatter; So much the worse for Canterbury still, For if that truth come once to rule the roast, No mar'le to see him tide up to a post.

"By wicked counsels faine he would have set The Scots and us together by the eares; A Patriark's place the Levite long'd to get, To sit bith' Pope in one of Peter's chaires.

And having drunke so deepe of Babels cup, Was it not time, d'ee think, to chaine him up?"

In these stanzas are roughly given the leading counts of the popular indictment against Archbishop Laud. Other prints present him to us in the Tower with a halter round his neck; and, again, we see him in a bird-cage, with the queen's Catholic confessor, the two being popularly regarded as birds of a feather. In another, a stout carpenter is holding Laud's nose to a grindstone, while the carpenter's boy turns the handle, and the archbishop cries for mercy:

"Such turning will soon deform my face; Oh! I bleed, I bleed! and am extremely sore."

But the carpenter reminds him that the various ears that he had caused to be cut off were quite as precious to their owners as his nose is to him. A Jesuit enters with a vessel of holy water with which to wash the extremely sore nose. One broadsheet represents Laud in consultation with his physician, who administers an emetic that causes him to throw off his stomach several heavy articles which had been troubling him for years. First, the "Tobacco Patent" comes up with a terrible wrench. As each article appears, the doctor and his patient converse upon it:

"_Doctor._ What's this? A book? _Whosoever hath bin at church may exercise lawful recreations on Sunday._ What's the meaning of this?

"_Canterbury._ 'Tis the booke for Pastimes on the Sunday, which I caused to be made. But hold! here comes something. What is it?

"_Doctor._ 'Tis another book. The t.i.tle is, 'Sunday no Sabbath.' Did you cause this to be made also?

"_Canterbury._ No; Doctor Pocklington made it; but I licensed it.

"_Doctor._ But what's this? A paper 'tis; if I be not mistaken, a Star-Chamber order made against Mr. Prinne, Mr. Burton, and Dr.

Bastwicke. Had you any hand in this?

"_Canterbury._ I had. I had. All England knoweth it. But, oh, here comes up something that makes my very back ake! O that it were up once! Now it is up, I thank Heaven!

"_Doctor._ 'Tis a great bundle of papers, of presentations and suspensions. These were the instruments, my lord, wherewith you created the tongue-tied Doctors, and gave them great Benefices in the Country to preach some twice a year at the least, and in their place to hire some journeyman Curate, who will only read a Sermon in the forenoone, and in the afternoone be drunke, with his parishioners for company."

By the same painful process the archbishop is delivered of his "Book of Canons," and finally of his mitre; upon which the doctor says, "Nay, if the miter be come, the Divell is not far off. Farewell, my good lord."

There still exist in various collections more than a hundred prints relating directly to Archbishop Laud, several of which give burlesque representations of his execution. There are some that show him asleep, and visited by the ghosts of those whom he had persecuted, each addressing him in turn, as the victims of Richard III. spoke to their destroyer on Bosworth Field. One of the print-makers, however, relented at the spectacle of an old man, seventy-two years of age, brought to the block. He exhibits the archbishop speaking to the crowd from the scaffold:

"Lend me but one poore teare, when thow do'st see This wretched portraict of just miserie.

I was Great Innovator, Tyran, Foe To Church and State; all Times shall call me so.

But since I'm Thunder-stricken to the Ground, Learn how to stand: insult not ore my wound."

This one poor stanza alone among the popular utterances of the time shows that any soul in England was touched by the cruel fanatic's b.l.o.o.d.y end.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "England's Wolfe with Eagle's Clawes" (Prince Rupert), 1647.]

During the civil war and the government of Cromwell, 1642 to 1660, nine in ten of all the satirical prints that have been preserved are on the Puritan side. A great number of them were aimed at the Welsh, whose brogue seems to have been a standing resource with the mirth-makers of that period, as the Irish is at present. The wild roystering ways of the Cavaliers, their debauchery and license, furnished subjects. The cruelties practiced by Prince Rupert suggested the annexed ill.u.s.tration, in which the author endeavored to show "the cruell Impieties of Blood-thirsty Royalists and blasphemous Anti-Parliamentarians under the Command of that inhumane Prince Rupert, Digby, and the rest, wherein the barbarous Crueltie of our Civill uncivill Warres is briefly discovered."

Beneath the portrait of England's wolf are various narratives of his b.l.o.o.d.y deeds. One picture exhibits the plundering habits of the mercenaries on the side of the king in Ireland. A soldier is represented armed and equipped with the utensils that appertain to good forage: on his head a three-legged pot, hanging from his side a duck, a spit with a goose on it held in his left hand as a musket, a dripping-pan on his arm as a shield, a hay-fork in his right hand for a rest, with a string of sausages for a match, a long artichoke at his side for a sword, bottles of canary suspended from his belt, slices of toast for shoe-strings, and two black pots at his garters. This picture may have been called forth by an item in a news-letter of 1641, wherein it was stated that such "great store of pilidges" was daily brought into Drogheda that a cow could be bought there for five shillings and a horse for twelve.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Charles II. and the Scotch Presbyterians, 1651.

"_Presbyter._ Come to the grinstone, Charles; 'tis now too late To recolect, 'tis presbiterian fate.

"_King._ Yon Covenant pretenders, must I bee The subject of your Tradgie Comedie?

"_Jockey._ I, Jockey, turne the stone of all your plots, For none turnes faster than the turne-coat Scots.

"_Presbyter._ We for our ends did make thee king, be sure, Not to rule us, we will not that endure.

"_King._ You deep dissemblers, I know what you doe, And, for revenges sake, I will dissemble too."]

The abortive attempt of Charles II., after the execution of his father, to unite the Scots under his sceptre, and by their aid place himself upon the throne of England, called forth the caricature annexed, in which an old device is put to a new use. A large number of verses explain the picture, though they begin by declaring:

"This Embleme needs no learned Exposition; The World knows well enough the sad condition Of regal Power and Prerogative.

Dead and dethron'd in _England_, now alive In _Scotland_, where they seeme to love the Lad, If hee'l be more obsequious than his Dad, And act according to Kirk Principles, More subtile than were Delphic Oracles."

In the verses that follow there is to be found one of the few explicit justifications of the execution of Charles I. that the lighter literature of the Commonwealth affords:

"But _Law and Justice_ at the last being done On the hated Father, now they love the Son."

The poet also taunts the Scots with having first stirred up the English to "doe Heroick Justice" on the late king, and then adopting the heir on condition of his giving _their_ Church the same fell supremacy which Laud had claimed for the Church of England.

The Ironsides of Cromwell soon accomplished the caricaturist's prediction:

"But this religious mock we all shall see, Will soone the downfall of their Babel be."

We find the pencil and the pen of the satirist next employed in exhibiting the young king fleeing in various ludicrous disguises before his enemies.

An interesting caricature published during the civil wars aimed to cast back upon the Malignants the ridicule implied in the nickname of Roundhead as applied to the Puritans. It contained figures of three ecclesiastics, "Sound-head, Rattle-head, and Round-head." Sound-head, a minister sound in the Puritan faith, hands a Bible to Rattle-head, a personage meant for Laud, half bishop and half Jesuit. On the other side is the genuine Round-head, a monk with shorn pate, who presents to Rattle-head a crucifix, and points to a monastery. Rattle-head rejects the Bible, and receives the crucifix. Over the figures is written:

"See heer, Malignants Foolerie Retorted on them properly, The Sound-head, Round-head, Rattle-head, Well placed, where best is merited."

Below are other verses in which, of course, Rattle-head and Round-head are belabored in the thorough-going, root-and-branch manner of the time, _Atheist_ and _Arminian_ being used as synonymous terms:

"See heer, the Rattle-heads most Rotten Heart, Acting the Atheists _or_ Arminians part."