Opposition Politics in Gullivers Travels

Putting out the Fire in Her Imperial Majesty's Apartment: Opposition Politics,
Anticlericalism, and Aesthetics

Author(s): Ronald Paulson
Source: ELH, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 79-107
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030274
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PUTTING OUT THE FIRE IN HER IMPERIAL MAJESTY'S
APARTMENT: OPPOSITION POLITICS,
ANTICLERICALISM, AND AESTHETICS
BY
RONALD PAULSON
In 1960, in the second volume of his biography of Sir Robert Walpole,
J. H. Plumb wrote that Gulliver's Travels was "one of the most remark-
able and virulent satires ever to be written against Walpole."' The only
trenchent allusion in Gulliver's Travels to Walpole (aside from general
references to ministers as well as princes) was in the third voyage to his
unsuccessful attempt to impose Wood's copper coinage on the Irish, and
this was mostly removed before publication.2 Bertrand Goldgar in 1976
made the point that anti-Walpole satire was only read into Gulliver's
Travels after the fact by the opposition; that Swift's general satire on
ministers and princes was only made particular by factious readers of
1726-27.1
Gulliver was published on 28 October 1726. The first political reading
was A Key, being Observations and Explanatory Notes, upon the Travels
of Lemuel Gulliver, a pamphlet announced on 5 December, which
connects Townshend and Walpole with Flimnap and Reldressal and the
purple, yellow, and white threads of the Lilliputians with the orders of
the Garter, Thistle, and Bath (13, 16).4 These references probably do, as
the author of the Key claims, reflect Swift's intention as he was finishing
Gulliver in 1725-26, in the year following the Drapier's Letters and the
scandal of Wood's Halfpence. But closer to the original intention of the
"Voyage to Lilliput" is the Key's reading of "the Conditions upon which
[Gulliver] was set at Liberty" after being pinioned by the Lilliputians to
the earth: "The Opposition made to Lemuel's Enlargement being almost
as considerable as what some English Peers struggled with before they
could get out of the Tower. ... And the Severities threatned against poor
Lemuel," the author continues, "some have resembled to the late Earl of
O----d's Sufferings" (17, 26), that is, to Oxford's imprisonment in the
Tower between 1715 and 1717. Two conclusions then are drawn by the
author of the Key from the "Voyage to Lilliput": "that the Emperor
himself is too much governed by Flimnap" and that the story of "the
Severities threatned against poor Lemuel" offers a retrospect on "the
four last Years of the Reign of a late Princess" (25).
ELH 63 (1996) 79-107 l 1996 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 79
As this pamphlet recognizes, the "Voyage to Lilliput" was in fact
essentially an allegory of the last four years of Queen Anne, focused on
the Peace of Utrecht-the war and peace settlement with Blefuscu-
and had little directly to say about the Walpole regime of 1721-26.
Although the author of the Key identifies Gulliver with Oxford, Swift
would at least equally have intended Bolingbioke, the actual architect of
the Peace, who fled certain retribution into exile in France/Blefuscu, as
Gulliver did. On the other hand, Irvin Ehrenpreis, in the final volume of
his biography of Swift (1983), notes of the "Voyage to Lilliput" that "The
dispelling of Gulliver's illusion as he learns more and more about the
imperial court evokes the enlightenment Swift suffered during the years
1711-14," and so shifts our attention from Oxford and Bolingbroke to
Swift himself.5
None of the Swift scholars, however, charting and distinguishing what
the "Voyage to Lilliput" meant to Swift and was made to mean by his first
readers, has taken cognizance of a publication that clearly did reinterpret
Gulliver's Travels as a topical anti-ministerial satire-and was the first to
do so: William Hogarth's print, The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver
(fig. 1), which was announced as "speedily to be published" in the Daily
Post of 3 December and as published in the Daily Post of the 27th.6
The earliest indications of an organized campaign of opposition to
Walpole were during the summer of 1726 in the meeting at Bolingbroke's
country estate of Dawley-and the earliest unmistakable sign was on 5
December when the first issue of Nicholas Amhurst's journal, The
Craftsman, was published. It would seem to be a sign of coordination
that Hogarth's print was announced on the 3rd of December, two days
before the first issue of the Craftsman. The Key, also announced on the
5th, was published by Edmund Curll, who had published most of
Amhurst's earlier works. One could argue, perhaps, that Hogarth simply
took off from the poem prefixed to the Key-"Verses writ in the Blank
Leaf of a Lady's Gulliver, as it lay open, in an Apartment of St. James's
Palace."'7 The true "key," the "Verses" explain, is to be found "Here," in
St. James's Palace, where we see "Magna Charta wave aloft in Air; / And
Judges see at Ombre with the Fair," and so on-bishops consorting with
statesmen, senators purchasing their places, and Virtue subservient to
Vice. In the context of the launching of the Craftsman this reading
clearly applies, more specifically than Swift's (with its primary reference
to 1714), to Walpole's ministry in the year 1726.8
Hogarth's print, however, refers to a scene that is not mentioned in
Curll's Key or any of the other pamphlets published in December as
80 Opposition Politics, Anticlericalism, and Aesthetics
-a /
/
Figure 1. Hogarth, The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver (first state); etching and
engraving; 7V/16 x 121/2 in.; December 1726; courtesy of the Trustees of the British
Museum, London.
responses to Gulliver's Travels. It claims to "illustrate" Gulliver, but it
shows a hypothetical scene, one very different from the actual punish-
ments projected and the one decided upon-the blinding of Gulliver
and his slow starvation. The punishment Hogarth envisages-an en-
ema-refers not to Gulliver's refusal to lay waste Blefuscu/France but to
his magnanimous attempt to put out the fire in the Empress of Lilliput's
apartment in the Lilliputian palace-to "the Manner by which I had
performed it" and specifically to the empress who, "conceiving the
greatest Abhorrence of what I had done, removed to the most distant
Side of the Court, firmly resolved that those Buildings should never be
repaired for her Use; and, in the Presence of her chief Confidents, could
not forbear vowing Revenge" (56). Hogarth is explicit in his caption
beneath the print: "The Punishment inflicted on Lemuel Gulliver by
applying a Lilypucian fire Engine to his Posteriors for his Urinal
Profanation of the Royal Pallace at Mildendo." He imagines a homeo-
pathic punishment, water corrected by more water.
If the first crime, refusal to lay waste Blefuscu, obviously applied to
Oxford, Bolingbroke, and the Treaty of Utrecht, the second-the crime
Ronald Paulson 81
for which Hogarth has Gulliver punished-evokes Swift's own crime, the
impiety of publishing A Tale of a Tub (1704), a satire which was
construed by Queen Anne as the profanation of her beloved Church of
England-which Swift himself, in the "Author's Apology" (added in
1710), defended in similar terms. What some saw as disrespect, he
argued, was the only way to extirpate not religion but "Corruptions in
Religion"-that is, to put out the conflagration of radical religious
sects-but it cost him the advancement he felt he deserved in the
Church of England and exiled him instead to Dublin.
On the face of it, Hogarth interprets Gulliver as an image of the
honest Englishman-a huge version of Arbuthnot's John Bull-who
stupidly gives up his "liberty" to these pygmy politicians and clergymen.
He singles out one of Swift's central themes in the first voyage, Gulliver's
Whiggish assertion of his liberty at just the moment when he surrenders
it to these tiny, pompous, antlike tyrants (themselves Whigs and
Hanoverians). This in itself is a cogent piece of literary criticism on
Hogarth's part as well as potent political satire, though not focused
specifically on Walpole.
But he transfers the punishment from Gulliver's eyes, the crucial
organ that designates his "liberty" in Lilliput (his spectacles were one
piece of property he withheld from the Lilliputian confiscation), to his
"nether eye," the bottom of his alimentary canal-from perception to (in
Gulliver's terms) a shameful, uncleanly evacuation. Within the text
Hogarth could have taken the idea, itself a Swiftean commonplace, from
Gulliver's emphasis on the excretory function, especially his insistence on
withdrawing for this purpose as far away as his chain will permit from the
"temple" in which he is housed-because he is cleanly, but also perhaps
because he wishes to avoid the profanation of a church (Queen Anne's
Church of England), though it is disused by the Lilliputians themselves.
The abandoned, ruined church could be taken as an ideal in the past on
the model of Swift's own Argument against abolishing Christianity in
which the ideal is the faint memory of apostolic Christianity. But in
Hogarth's Punishment the satire is not (as in Swift's Argument) on
secularizing latitudinarians but the Church of England itself-its bishop,
its clergy-whose focus on the punishment of a supposed blasphemer
permits their parishioners to turn to the worship of Pan. One conse-
quence is that their children are carried off unopposed by Gulliver-
scaled rats.
The focus on the church was timely. By 1726 Walpole's chief assistant
in matters of religion was the High Church Bishop of London, Edmund
Gibson, responsible for dispensing ecclesiastical preferment and so
control of the House of Lords-a point that would be repeated by
opposition propaganda in the years to follow and by Hogarth himself five
years later in A Harlot's Progress (1732), where Gibson and Walpole are
linked. Gibson was in power by 1723, called by Walpole "my Pope."9
Earlier, in his Codex Juris Ecclesiasticae (1713), which earned him the
nickname "Dr. Codex," Gibson had taken the position that ecclesiastical
authority should extend into civil affairs; primarily, as it developed in his
practice in the later 1720s, in the case of prosecutions of vice and
heterodoxy-which figure (related to the references to Gibson) in
Hogarth's Harlot's Progress. The Harlot was followed directly in both
title and focus on Bishop Gibson and a corrupt clergy by Richard
Savage's Progress of a Divine (1735). And at this time the Old Whig,
another anti-ministerial journal, was still equating "C-d-x" with monks,
popes, and popish bishops (8 May 1735).
Swift was obviously a major influence on Hogarth, and the influence
was reciprocated. It is likely that Swift himself, through his Dublin
publisher George Faulkner who (by the 1730s at least) imported
Hogarth's prints from London, saw The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver.'"
As Hogarth reinterpreted Gulliver in The Punishment, so a decade later
Swift in "The Legion Club" reinterpreted Hogarth's Rake's Progress,
Plate 8-but in Rake 8 Hogarth had himself reinterpreted Swift's own
vision of Bedlam in "A Digression on Madness" in A Tale of a Tub, the
work to which Swift had alluded in the palace-burning episode of
Gulliver and which Hogarth reinterpreted in The Punishment of Lemuel
Gulliver."
But there was a third party without whom it is difficult to imagine the
publication of Hogarth's Punishment at just this moment. He had to have
been at least informed by Amhurst of the inauguration of The Craftsman
on 5 December. Hogarth and Amhurst, young men of the same age and
background, lived near each other and were acquainted. In June 1726
Amhurst had published a collected edition of his satiric periodical
Terrae-Filius, to which Hogarth contributed a frontispiece (fig. 2). The
fact that the book and frontispiece were first announced in March 1722/
3, however, could suggest that they knew each other earlier.12 Up to 1724
Hogarth had given no indication of a political alignment. In that year he
published a series of satiric prints on cultural affairs supportive of Sir
James Thornhill, his artistic mentor (and later his father-in-law). Thornhill,
elected to parliament in 1722, was in fact a supporter of Walpole.'3 In
1724 Hogarth also published two prints that, while not specifically anti-
Walpole, were plainly anti-government: The South Sea Scheme and
Ronald Paulson 83
Royalty, Episcopacy, and Law. The emphasis of the satire in both prints,
and in a third, The Lottery, was more ecclesiastical than political.'4
Amhurst had reason to distrust Walpole and the kind of government
for which he stood. He had attached his wagon to Stanhope's star, and
the death of this rival had paved the way for Walpole's ascendency. For
Amhurst, however, the two most significant facts were the Bangorian
Controversy of 1717 and his expulsion from Oxford in 1719, evidently for
his part in defending Benjamin Hoadly's position and attacking English
"Papism" in a series of poems published in quick succession, collected
and reprinted in 1719 and again in 1720 (all published by Curll). What
he maintains directly and indirectly is Bishop Hoadly's denial that there
is a visible church of Christ, that is, that the church and its clergy carry
any authority whatever. Hoadly, the central spokesman of the anti-
Gibson position in the church, was the "latitudinarian" ecclesiastic
invoked later by Hogarth and Fielding as the embodiment of true (for
which read, liberal) Christianity in England, as opposed to priestcraft-
though he was accused by High Church clerics of deism.'5 The Oxford
story, as Amhurst formulated it and reformulated it in works between
1719 and 1726, was the persecution of a young man for his Protestant
Whig principles in a seat of Jacobitism and Laudian priestcraft. 6 This
expulsion was the story by which Amhurst came to identify himself and
be identified.
A typical manuscript note on the title page of his satiric poem
Protestant Popery: or, the Convocation of 1718 (a year before the
expulsion) identifies it as "by Nich: Amerst [sic] late Fellow of St Johns &
expelled from thence." Protestant Popery is addressed to, and presented
as a defense of Hoadly (with his portrait by Gerard Vandergucht as
frontispiece).17 Amhurst's pose is Hoadlian Protestant versus Oxford
Roman Catholic, but the latter stands in for all organized religion. He is
careful to distinguish between the New Testament Jesus and the figure
created and utilized to their own ends by the clergy:
Th'ambitious, upstart, sacrificing Priest
Reigns absolute, and lords it o'er his CHRIST;
On a new Foot projects the sov'reign Scheme,
His Prince a Subject, and himself Supreme.
(13)
These words invoke, by contrast, Hoadly's view of the proper subordina-
tion of religious to civil authority. Amhurst contrasts his poem generically
with John Gay's pastorals; that is, if Gay wrote anti-pastoral,
Mine be the bolder Province, to engage
A vicious Priesthood, and degen'rate Age;
The furious English-Papist to chastise,
And strip him of his Protestant Disguise.
(6)
His conclusion is that "Still in our Albion Popery remains; / The Name
proscrib'd, the Spirit still obtains" (13).18
Canto 1 of Protestant Popery is an attack on the Romish priestcraft;
canto 2 is addressed to Hoadly, who is pitted against the portrait of a
Nonjuror and the allegory of a Goddess Priestcraft and her children
Bigotry and Imagination, and her attendant Superstition. Amhurst is
parodying Paradise Lost-but he traces a Dunciad-like "progress" from
day to night, where the forces of ignorance and superstition reemerge in
George I's reign to undermine English Protestantism. The fourth and
fifth cantos depict the paper war waged by the contemporary Laudites
against Hoadly, whom by this time Amhurst has come to associate with
Jesus himself.
Protestant Popery was followed by The Protestant Session, a Poem
(1719), this time addressed to Stanhope, the chief minister. The poem
celebrates Stanhope and George I, as well as, once again, Hoadly, as
Protestant heroes who banish popery and superstition from England.
What happened between 1719 and the inauguration of The Craftsman in
1726 were the South Sea Bubble, the disgrace and death of Stanhope,
the rise to power of Walpole and with him Bishop Gibson. The chief
event, however, was personal. In his Poems on Several Occasions (1720),
which retains the portrait of Hoadly for its frontispiece, Amhurst makes
of central importance the fact of his expulsion by the Laudean ecclesias-
tics, and he presents it as a "punishment" (a word he emphasizes
throughout).'9 In the preface he acknowledges that he was called by the
Oxford authorities atheist, libertine, and freethinker, and an enemy to
religion and revelation. He dedicates the book to the Rev. Dr. De Laune,
president of St. John's College, from which he had been expelled, and
admits that some of his poems "make a little free with your sacred Order;
but," he adds (the usual refrain, echoing Swift's own defense in his
"Apology" for A Tale of a Tub), "every candid reader will suppose that I
aim at bad Clergymen only" (vi).
He explains in great detail why he was expelled: When he arrived at
St. John's he "took Liberty for a real Blessing, and Religion for the real
Worship of God"; he mentions "with what tremendous veneration" he
took the sacrament--"but how much I am improved for the better since,
Ronald Paulson 85
let my worst Enemies bear witness." Because he is now "convinc'd of a
great Truth; namely, that Faith and a good Life are utterly independent
of each other" (vii). The particulars of his expulsion center upon
disrespect for the Church of England, especially in its High Church
aspects (embodied in "St. William Laud" and his "priestcraft"-with
Oxford pedantry a secular priestcraft). So, he tells us, he "got a cock-
horse upon Reason, and gallop'd away in romantick search of a fair Lady,
called Truth"-the usual words that were opposed by deists to religion
and the impositions of priestcraft. He finds this lady Truth imprisoned in
a castle "guarded by a numerous Regiment of black Giants," priests who
levy upon their subjects "immense sums of Money for maintaining them
in religious ignorance" (ix).
The result, in this ironic redaction of the story, is his submission:
"therefore, like other polite Malefactors, I heartily forgive my Accusers,
and confess that I deserv'd the punishment I suffer'd," and he promises
that if it were possible,
it would be the sole business of my Life to bolt new Mysteries out of
Scripture, and new points of Faith more difficult and abstruse than
those already impos'd upon Mankind, to shew how good a Church-
man I could be, and how much I could outstrip even the Athanasian
Believers. (xii-xiii)
And so he proceeds, with a humble, lengthy, and hyperbolic recantation:
"I can scarce forgive my self for my childish Behaviour," "My Eyes are
now open," "I hope all young Men will take warning from me," and "I
have indeed been a very naughty Boy" (xiii-xiv, xxi). With heavy irony he
apologizes and accepts his "punishment" "for thinking like one in his
Senses," which means, he makes abundantly clear in the following
sentences, "Freethinking."20
Settling into the life of a hack writer in London, in 1721 Amhurst
published the fifty Terrae-Filius essays (every Wednesday and Saturday
from 11 January to 6 July), satires on all aspects of Oxford, but focused in
nos. 14-18 on the subject of his expulsion. In the first issue he identifies
himself as Oxford's Terrae-Filius, the Saturnalian figure who has "at
certain seasons" license to "divert . . . with a merry oration in the
Fescennine manner, interspers'd with secret history, raillery, and scarcasm,
as the occasions of the times supply'd him with matter"-i.e., as a satirist
who exposes the lechery and hypocrisy of the Oxford clerics and
scholars.2 In the second issue he tells how the "truths of religion" have
been "wrapt up ... in a cloud of hard names" by "ill-minded priests in all
ages" and called "mysteries"-to be exposed by Terrae-Filius, who
identifies himself as "a free-thinker, and a free-speaker" (8-9). The
name, literally son of the earth, but usually translated bastard, reflected
on his natural but left-handed relation to the "father" or moderator of
formal academic disputations, and therefore to those legitimate "sons,"
the candidate B.A.s and M.A.s, those who, unlike Amhurst, received
their degrees and fellowships.
Hogarth's illustration for the collected edition of Terrae-Filius (pub-
lished in June of 1726) shows at its center a grim clergyman tearing in
two a copy of Terrae-Filius, within what appears to be an ecclesiastical
court (fig. 2).22 Poor Amhurst, prevented from ascending the lecturn, is
being stripped of his wig and robe by clerics assisted by a couple of
Oxford "toasts" (women offended by his satire of Oxford immorality,
Strephon's Revenge: A Satire on the Oxford Toasts [1718]).23
Thus Amhurst suffers a "punishment" which, though it would hardly
have found a sympathetic audience in Swift, was as misguided, he would
like to think, as the attacks on Swift's "irreligion" and "blasphemy" in A
Tale of a Tub. And in this sense, Hogarth's was a perceptive illustration of
Gulliver's sacrilege, dictated by one whose own case would have made
him susceptible to this reading. Amhurst's reference to his "childish
Behaviour," his apology for having been "a very naughty Boy," may have
inspired Hogarth to bare Gulliver's bottom as for a juvenile flogging.
Amhurst's citation of De Laune's "many strenuous Pulpit-Attacks" upon
such "Heresiarchs" (xxvi) may reappear in the pulpit adjacent to Gulliver's
bottom.
Given the coincidence of the first issue of The Craftsman and the
announcement of Hogarth's print, and of Amhurst's views of religion and
Hogarth's, the paranoid scenario would seem to be Amhurst's, and so the
association of his personal trauma with England's and specifically under
the aegis of church and state, with the church clearly predominating.
While in the "Voyage to Lilliput" the only allusion to the church is the
ruined temple in which Gulliver is lodged, in Hogarth's print the temple
is centered, adjacent to the bishop in his teapot pulpit-the Walpole
figure, carried in a thimble, is marginalized.
Amhurst and Hogarth have focused on these issues in the graphic
image of The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver. The same issues do not
appear in The Craftsman itself, except for a reference in No. 4 (16
December) to liberty of the press and speech, which picks up the
emphasis of Amhurst's Dedication to the Poems on Several Occasions
and the word "punishment."24 Caleb D'Anvers (Amhurst's persona) starts
Ronald Paulson 87
W 4ar/
Figure 2. Hogarth, Frontispiece to "Terrae-Filius"; etching and engraving; 55/16
x 31/16 in.; June 1724; courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.
with an epigraph from Seneca which he translates as: "The Punishment
of learned Men ... was a new and unusual thing" (31). He concludes the
paper with Seneca's observation that tyrants gained only "Infamy to
themselves, and Glory to those whom they have punished" (38).25
Liberty of the press, however, is applied to government and religion,
state and church, and is specified as the right to criticize their corrup-
tions (No. 2, 9 December). More interesting, Amhurst launches his
satire in these first issues with a sort of coding that represents one thing
(a safe social situation) but refers to another (an incendiary political
situation). Caleb D'Anvers talks about a bad servant (named Robin) and
the reader sees that he is talking about political "servants," specifically
about the king's chief minister Sir Robert Walpole. The "craft" of The
Craftsman itself is, of course, "state-craft" and "political craft" (Nos. 1,
15). When Caleb discusses quackery in medicine, the readers see that he
is talking about "quackery" in politics (No. 3). When he introduces the
theater and (with it) the fall of princes, and so the example of Shakespeare's
Cardinal Wolsey, the readers see Walpole (Nos. 8, 72). When he
mentions "Great Men," they again see Walpole.
Whether or not at the suggestion of Amhurst, Hogarth carried the
same strategy into a print that he advertised as published in tandem with
The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver-a topical, apparently merely repor-
torial depiction of the scandalous hoax of Mary Toft, the "Rabbit
Woman" of Godalming. Word of her extraordinary delivery of seventeen
rabbits began to appear in the newspapers of the second week in
November. The Weekly Journal published an account in the issue
immediately preceding the one of 26 November with a letter from
Ephraim Gulliver (Lemuel's brother) and again in the issue of 3
December. The exposure of the hoax was reported on 10 December, and
there was a front page essay on the 17th (also in The London Journal of
the 17th). Hogarth's print, Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godliman in
Consultation (fig. 3), was announced as published in the Post-Boy of 22-
24 December, just two days before The Punishment of Lemuel Culliver.26
London physicians, conspicuously including court physicians, had
been taken in by the hoax. Obviously, a print on this subject, appearing as
Caleb D'Anvers was writing about quackery in medicine and in politics,
about hoaxes on the stage and in politics, would be read the same way
one read The Craftsman. But the image of the body, and the intrusion of
its nether parts, also relate the two prints. The rabbits fill the same space
as the Lilliputians, as opposed to the parallel figures of Gulliver and
Mary Toft; and the court physicians vouch for Toft's authenticity as the
Ronald Paulson 89
AA-
IE 74;,r.
4i~~Ps&P/~4'Op~r/iir.A s_I _
f/,.#.,,../,Lov _
'Il~~ecdrj PI;r tsl~
,I" D ', ,,s o,,",,z.

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CPtg: rnk Ar4~h'
Figure 3. Hogarth, Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godlinmen in Consultation; etching;
65/16 x 97/16 in.; December 1726; courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.
representatives of church and state carry out their punishment of
Gulliver. Both Gulliver and Toft are passive parties being exploited by
their "betters," and both lend themselves to the exploitation.
Hogarth produced other anti-Walpole satires in 1727-28 (in which he
picked up Amhurst's analogies of Walpole and Wolsey, Walpole and
Falstaff),27 but he was apparently bought off in 1728 when Walpole
commissioned him to engrave the plate made from the Great Seal that
was melted down when George I died and Walpole momentarily
relinquished the Lord Treasureship.28 In the years following, however, in
both the Harlot's and Rake's Progress (1732, 1735), while ostensibly
telling moral stories of crime and punishment, Hogarth recoded political
as social issues, glancingly connecting Colonel Charteris and Bishop
Gibson with Walpole, continuing to play with analogies of the sort set
forth by Amhurst in the Craftsman.
Hogarth's politics at this point was apparently independent of, if not at
odds with, Thornhill's, although the commission of the Walpole Salver in
1727-28 could have been through Thornhill's good graces as a Walpole
supporter. We know that in 1729 Thornhill angrily repudiated Hogarth
when he eloped with his daughter Jane, but in 1730 he collaborated with
his son-in-law on a group portrait of M.P.s that included Walpole. All of
this may be taken as further evidence of Amhurst's influence on
Hogarth's politics but also of Hogarth's relative indifference to the
political, as opposed to the religious, aspect of his satire.
The central image of The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver, Gulliver's
bottom, returned in later anti-Walpole satire, but now identified as
Walpole's own or as George II's, an object not of punishment but of
worship. The most scandalous case was the play of 1737 called The
Golden Rump, which only survives in a satiric print titled The Festival of
the Golden Rump published in Common Sense and accompanied by an
explanatory "Vision."29 George II is a satyr mounted on a pedestal, whose
rump is being worshiped; the figure recalls the Pan-satyr figure in
Hogarth's Punishment and indeed conflates this figure as object of
worship with Gulliver's rump. The priest officiating at the ceremony is
Walpole.
Idol-Worship or The Way to Preferment (1740, fig. 4) showed Walpole
himself as "pagod," bottom facing out, filling the gateway of St. James's
Palace, very much as Gulliver was positioned in the doorway of the
church. Yet another, at the time of Walpole's fall, Bro. Robert under his
Last Purgation (1742), showed him being purged by Cardinal Fleury
with a clyster like the one employed in Hogarth's print.30 In the mid-
1740s, following Walpole's fall, the term "Broadbottom" was applied to
the ministry of his successor, Henry Pelham,31 and finally, in 1757, the
opposition adapted Hogarth's print of 1726 to recommend the "purging"
of various members of the "Broadbottom." The printseller Robert Sayer,
who owned the copperplate, reissued it, without Hogarth's permission,
and retitled it The Political Clyster, which proposes that Lord Hardwick,
the Duke of Newcastle, Andrew Stone, and Lord Anson "should be
purged." Only the "purge" of Hogarth's original meaning remains, now
reversed: Gulliver (for which read, John Bull) should be purged of not by
these politicians in the ruling ministry.32
From this sequence of rereadings of Hogarth's image we can draw the
inference, given the original positioning of Gulliver's rump in the
doorway of the church, that Hogarth may have intended it as formally
parallel to the rabbit birth in Cunicularii. The latter is, one of the doctors
exclaims, "A great birth," and the composition resembles a traditional
scene of Wise Men bearing gifts to the Christ Child, but in this case
arriving fortuitously at the moment of birth: They are there to witness a
"Nativity" like the one in which the birth, as the deists complained, had
Ronald Paulson 91
KING IDOL
Figure 4. Anon., Idol-Worship or the Way to Preferment; engraving; 1740; courtesy of
the Lewis-Walpole Library, Yale University.
precisely gone unwitnessed. The jest lies in combining the "Miracle" of
the Birth of Christ with the "hoax" of Toft's litter of rabbits; in replacing
the three Wise Men with the three "Wise Men of Godlimen," who are
quacks (according to Hogarth's epigraph from Hudibras, "They held
their Talents most Adroit / For any Mystical Exploit"); and in replacing
Mary the Mother with Mary Toft and Christ with the rabbits. The Mary-
Mary analogy is made unmistakable by Toft's identification in the "key"
as "The Lady in the straw," as if in a manger though no straw is in
evidence. The Latin title plays on the pun of cuniculus (rabbit) and
cunnus (vulva); and the foremost Wise Man is "An Occult Philosopher
searching into the Depth of Things." The rabbit birth is, of course (like,
it is implied, the Virgin Birth), fraudulent: yet another rabbit carcass
("too big") is being offered for sale at the door.
Besides being on a wavelength with the Craftsman satire of Walpole,
suggesting that Toft is a Mary of our time, corrupted and Walpolean,
Cunicularii is a parody, in the manner of Anthony Collins and Thomas
Woolston, which "historicizes" the New Testament story in order to
demystify and "allegorize" it. In 1724 Collins, in his Discourse of the
Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, had started his
demystification of Scripture with the example of the Virgin Birth-
always, among free-thinkers, the miracle that evoked the most mirth
(commonsense said the story of Mary's virgin conception was a hoax and
the aged Joseph a cuckold). He had sought to uncover "the plain drift
and design" of the story, "literally, obviously, and primarily understood";
which he therefore was forced to interpret in "a secondary or typical, or
mythical, or allegorical sense.""33 In Woolston's Discourses on the Miracles
of our Saviour (1727-29) this sense proved to be Jesus' attack on

priestcraft.
In his First Discourse, published early in 1727, Woolston satirizes the
Nativity, remarking of the "Wisemen" that had they acted "as wise as well
as good Men," they would have brought gifts of not gold, frankincense,
and myrrh but soap, candles, and sugar. In the same passage he refers to
Mary as Jesus' "Mother in the Straw."34 The similarity of the phrases
(Woolston's "Mother in the Straw" and Hogarth's "Lady in the straw")
makes me suspect that either Woolston's book was in circulation before
the end of 1726 (the earliest advertisement I have found is the
Craftsman's in April 1727),35 or Woolston saw Hogarth's print as he was
writing, or Hogarth had access to Woolston's manuscript. The last raises
a whole new issue of whether Woolston was part of the group that
included Amhurst and Hogarth-and so of a three-way collaboration on
the uses of innuendo and irony. Amhurst was writing his first Craftsman
Ronald Paulson 93
essays at the same time that Woolston was writing his First Discourse. It
is plausible to argue, at the least, that Amhurst's particular rhetoric is
parallel with, part of the same discourse as, Woolston's. Woolston's
Discourses became the center of the controversy over the application of
wit to religious texts and doctrines; the crucial terms were coding, wit
and irony, implication and innuendo.36 Cunicularii is most satisfactorily
explained by the confluence of these three men at just this moment;
which would also explain Hogarth's invoking Woolston, following his
conviction for blasphemy, in A Harlot's Progress."3
Cunicularii and The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver are twin
scatalogical demystifications of the "mysteries" of the Christian religion.
In these two prints, published within a day of each other, Hogarth
reduces the Virgin Birth to a hoax concerning rabbits and the church
itself to a huge bottom. An irony in The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver,
given Hogarth's choice of the enema, is that the portal of the church is
going to be physically profaned38-in fact, precisely as Hogarth himself
was to profane the portal of a church in Kent in June 1732.3" In satiric
terminology, if we parallel the birthing rabbits and the punishing
Lilliputians, the latter fill the place of Gulliver's prospective evacuation.
They can be regarded, in popular body imagery, as either about to be
drowned in excrement (as the people of Paris were by Gargantua's urine)
or as themselves excremental.40
Amhurst and Hogarth, it would seem, held a set of beliefs that were
not easily accommodated to those of their colleagues in the Walpole
opposition such as Arbuthnot, Swift, Gay, and Pope. If Amhurst is the
author of The Twickenham Hotch-Potch, signed by Caleb D'Anvers, a
spinoff of The Beggar's Opera which spells out its anti-Walpole satire, he
is certainly not friendly toward the Scriblerians, whom he calls "an
impertinent Scotch-Quack, a Profligate Irish-Dean, the Lacquey of a
Superannuated Dutchess, and a little virulent Papist" (vi).41 These were
sentiments shared in the same years by Hogarth, Fielding, Thomas
Cooke, and others (all friends).42
Of course, it is well known that the opposition to Walpole was by no
means of a piece, by no means limited to, or distinguished by, the
Jacobite-Tory nostalgia of Swift himself (or Bolingbroke or Pope).43 The
first-mover of The Craftsman, the first person to reinterpret Gulliver's
Travels as an anti-Walpole satire, was a freethinker and Hanoverian
Whig, and certainly no "Ancient." Bolingbroke, also a freethinker, was
otherwise temperamentally one with the exiled Swift and the Roman
Catholic outsider Pope. For Amhurst and Hogarth the past was not a
Golden Age, a country-house idyll, but Jacobite, tyrannical, priestridden,
and (in Hogarth's case) dominated by academic and continental (in
effect, Roman Catholic) models of painting. Hatred of ecclesiastical
tyranny was the element shared by Amhurst, Bolingbroke, and Hogarth.
Bolingbroke, the figure who bridged the two groups, kept his deism to
himself, and both Amhurst and Hogarth kept theirs under the umbrella
of Hoadlian latitudiniarianism and Erastianism.
The strands of anti-Trinitarianism (Arianism and Socinianism) within
the church hierarchy, embodied in Hoadly, naturally served as one
challenge to the authority of the ministry, in particular to Bishop
Gibson's control over ecclesiastical patronage. "Attacks on 'priestcraft'
were," however, one historian writes, by this time "a well-established
part of the language of opposition Whiggery"; and another historian
notes that English Whiggery "was born as much in anticlericalism as in
constitutionalism, and church history was as natural a stamping ground
for Whig polemicists as was parliamentary history."44 On the other hand,
as Christine Gerrard adds in The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: "Anti-
clericalism was not synonymous with deism or secularism"; rather what
drove one wing of the Whig party, and participated in opposition to the
Walpole ministry, was Hoadlian Erastianism-in short, "calls for a
purged or reformed Church led by a Protestant king untrammelled by
priestcraft."45
The opposition cry of "liberty" referred not only to freedom of
property but freedom of thought, conscience, and speech, particularly in
religious matters. This was a rhetoric that began in the Restoration but
by the end of the century, in certain of its forms, had accrued traces of
deism along the way. In the context of the "Voyage to Lilliput," "liberty"
means the liberty of the subject, specifically (given the Lilliputians'
confiscation of Gulliver's possessions) of property; but in Hogarth's print,
in the context of the church in which Gulliver huddles, it is liberty of
conscience and religious expression.
Both Amhurst and Hogarth would have been associated with the
anticlerical wing of the opposition Whigs. The question is at what point
did Hogarth cross the line into critical deism? There is no proving
whether Amhurst crossed the line; certainly his assertion and reassertion
was that he stood for a Protestant monarch and an Erastian church, and
no more.46 The Craftsman itself, ironically conciliatory along the lines of
Amhurst's Poems on Several Occasions with its apology for his hetero-
doxy, avoided religious issues.
To be sure, ridiculing the superstition with which such trumpery as
the Toft hoax was received by the credulous does not necessarily
question revealed religion. It need not, Hogarth would have added; in
Ronald Paulson 95
the manner of Caleb D'Anvers in The Craftsman, his audience was
invited to have it either way. When the clergymen Humphrey Prideaux
and Isaac Barrow attacked Mohammed as an imposter guilty of frauds,
they intended no disrespect to Christ and his authentic miracles.47 But
Prideaux and Barrow attacking Mohammed as an imposter, not meaning
any disrespect to Christ's miracles, is at some distance from Hogarth's
presenting Mary Toft and her rabbit hoax in a composition that does on
the-face of it invoke the other Mary and the Wise Men--with, Hogarth's
explicit addition, the Virgin in the act of giving birth.
Before Cunicularii, as I have mentioned, Hogarth had published a
pair of satires, The South Sea Scheme and The Lottery (1724), with
elements of Christian parody. The first replaced the soldiers casting lots
for Christ's robe at the foot of the cross with clergymen, and the second,
parodying Raphael's Dispute on the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist,
replaced the Host with a lottery, Christian choice with existential chance.
These images could still be regarded as a depiction of Antichrist (as Pope
depicted an "Antichrist of wit" in The Dunciad a few years later), that is,
of a contemporary England that has degenerated from the ideals of
Christianity.
Cunicularii, however, asked to be read as a bold extension of the
Protestant attack on the particular emphases of Counter-Reformation
popery, and, in its context of Whig opposition anticlericalism, on the
supposed acceptance of these by High Church Anglican prelates: the
role of priests and their spiritual primacy, the nature of the Holy
Sacrament as the Body of Christ, and the worship of the Virgin as
Mother of Christ. Five years later, A Harlot's Progress takes off from, as
its nucleus, a parodic Annunciation scene whose composition was
formally anticipated by Cuniculari; the woman is named "M[ary?]
Hackabout"; and, in the light of Woolston's Discourses, Hogarth expands
this scene, now numbered Plate 3, into the historicizing and demystifying
of Scriptural miracles over a series of six plates. Through parodic echoes
of representations of the "Life of the Virgin" and "The Passion," he
focuses on the miracle of the Virgin Birth and the doctrine of the
Eucharist. Like Amhurst, he would doubtless have replied that these
were still Roman Catholic doctrines, being aped by Laudian High
Church prelates like Gibson. But in the Harlot he signaled the cross-over
from safe religious discourse to the outlying areas of heterodoxy and
blasphemy by referring to Woolston's Discourses and the context of
1720s deism (and upon its completion, on a celebratory romp, by
carrying out his "profanation" of the church porch in Kent).48 At this
point, Whig opposition anticlericalism became (or served as a mask for,
since the political message remained) critical deism.
Cunicularii permitted Hogarth to go a step beyond Amhurst's coding/
allegorizing in The Craftsman to the mode of Collins and Woolston. On
top of the political coding of court-ministry as pygmies or quack doctors
he adds the religious coding of Wise Men as quack doctors and the
Virgin Mary as Mary Toft. Thus the Wise Men are now only Walpolean
quacks and Mary the Mother is only Mary Toft; or, a few years later,
Mary Hackabout, the Harlot. By the final plate the Harlot has become
the 1730s reality (in Mandeville's sense) beneath the fiction of the
Eucharistic Sacrifice, the end of a sequence that runs from belief to
gullibility (in a hoax) to truth and the reallegorizing of that truth as the
Harlot's "sacrifice" for the sins of the men who have bought, exploited,
and destroyed her.
If the miracles of the Nativity and the Eucharist were not normative
in Hogarth's satires (as they were in Swift's and Pope's), what was? There
was little that was positive in his works from the Harlot onward: primarily
isolated and unproductive acts of charity, in the Harlot administered by
a disfigured servant woman, but thereafter by young women who tend to
be pretty. There was not, as expected in satire, an ideal-either religious,
political, or moral-until in the later 1730s he denominated an aesthetic
ideal, a young woman who mediates between extremes of unity and
variety, order and disorder; and thereafter it is precisely and only an
aesthetic ideal that survives for him in a world that is bankrupt in terms
of religion, politics, and morality.
In the 1750s he theorized this ideal in his treatise The Analysis of
Beauty (1753): In the subscription ticket and frontispiece, Columbus
breaking the Egg (fig. 5a), he adapts the composition of a Last Supper,
not to satirize (as in Harlot, Plate 6) but to celebrate Columbus's
messianic discovery of a "new world"-analogous to his own "discovery"
of the principle of Beauty in a serpentine line, found in greatest
abundance in the human female figure. In this case he uses the Last
Supper to indicate that religion is demystified only in order to be
recovered as natural beauty. To illustrate his point he replaces the Host
in the Last Supper with two serpentine eels, which form "Lines of
Beauty," and two eggs.49 In the story of Columbus's jest at the expense of
his detractors who said anyone could have made his discovery (a story
connected by artists with Brunelleschi), he challenges them to stand an
egg on end. When they cannot, he does so by breaking the egg and
Ronald Paulson 97
VARIETY
63
Joy ful
PLEA SED
70
Chan yeabe
AN GRY
Wrcia ful
c
d
Figure 5. a. Hogarth, Columbus breaking the Egg; April 1752 (detail); courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum, London.
b. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, title page; 1753 (detail).
c. Hogarth, Enthusiasm Delineated; c. 1759 (detail); courtesy of the Trustees
of the British Museum, London.
d. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, Plate 2; 1753 (detail).
standing it on its broken end-showing skeptics how he discovered a new
world. In the text of the Analysis, Hogarth asserts that the perfect oval of
a female face is not beautiful unless broken, for example by a lock of
hair.50
Opposite the frontispiece of the Analysis is the title page, whose logo
is the traditional triangle of the Trinity in which Hogarth has replaced
the Tetragrammaton (the four Hebrew letters that form the name of
God) with the Line of Beauty, once again naturalized with the head of a
serpent (fig. 5b, c).51 Indeed, in the margin of the second illustrative
plate a small figure (no. 70, fig. 5d) juxtaposes two Latin crosses. In the
text (92-93) Hogarth discusses them together with a Greek cross (no. 69)
as a schema for "the figure of a man." In order to "produce a figure of
tolerable variety" ("a genteel man"), in the illustration he shows one
Latin cross made of straight lines, the other of serpentine Lines of
Beauty. The Latin cross is of course the Christian crucifix, which he has
in effect aestheticized as well as humanized.52
Hogarth's process of aestheticization is not the same as that satirized
by Pope in Belinda's "sparkling Cross ... Which Jews might kiss, and
Infidels adore."53 The latter represents the modernity that degrades a
religious symbol (a lost ideal) into mere decoration. Hogarth may have
intended to imply degeneration when he showed the Eucharist reduced
to a lottery or Mary to a Walpolian Toft; but a cross that is "beautified" is
a very different thing. What for Swift and Pope was a negative process,
for Hogarth is a positive one.54
Toft was a living, contemporary Mary, consisting of serpentine lines
and a face that Hogarth has in fact beautified beyond that of the real
Toft.55 The "demystification" or reduction of Mary to Toft involves the
preference for the second (as in the Calvinist redefinition of the
Eucharist as a friendly meal, the altar as a dinner table), because it
contains the principle of natural beauty, which was excluded from the
straight lines of such religious symbols as the Tetragrammaton and the
Latin cross. The contrast is implicitly between religion (a clerical religion
of ridiculous doctrines such as the Trinity and the Eucharist) and Nature,
in its deist sense of God.56
This aesthetic formula is the final stage of a process that began with
political and religious satire. The relationship between anticlericalism
and aesthetics is fairly obvious, as Hogarth's example shows: Belief
demystified need not be a merely negative procedure (the usual criticism
that the critical deists destroy but cannot rebuild); belief can be
reformulated as enjoyment of the beautiful, the object of worship as the
object of aesthetic pleasure. But there is a connection as well between
Ronald Paulson 99
politics and aesthetics-at least so far as politics was symbiotic with
religion, as it was from Stuart times up to the Hanoverian Succession.
The flourishing of the anticlerical wing of the Whig opposition tells us
that the congruence of the monarchy with a religious position (Jacobitism
with popery; Hanoverianism with Protestantism) had reached a water-
shed. With the linkage, by way of Hoadly, of the Hanoverian Succession
and a liberal, Erastian Protestantism, the ancient politico-religious
equation was in fact sundered--or would have appeared so to Hogarth
and Amhurst.
The more general association of politics and aesthetics made by
recent scholars assumes the internalizing of the former by the latter; the
external laws of a police state were rendered more effective as Shaftes-
bury's moral sense, each sensitive citizen's self-subordination to a moral
(rather than overtly a political) imperative.57 Shaftesbury's politico-
aesthetics, however, was never an opposition ideology; it presupposed,
and indeed supported, the rule of the Whig oligarchy. Amhurst and
Hogarth attacked that oligarchy as it was embodied in Walpole, and
therefore demystified it, in part because it maintained a non-Erastian
position on religion, in part because it revealed what was wrong with the
politico-aesthetics of Shaftesbury's theory-that the political arm was
simply (like Walpole the "pagod") taking on the sacral aura of the
religious.
The Johns Hopkins University
NOTES
1 J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King's Minister (London: Cresset Press, 1960),
104. This paper was originally delivered at a symposium, "Jonathan Swift 1667-1745," at
Yale University in September 1995.
2 The suppressed passages were added in MS. to Ford's interleaved copy. There is
probably also an allusion to Walpole's successful banishment of Bishop Atterbury. My text
is Gulliver's Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959).
3 Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature,
1722-1742 (Lawrence: Univ. of' Kansas Press, 1976), 49-63.
4 Casual responses had appeared earlier in pro-government journals that saw nothing
seditious. The Weekly Journal: Or, the British Gazetteer of 26 November 1726 printed a
letter from Ephraim Gulliver, Lemuel's brother, retailing stories of Englishmen who are
afraid they will find Brobdingnagians hiding under their beds; of women delivered of
Brobdingnagian babies-the result of people's reading Gulliver's Travels. Passing re-
marks in the London Journal (12 Nov., 26 Nov.) were also neutral.
5 Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: the Man, His Works, and the Age, Vol. 3: Dean Swift
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 457.
6 The overlooking of this piece of evidence is all the more surprising because I had
dated Hogarth's print as early as 1965 in Hogarth's Graphic Works and again in 1971 in
Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Tinmes. On the other hand, I wrote that "The 'Voyage to
Lilliput' was, of course, full of particular and general reflections on the government, and
Hogarth's purpose in his print was apparently to point them out as clearly as possible." I
should have written, more precisely: "contained general reflections on government-
princes and ministers-and Hogarth's print applied these to the current situation, the
Craftsrnun's campaign against the Walpole Ministry in 1726." See Paulson, Hogarth's
Graphic Works (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), No. 108; 3d ed. (London: The Print
Room, 1989), No. 107; Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1971), 1:173; and again in the revised 3 volume version, Hogarth, Vol. 1: The
"Modern Moral Subject," 1697-1752 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1991), 166.
For the previous dating by Hogarth scholars of' 1727 or 1728, see John Nichols and
George Steevens, The Genuine Works of William Hogarth, 3 vols. (London, 1808-17),
2:200.
7 The "Verses" opened the Key in its collected edition, titled Lemuel Gulliver's Travels
into several Rerrumote Nations of the World. Compendiously Methodized.... It is significant
for Hogarth's Harlot, Plate 1, that the series ends seeing "Ch[arteri]s triumph with his
loaded Dice, / And Virtue ... subservient made to Vice."
8 The Craftsnum itself does not mention Gulliver's Travels until No. 14 (16-20 Jan.
1726/7), and then only as an example in an ironic history of ridicule in England. No. 25 (27
Feb.-3 Mar.), in what is apparently Amhurst's playful juxtaposition of advertisements,
relates a satire on Great Men and Prime Ministers with the announcement of a third
volume of Gulliver's Travels. But the spinoff volume 3 in fact proves to be quite innocent
of political intent-as were Menwirs of the Court of Lilliput and Gulliver Decypher'd, also
advertised in The Craftsmnum in 1727. In Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput, Gulliver tells
adventures he had omitted from the "Voyage to Lilliput"-all of a romantic sort, with love
the theme and no trace of political innuendo. Gulliver Decypher'd is merely a secret
history. There is a connection to Walpole on page viii ("Sir R-----" and "Great Men"), but
for its key it focuses on the last years of the Queen, and Walpole enters only as another
player in that drama (6).
9 Plumb, Walpole, 95. See Harlot's Progress, plates 1 and 3 (in Hogarth's Graphic
Works, Nos. 121, 123; Hogarth, Vol. 1, 2, 249, 253, 288-90, 389, 328-29). For Gibson, see
J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political
Practice during the Ancien Regime (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 277-315.
'0 The author of the pamphlet The Devil to Pay at St. Janmes's, published a few months
later (June 1727) at the time of the fracas involving the opera divas Cuzzoni and Bordoni
at the Royal Academy of Music, may recall The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver. It calls on
Hogarth to illustrate other scenes in Gulliver. Referring to the animals Gulliver brought
back with him: "But Hogarth the Engraver is making a Print after them, which will give a
juster Idea of them than I can" (13). The quotation is cited by Jeanne K. Welcher, "Swift-
Hogarth Give and Take," Ventures in Research, ed. Richard R. Griffith (C. W. Post
Center, New York, 1974), 23-25.
" Earlier Hogarth had adapted the clothes worship of chapter 1 of the Tale in Royalty,
Episcopacy, and Law (1725)-and later he drew upon the Tale and Mechanical Operation
of the Spirit in Enthusiasm Delineated and Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism
(1759-62). For that matter, he reinterpreted Swift's "Baucis and Philemon" in The
Sleeping Congregation (1736) and The Battle of the Books in his Battle of the Pictures
(1745). The one point of explicit contact was Faulkner's letter to Hogarth of 15 November
1740: "I have often the Favour of drinking your Health with Dr. Swift, who is a great
Admirer of yours, ... and desired me to thank you for your kind Present, and to accept of
Ronald Paulson 101
his Service" (BM. Add MS. 27995, 4). In this letter Faulkner ordered fifty sets of the
Distrest Poet, Enraged Musician, and the projected companion "on Painting" for his shop.
This corrects Paulson, Hogarth, Vol. 2: High Art and Low, 1732-50 (New Brunswick:
Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992), 394, n. 57.
12 See Hogarth's Graphic Works, No. 100. Amhurst first announced that the collected
Terrae-Filius would be published by subscription ("N.B. The Names of the Subscribers
will not be printed"-alluding to the supposedly scandalous nature of the essays), with "a
curious Frontispiece," in the London Journal of 9 March 1722/3 (and 13 March in his own
journal Pasquin). The book did not, however, appear until 1726, announced in the Daily
Post of 15 June. The style of Hogarth's print could suggest that it was executed as early as
1722; such announcements were, however, often mere advertising (in this case to keep
the public interested between the end of the periodical and the appearance of the book).
A second edition of Terrae-Filius in two volumes was advertised as "lately publish'd" in
Amhurst's Craftsman No. 20 (10-13 Feb. 1726/7), distinguished from the first by the
addition of a dedication to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford and "Remarks upon a late Book
entitled, University Education, by R. Newton, D. D. Principal of Hart-Hall." Amhurst
advertised Terrae-Filius from time to time in the Craftsman throughout 1727.
13 For Thornhill, see Hogarth, Vol. 1, 96-101. As to Gibson: There was a persistent but
unproved story that Hogarth's father came down from Westmoreland as a young man with
the young Edmund Gibson. The fact that his father was not Church of England (whatever
else he may have been is not certain) and was as unsuccessful as Gibson was successful,
might have had some influence on Hogarth's political orientation at this time and could
explain his later allusions to Gibson in A Harlot's Progress. See note 9 above.
14 See Hogarth's Graphic Works, Nos. 43, 53, 56. The South Sea Scheme has been
traditionally dated c. 1721 on the basis of its referent, the South Sea Bubble, and its style;
but the first known publication was with The Lottery in 1724 (Hogarth, Vol. 1, 72-73). For
more on the anticlerical content of these prints, see below.
'5 The common veneration of Hoadly raises another question about the Hogarth-
Amhurst relationship. There is no indication of Hogarth's personal contact with the
Hoadlys, the bishop and his two sons, until the 1730s (perhaps through Sarah Curtis
Hoadly, the bishop's first wife, a portrait painter). It is possible that he first met the bishop
through his great admirer Amhurst. See Paulson, Hogarth, Vol. 2, 166.
16 In the preface to Terrae-Filius (1726) Amhurst says that he went to Oxford in 1716
and remained until June 1719. Michael Erben has researched a biography of Amhurst but
has concluded that "there is just not sufficient information available. . . . My research has
led me to think that the DNB article on him is substantially accurate and that there is
probably not a great deal of additional information to be found" (correspondence with the
author, 21 Aug. 1995).
17 Hogarth's portrait of Hoadly (engraved by Bernard Baron after the painting in 1743)
was the only portrait of an ecclesiastic, the only portrait not engraved by himself, or of
himself, that Hogarth included in the folios of his prints (the only other portrait was his
own engraving of his painting of Martin Folkes, a freethinker of the same mold as
Amhurst). In at least one case he used the Hoadly engraving as frontispiece of the folio, in
place of his own portrait (this is now in the Richard Greenberg Collection, New York).
18 Forty years later Hogarth would reiterate, or illustrate, this image of "Protestant
Disguise" in the Anglican priest whose wig flies off revealing a tonsure in Enthusiasm
Delineated (in its later version, Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, he is Methodist).
See Hogarth's Graphic Works, No. 210.
19 My citations are from the third edition, 1724.
20 Another volume, also called Poems on Several Occasions, also published in 1720, and
also with the Hoadly frontispiece, signed "By a Student of' Oxford," is a collection of'
Amhurst's Bangorian poems (with their original title pages) ending with an ironic prose
attack on William Law, Hoadly's most skillful responder, with a separate title page signed
"By a Free-Thinker at Oxford" and at the end signed "Philalethes Oxoniensis." The climax
of this piece is "A Catalogue of Synonimous Appellations, for the Use of young Preachers
and Orators in both Universities," which rises to a crescendo linking "Scoffers, ... Free-
Thinkers, Latitudinarians, ... Unbelievers, Infidels, Hereticks, Schismaticks, Unitarians,
. Blasphemers, . . . Arians, Enthusiasts, Socinians, Deists, Atheists, Huguenots,
Protestants, Bangorians" (61-62).
This Poems on Several Occasions (which I shall call Poems [2]) follows, with additions,
Political Poems of 1719 (both published by Curll). Political Poems contained Protestant
Popery, An Epistle from the Pope to Dr. Snape, An Epistle to the Chevalier, and An Epistle
to Mr. Addison. The 1720 Poems on Several Occasions (2) adds the Letter to Mr. Law as
well as An Epistle from the Princess Sobieski to the Chevalier de St. George and The
Protestant Session. This volume was published by Curll, who had published the pamphlets
of which it consists; Poems (1) was published by Richard Francklin, who would also
publish The Craftsanm. If the second is incendiary, the first is presented apologetically as
penance for the indiscretions of Poems (2): although including epigrams on Oxford
figures, they are not overtly political and simulate repentance. Poems (1) opens with two
Old Testament poems--one on the creation (possibly a deist poem in that once the
creation takes place God withdraws) and the other on Pharaoh's pride, the tyrant swept
away by the Red Sea. But there is clearly an ironic edge on many of the poems: "The Free-
Thinker Converted" shows not a serious attack on free-thinkers but only on a libertine fop
("Sir Fopling") who is converted by a dream of punishment (48-49). Again, "Upon the
Same [Mrs. Centlivre's 'desiring me to read and correct a Poem']" ends by focusing on the
uselessness of a clergyman (48-49). It is possible that the repetition of the title was an
ironic gesture on Amhurst's part; but it is also possible that Curll published Poems (2)
without consulting its author.
21 Terrae-Filius (1726), 1.
22 The location is probably the Sheldonian Theatre. Hogarth may identify himself with
the Terrae-Filius as he had identified himself two years earlier with Apuleius and Charles
Gildon (the latter another deist) in his frontispiece for Gildon's Metamorphoses (1724; see
Hogarth's Graphic Works, No. 43).
23 In Terrae-Filius No. 19 Amhurst turns to the women (their effect on Oxford boys-
"Ladies! It may be play to you, but 'tis death to them" [103], and again, No. 28). Hogarth
is illustrating an incident in No. 33, Wednesday, 8 May 1721: "Have a particular regard
how you speak of those gaudy things which flutter about Oxford in prodigious numbers,
in summer time, called TOASTS; take care how you reflect on their parentage, their
condition, their Virtue, or their beauty. .. ." He goes on to refer to his lampoon and
explain that one of the toasts "(more enraged than the rest) was heard to declare, that,
right or wrong, that impudent scoundrel," i.e., Amhurst, "should be expelled, by G-d; and
that SHE had interest enough with the PRESIDENT and SENIOR FELLOWS of his
college to get his business done. Accordingly, within a year after this, he was (almost
unanimously) expelled from his Fellowship, in the presence of some of the persons
injured, who came thither to see the execution" (177-82). (I wonder if Amhurst
connected his Oxford toasts with the furious Lilliputian empress.)
24 My text is The Craftsman, 1st collected ed. (2nd ed., 1727), which runs from No. 1, 5
December, to No. 9, 2 January 1726/7. No. 13 (13-16 Jan.), in its original publication,
Ronald Paulson 103
announced publication of the first nine numbers (and separately No. 11, on the East India
Company). On the publication history of The Craftsman, see Michael Harris, "Figures
Relating to the Printing and Distribution of the Craftsman 1726 to 1730," Bulletin of the
Institute of Historical Research 43 (1970): 233-42; and Simon Varey, Introduction, Lord
Bolingbroke: Contributions to "The Craftsnun" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
25 The "punishers" here are the Stuart monarchs (whom Caleb D'Anvers compares by
analogy to Augustus and Tiberius) and the royalists of church and state of the 1640s.
26 See Hogarth's Graphic Works, No. 106.
27 For Hogarth's other anti-government satires, see Masquerade Ticket (1727), Henry
VIII and Anne Boleyn (1728/9), and the paintings of' The Beggar's Opera and Falstaff
Examining his Recruits in 1728 (Hogarth's Graphic Works, Nos. 108, 113; Hogarth, Vol.
1, 159-87).
28 See Hogarth's Graphic Works, No. 114; Hogarth, Vol. 1, 171-72.
29 British Museum Catalogue of Satiric Prints, No. 2327; repro. Paul Langford, The
English Satirical Print 1600-1832: Walpole and the Robinocracy (Cambridge: Chadwyck-
Healey, 1986), No. 48. George II's rump was the namesake of the Rump-Steak Club; the
club was formed in 1734 to commemorate the king's turning his "Royal Rump" on
courtiers who had gone into opposition.
30 BM Sat. 2447; Langford, No. 67; BM Sat. 2533; Langford, No. 99.
31 For the mid-1740s use, see the "broad bottom" of the central figure in Hogarth's
Stage Coach; or a Country Inn Yard at Election Time of 1747, made to celebrate the
General Election of that year (Hogarth, Vol. 2, 278-88).
32 Hogarth's Graphic Works, No. 107, p. 70. Langford reproduces The Political Clyster
(No. 8) but dates it 1726, apparently unaware that this is the 1757 version.
33 Collins, Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724), 41-
42, 53.
34 First Discourse [fifth ed., 1728], 55-56.
35 Amhurst advertised the First Discourse in Craftsnum No. 41 (24-28 Ap. 1727), and
again in No. 43 (1-5 May), in the latter case followed by Nunnery Tales and some
imitations of Gulliver's Travels. Woolston's Second Discourse was advertised in No. 68 (21
October). It is indicative that Amhurst advertised a surprisingly large number of books on
the Bible, including the works of Toland (No. 28, 10-13 Mar.). As to the facts of
Woolston's life, William H. Trapnell's researches have not produced any record for his
movements during the years in question (Thonmas Woolston: Madman and Deist [Bristol:
Thoemmes Press, 1994]).
36 For John Toland's terms for two levels of reading, "esoteric-exoteric," see "Clidophorus;
or of the Exoteric and Esoteric Philosophy," in Tetradymus (1720); for Collins's "irony"
and the more precise and blunt term for deistic discourse, "theological lying," see David
Berman, "Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying," in Deism, Masonry, and
the Enlightenment, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1987), 61-78.
On the controversy over wit applied to religion, focused on Woolston, see Roger D. Lund,
"Irony as Subversion: Thomas Woolston and the Crime of Wit," in The Margins of
Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writings and Cultural Response, 1660-1750, ed. Lund (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995), 170-94.
37 The case of Woolston also raises the issue of the relationship between graphic to
written wit as blasphemous discourse. The case for written wit as blasphemy had been
judged proved in the Woolston trial of' 1729. There was no precedent for the case of
graphic materials, unless we go back to the Sacheverell Trial (see State Trials, vol. 15
[1710]; for which my thanks to Roger Lund). One can almost imagine Hogarth
announcing in the Harlot's Progress (especially in its subscription ticket, which represents
the unveiling of allegory): Woolston proved that written innuendo is prosecutable; let's
see whether anyone can prosecute graphic innuendo. But then, when publication day
approached, he removed the red flag of Woolston's name from Plate 2 (though retaining
it in the authorized cheap copies by Giles King).
38 We might also recall that, on his arrival in the temple, Gulliver is so "extremely
pressed by the Necessities of Nature" (28) that he goes into the temple to the length of his
chain and relieves himself. Since he is chained at the door, the spot must be at the altar
itself. In terms of the allegory of Swift and the Church of England, this could be
interpreted as a profanation along the lines of Juvenal's difficile est saturam non scribere
[it's impossible not to write satire], of which Swift has done his best to avoid a repetition.
There is no avoiding the connection of Gulliver's profanation of a church with his later
profanation of a palace.
39 For this story, recorded in Hogarth's "Seven Days' Peregrination," see Hogarth, Vol.
1, 322-23; quoting the Peregrination itself (ed. Charles Mitchell [Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1952]): "Hogarth having a Motion; untruss'd upon a Grave Rail in an unseemly
Manner which Tothall Perceiving administered pennance to ye part offending with a
Bunch of Netles, this occasion'd an Engagement which Ended happily without Bloodshed
and Hogarth Finish'd his Business against the Church Door" (7).
40 Given the fact that Hogarth's father was a Latin scholar and Hogarth, who grew up in
his father's Latin-speaking coffee house, liked (as in cuniculus-cunnus) to play with Latin
tags, we might note that his phrase in the caption of The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver
is Gulliver's "Urinal Profanation of the Royal Pallace." Latin profanum is the place in front
of, outside the temple.
41 The Twickenham Hotch-Potch (a copy in Yale's Beinecke Library) was published by
J. Roberts; whereas most Craftsman offshoots signed Caleb D'Anvers were published by
the Craftsmanm publisher, Francklin. Internal evidence, however, leads me to think
Amhurst the author. The evidence of advertising is inconclusive. Amhurst repeatedly
advertised Lewis Theobald's attack on Pope, Shakespeare Restored, in 1727; on the other
hand, he thrice advertised the Swift-Pope Miscellanies (Nos. 50, 51, 52).
42 For Hogarth and Fielding, see Hogarth, Vol. 2, 119-22; for Cooke, see, e.g., his Bays
Miscellany, or Colley Triumphant (n.d. [173]).
43 On the diversity of opposition writing and outlook, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot
Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725-1742 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994), 16-17.
44 Gerrard, 24; Mark Goldie, "Priestcraft and the Birth of' Whiggism," in Political
Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 214. For a valuable overview, see Richard Ashcraft,
"Anticlericalism and Authority in Lockean Political Thought," in The Margins of Ortho-
doxy, ed. Lund, 73-96.
45 Gerrard, 24-25.
46 In these terms, Fielding could be called an anticlerical Whig who never crossed the
line, as Hogarth often did; though in other ways, he was a Shaftesburian deist (see
Paulson, The Beautfidl, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy [Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996], ch. 5).
47 I am grateful to Anne Barbeau Gardiner for this counterargument, which resulted
from discussion at the conference referred to in note 1 (the words in the preceding
sentence are from her letter to me).
48 The identification of the portrait in Plate 2 as Woolston was first included (in a proof
Ronald Paulson 105
state recorded by Nichols and Steevens), then suppressed in the published state, and then
reinstated in the cheap popular copies by Giles King, which were authorized by Hogarth.
Significant also in the Harlot was the deletion of images of God, which could be read as
signs of a secularized Walpole world or, more simply, as a cross-over from the Protestant
fear of images (iconoclasm) to the deist assumption of a deus absconditus.
49 Eggs appear in theological writings as a natural symbol for the Host (while the egg
remains the same on the outside, it is being transformed inside into a whole chicken). An
example is the ostrich egg suspended above Piero della Francesca's Sacra Converzatione
in the Brera, Milan (drawn to my attention by Charles Dempsey). This is also perhaps one
implication of Swift's use of eggs in the Big and Little Endians in the '"Voyage to Lilliput."
Given our knowledge of Hogarth, I would not want to rule out the possibility that the
number of the eggs reflects a reference to the reproductive function of the human male.
My thanks to Professor Barbeau Gardiner for first drawing my attention to the egg and to
Basile de Soissons, Difence invincible de la vv6rite orthodoxe de la presence rdelle de Jdsus-
Christ en l'eucharistie: ou elle est provec par pres de trois cens Argumens, dont toutes les
Majeurs sont prises dans l'Ecriture (1676).
50 "A lock of hair falling thus cross the temples, and by that means breaking the
regularity of the oval, has an effect too alluring to be strictly decent, as is very well known
to the loose and lowest class of women." This is the association of the "living woman,"
sexual "allure," the lower orders, and blemish which, rather than Shaftesburian geometry,
defines Hogarth's aesthetics. (See Analysis of Beauty, ed. Joseph Burke [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955], 52. For the context of Hogarth's aesthetics, see Paulson,
Beautifid, Novel, and Strange.)
51 The epigraph from Paradise Lost, printed just above the serpent, argues for a
connection with Satan, or a translation of his negativity into an image of Beauty related to
the broken oval, erotic pleasure, and the other elements associated with the Beautiful in
the Analysis.
52 Cf. a few pages later (152): "A man must have a good deal of practice to mimic such
very straight or round motions, which being incompatible with the human form, are
therefore ridiculous" (emphasis added).
53 Pope, Rape of the Lock (1714), Canto 2, 11. 7-8. From Pope's point of view, the cross
is Christian; but from the point of view of a Daniel Defoe it is Roman Catholic, and
Belinda's wearing it indicates either her popery or her Protestant vanity. As Defoe writes
in his Review: "For a Protestant to wear a cross about her Neck is a Ridiculous, Scandalous
piece of Vanity;" "to wear that which in all Countries is the Badge and Signal of a Roman
Catholick, and which for that Reason has been left off by all the Protestant Ladies in the
World, is a tacit owning themselves in the Wrong, and is Scandalous to Protestants, as if
they were asham'd of being Distinguish'd [i.e., as Protestants]." Hogarth's view, of course,
would be closer to Defoe's than Pope's and he could have justified his modification of the
cross in Analysis, Plate 1, as of the Trinity on the title page and the Host in Columbus
breaking the Egg, as a correction of Roman Catholic idolatry-a sort of iconoclasm. See
Defoe, Review, 18 July 1704; ed. Arthur Secord, 9 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1938), 1:171; my thanks for the reference to DeAnn DeLuna.
54 In another essay I shall discuss the pivotal figure between political satire (of the sort
practiced by Swift, Amhurst, and Woolston) and Hogarth's comic-aesthetic mode:
Addison, in his essays on comedy (Spectator Nos. 47, 249) and the "Pleasures of the
Imagination" (Nos. 411-21), offers parallel aesthetics of comedy (out of satire) and of
beauty, novelty, and greatness (out of' the pejorative concept of "imagination," as in
religious "enthusiasm").
55 Cf. the pudgy body and round, unprepossessing face of Toft in John Laguerre's
portrait, engraved in mezzotint by John Faber, Mary "Tofts of Godelman the pretended
Rabbit Breeder (announced 21 Jan. 1726/7, Mist's Weekly Journal, BM Sat. 1783).
56 The woman-the Mary Toft, M. Hackabout, and the women who dominate his
works-will be the bridging metaphor for Hogarth between satire and comedy, religion
and aesthetics.
57 See, e.g., Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Terry
Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); and Peter de Bolla, The
Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics, & the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
Ronald Paulson 107

Opposition Politics in Gullivers Travels

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Putting out the Fire in Her Imperial Majesty's Apartment: Opposition Politics,

Anticlericalism, and Aesthetics

PUTTING OUT THE FIRE IN HER IMPERIAL MAJESTY'S

APARTMENT: OPPOSITION POLITICS,

ANTICLERICALISM, AND AESTHETICS

In 1960, in the second volume of his biography of Sir Robert Walpole,

trenchent allusion in Gulliver's Travels to Walpole (aside from general

references to ministers as well as princes) was in the third voyage to his

unsuccessful attempt to impose Wood's copper coinage on the Irish, and

this was mostly removed before publication.2 Bertrand Goldgar in 1976

ministers and princes was only made particular by factious readers of

Gulliver was published on 28 October 1726. The first political reading

of Lemuel Gulliver, a pamphlet announced on 5 December, which

scandal of Wood's Halfpence. But closer to the original intention of the

"Voyage to Lilliput" is the Key's reading of "the Conditions upon which

[Gulliver] was set at Liberty" after being pinioned by the Lilliputians to

the earth: "The Opposition made to Lemuel's Enlargement being almost

as considerable as what some English Peers struggled with before they

O----d's Sufferings" (17, 26), that is, to Oxford's imprisonment in the

Severities threatned against poor Lemuel" offers a retrospect on "the

four last Years of the Reign of a late Princess" (25).

ELH 63 (1996) 79-107 l 1996 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 79

As this pamphlet recognizes, the "Voyage to Lilliput" was in fact

essentially an allegory of the last four years of Queen Anne, focused on

the Peace of Utrecht-the war and peace settlement with Blefuscu-

would at least equally have intended Bolingbioke, the actual architect of

the Peace, who fled certain retribution into exile in France/Blefuscu, as

dispelling of Gulliver's illusion as he learns more and more about the

1711-14," and so shifts our attention from Oxford and Bolingbroke to

None of the Swift scholars, however, charting and distinguishing what

readers, has taken cognizance of a publication that clearly did reinterpret

Gulliver's Travels as a topical anti-ministerial satire-and was the first to

do so: William Hogarth's print, The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver

(fig. 1), which was announced as "speedily to be published" in the Daily

Post of 3 December and as published in the Daily Post of the 27th.6

The earliest indications of an organized campaign of opposition to

Walpole were during the summer of 1726 in the meeting at Bolingbroke's

country estate of Dawley-and the earliest unmistakable sign was on 5

December when the first issue of Nicholas Amhurst's journal, The

Craftsman, was published. It would seem to be a sign of coordination

5th, was published by Edmund Curll, who had published most of

Leaf of a Lady's Gulliver, as it lay open, in an Apartment of St. James's

Palace."'7 The true "key," the "Verses" explain, is to be found "Here," in

statesmen, senators purchasing their places, and Virtue subservient to

Vice. In the context of the launching of the Craftsman this reading

to 1714), to Walpole's ministry in the year 1726.8

Hogarth's print, however, refers to a scene that is not mentioned in

Curll's Key or any of the other pamphlets published in December as

80 Opposition Politics, Anticlericalism, and Aesthetics

responses to Gulliver's Travels. It claims to "illustrate" Gulliver, but it

ments projected and the one decided upon-the blinding of Gulliver

and his slow starvation. The punishment Hogarth envisages-an en-

ema-refers not to Gulliver's refusal to lay waste Blefuscu/France but to

apartment in the Lilliputian palace-to "the Manner by which I had

performed it" and specifically to the empress who, "conceiving the

greatest Abhorrence of what I had done, removed to the most distant

not forbear vowing Revenge" (56). Hogarth is explicit in his caption

beneath the print: "The Punishment inflicted on Lemuel Gulliver by

applying a Lilypucian fire Engine to his Posteriors for his Urinal

Profanation of the Royal Pallace at Mildendo." He imagines a homeo-

pathic punishment, water corrected by more water.

If the first crime, refusal to lay waste Blefuscu, obviously applied to

Oxford, Bolingbroke, and the Treaty of Utrecht, the second-the crime

impiety of publishing A Tale of a Tub (1704), a satire which was