Mr. Punch's History of Modern England (Vol. 1-4). Charles L. Graves
wrong begot by wrongs,
For our little Prince will say—"To me
Nor life nor death belongs."
So we will rattle our little bell,
And laugh, and dance, and sing as well—
Roo-too-tooit! Shallaballa!
Life to the Prince! Fallallalla!
But while taking the Prince's future very seriously, Punch could not emulate those writers in the Press who, with goose-quill in hand, could not approach the ordinary trials from which even Royal infants are not exempt, save on their knees:—
It has been announced to the public, through the medium of the Press, that a most important epoch has arrived in the life of the Prince of Wales. It is a strange fact, that this "important epoch" has not been noted in the biography of any previous Prince of Wales; for we look in vain through the pages of Hume and Smollett, Rapin, Lingard, Miss Julia Corner, and indeed every other corner within our reach, without being able to ascertain when Edward the Black Prince was driven from the breast to the bottle. The Heir Apparent to the English throne has, we are told, been lately subjected to this frightful vicissitude; and though his Royal Highness is said to have borne it tolerably well, it will appear that while he took to the pap-spoon with princely fortitude, there was something of the infant perceptible in his mode of first receiving it.
When another Princess was born in 1843, we read that "there were some apprehensions that the nasal organ of the Heir Apparent might be affected by the birth of a younger sister, but we are happy to say that there are no symptoms of a derangement of the Prince's proboscis at present," also that Donizetti had been requested to arrange a series of concertos for the penny trumpet, and had sent to the Prince one on the noble theme of "This little pig went to market" to the Italian words:—
Questo piccolo porco
E andato al mercato.
Questo piccolo porco
E a casa restato.
Questo piccolo porco
Ha avuto del rosbief per pranza.
Questo piccolo porco
Niente ebbe nel sua stanza.
These familiar jocularities, redeemed by their general good humour from the charge of disrespect, are harmless compared with the sustained campaign of ridicule directed against Prince Albert as tailor and sportsman. German sovereigns and princes have always been great on uniforms, and Prince Albert undoubtedly suffered severely from this hereditary failing. A concise biography in the Almanack for 1842 states that he was born on August 26, 1819, and afterwards invented "a shocking bad hat for the British Infantry, but England refused to put her Foot in it." From this time onward the attacks are constant and malicious. The Prince's bell-shaped hat repeatedly figures in cartoons. He "bresents his gompliments" to Herzog Jenkins (of the Morning Post), for whom he has "gomposed a dugal goronet."
Prince Albert as Tailor
In the following year there is a cartoon representing the Prince in his sartorial studio surrounded by designs and models; the following comment is associated with the cartoon:—
Ever since the accession of Prince Albert to the Royal Husbandship of these realms, he has devoted the energies of his mind and the ingenuity of his hands to the manufacture of infantry caps, cavalry trousers, and regulation sabretaches. One of his first measures was to transmogrify the pantaloons of the Eleventh Hussars; and as the regiment alluded to is Prince Albert's Own, His Royal Highness may do as he likes with his own, and no one could complain of his bedizening the legs of the unfortunate Eleventh with scarlet cloth and gold door-leather. When, however, the Prince, throwing the whole of his energies into a hat, proposed to encase the heads of the British soldiery in a machine which seemed a decided cross between a muff, a coal scuttle, and a slop pail, then Punch was compelled to interfere, for the honour of the English army. The result has been that the headgear has been summarily withdrawn by an order from the War Office, and the manufacture of more of the Albert hat has been absolutely prohibited.
THE TAILOR'S GOOSE—THE TERROR OF THE ARMY
Prince Albert as Sportsman
The campaign reached its height in 1845 when Punch was given an irresistible opportunity on the occasion of the Prince being entertained by the Merchant Tailors. The Prince, Punch averred, was a born tailor, the Prince of Tailors, the true British tailor. He sought to make the British Army invincible by rendering them so comical that, by coming rapidly on the enemy, they might convulse him with laughter and paralyse his defence. He had fraternized with the Goose of Great Britain, and might sit cross-legged in the eyes of posterity. After this outburst of derision Punch gave the Prince a rest as tailor, but took up the running—or baiting—with renewed energy against his sportmanship. Punch, it may be noted, was not an unmitigated admirer of field sports; he denounced otter hunting as cruel, and more than once protested against officers and others who rode their horses to death for a wager. It was part of the humanitarianism which impelled him to support the abolition of capital punishment, though here his argument was based on the view that death was a release for the murderer, who was more effectually punished by being kept in life-long penance for his crime. Punch was never an enemy of fox hunting. Doubtless the influence of Leech counted for something. But the organized slaughter of game filled him with disgust, and the exploits of the Prince in the Highlands in the autumn of 1842 prompted the first of many tirades.
Stag Slaughter at Gotha
The pheasant battues at Drayton, when the Queen and Prince Albert were the guests of Sir Robert Peel, are treated in the same spirit, and the Ballad of Windsor Chase, with its grotesque illustration of fat beagles and obese hares, the Prince on horseback, and the Queen in her pony phaeton, carries on the satire in this fashion:—
Six hares alive were taken out
Each in its canvas sack;
And five as dead as mutton, in
The same were carried back.
The battue of hares at Stowe during the Prince's visit to the Duke of Buckingham in January, 1845, is the subject of another derisive ballad modelled on John Gilpin, and of a cartoon showing the Prince shooting down the tame quarry point-blank from an easy chair. The grand climax to this raillery, however, was reached during the Royal visit to Germany in September, when the stag hunt at Gotha was scarified with pen and pencil. In two parallel cartoons of "Court Pastimes" are contrasted the bear-baiting under Elizabeth with the butchery of stags under Victoria; and the hand of Thackeray is unmistakable in the "Sonnick, sejested by Prince Halbert gratiously killing the Staggs at Sacks-Cobug-Gothy":—
Some forty Ed of sleak and hantlered dear
In Cobug (where such hanimmles abound)
Were shot, as by the nusepapers I hear,
By Halbert Usband of the British Crownd.
Britannia's Queen let fall the purly tear;
Seeing them butchered in their silvn prisns;
Igspecially, when the keepers, standing round,
Came up and cut their pretty hinnocent whizns.
Suppose, instead of this pore Germing sport,
This Saxn wenison which he shoots and baggs,
Our Prins should take a turn in Capel Court
And make a massyker of English Staggs.12
Pore Staggs of Hengland! Were the Untsman at you,
What avoc he would make and what a trimenjus battu!
Jeams.