Mr. Punch's History of Modern England (Vol. 1-4). Charles L. Graves
Punch enumerates his special bêtes noires as "Humbug, Cant, Sleek Hypocrisy and Brazen Wrong." But as has already been abundantly proved, the list would have to be considerably extended to include all the personages, notable and notorious, who came under his lash. In earlier years he is much more specific. Thus in 1850 his amiable catalogue of the gentlemen and public bodies who have kindly consented to furnish him with game in the ensuing year contains Colonel Sibthorp, the bearded reactionary who sat for Lincoln, Barry, the architect of the new Houses of Parliament, all quack-medicine vendors, tyrants and woman-floggers (the Tsar Nicholas and Haynau are specially aimed at), Madame Tussaud, Lord Brougham, R.A.'s, the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's, Smithfield and all City nuisances, and all sinecurists and pensionists. In 1852 Panizzi (for his long deferred catalogue of the British Museum of which he was Chief Librarian), Cardinal Wiseman, and Lord Maidstone are added, together with Railway Directors, Homœopathists and Protectionists.
PEEL AS THE KNAVE OF SPADES
Among the various devices adopted to ventilate his personal animosity may be noted Punch's list of "desirable emigrants," and the ingenious suggestion that "Penal Statues" should be erected to commemorate the misdeeds of great offenders, obstructionists, bigots and anti-reformers. Of some of Punch's butts it may be said that they were rescued from oblivion by his satire and caricature—Sibthorp for example, though he was by no means the merely reactionary buffoon who appears in Punch. He was eccentric in dress and figure, opposed all the great measures of Reform, and was the incarnation of ultra-Tory tradition. But he was frequently witty, and as truculently courageous as Punch himself. Sir Peter Laurie, Alderman and Lord Mayor of London, stood to Punch for all that was pompous, officious, meddlesome and even odious in City administration. We rub our eyes on reading in the D.N.B. that Sir Peter throughout his public life "devoted himself largely to schemes of social advancement, was a good magistrate and a disciple of Joseph Hume." But the explanation of this and other divergent records is simple enough. Punch was often too angry or enthusiastic to be just or discriminating. He wrote on the spur of the moment, with the result that he often had to revise his verdicts. We have seen this change in regard to Prince Albert, the Duke of Wellington, and Palmerston, and already Punch had reluctantly begun to admit that Disraeli was a force in politics and not a mere mountebank. The bitter attacks on Bulwer Lytton as a pinch-beck writer and padded dandy, which abound in the 'forties, ended in reconciliation and amity. We have seen the process at work again in the altered estimates of Jullien. Bunn was severely let alone, but only when it was found that the animal, as in the French saying, was so evil as to defend himself when he was attacked. Sometimes, however, Punch was implacable and impenitent. He never appears to have had a really good word to say for Daniel O'Connell, but regarded Repeal throughout as a fraud, and the "Liberator" as a self-seeking and grasping agitator. When Dan promised in 1845 to achieve Repeal in six months or lay his head on the block, and did neither, Punch only jeered at his "brazen boasting," and depicted him later on as the real "Potato Blight" of Ireland. Impenitence, too, marked his attitude towards both "Henry of Exeter" (Dr. Phillpotts), Pusey, and Wiseman; and his distrust of Louis Napoleon, after a brief period of reticence imposed during the Crimean War, revived in full force in the later 'fifties. We have also seen the converse of the process described above in the treatment of Cobden and Bright, who were rudely hauled down from their pinnacles when Punch the peace-loving Free Trader developed in the Crimean War into the bellicose patriot. The change was made in the contrary direction with Peel, but the grace of recognition was grievously impaired by its delay. Posthumous honours are a sorry reparation for continual abuse of the living, and Punch's treatment of Peel is one of the worst blots on his scutcheon. In Punch's early volumes no abuse was too bad for the Conservative statesman. Even the Bible was ransacked for invidious parallels, which only stopped short of Judas. He was a "political eel," a "quack," a "genius or Janus," and there is a curious foreshadowing of the recriminations of our own time, in the way in which Peel, in virtue of his inveterate policy of temporizing, is saddled with the watchword "wait awhile."
THE ROYAL RED RIDING HOOD
"Punch's" Injustice to Peel
If "Jenkins" was Punch's "chief butler"—in the sense of the supreme flunkey—Lord Brougham was his chief butt throughout these years. And certainly no public character in the nineteenth century ever played better into the hands of the satirist. His nose in the most literal sense lent a handle to the caricaturist. His tweed trousers figure as regularly in Punch's portraits as the straw in Palmerston's mouth—which, by the way, is generally traced to a trick that "Pam" acquired in visiting his stables. Palmerston's nickname was "Cupid" from his gallantry: the mythological parallel for Brougham would have been Proteus. One of the earliest references to him in Punch appears in the composite Preface to Vol. vi., in which each of the contributors ascribes to Punch his own characteristics, Brougham praising him for "forswearing like a chameleon every shade of opinion, when for the moment he has ceased to wear it." Thereafter the fun becomes fast and furious. Brougham is charged with writing the flamboyant advertisements of George Robins, a veritable Barnum among auctioneers. His tweed trousers are explained as a cause of his always wanting to get back to the woolsack. He is credited, in virtue of his versatile activities, with the attempt to discover perpetual motion. Brougham's vanity, craving for office at all costs, meddlesomeness, and subservience to the Duke of Wellington are held up to contempt, and in "Rational Readings for Grown-up People" (an early anticipation of the Missing Word Competition) we read:—
If people may, without rebuke,
Call Wellington the "Iron——,"
Why then we safely may presume
The "Brazen Peer" to term Lord——.
QUEEN CANUTE REPROVING HER COURTIERS
The snobbishness of Brougham's arguments on behalf of royal princes in his Debtors' Bill again infuriates the democratic Punch, who in 1849 was even more disgusted by Brougham's fulsome championship of Radetzky and the Austrians when they defeated the Piedmontese. But Punch's hostility reaches its height in the verses (accompanying a cartoon which represents Brougham standing on his head) describing the amazing farrago of inconsistencies which composed the mind of one who was at once a charlatan and encyclopædist, a reformer and a courtier. In the same year Punch suggests a Bill should be promoted for "the better behaviour of the erotic and learned lord,"
Who'd rather mount the mountebank's stage than be laid on the shelf,
Who does with ease the difficult task of turning his back on himself.
Brougham's perversely obstructive attitude towards the Exhibition of 1851 excited Punch's wrath, when he himself had become converted to the scheme, but already the tone of the paper had changed; and the turning point was reached on the occasion of Brougham's visit to America in 1850, when Punch printed the following unofficial letter of introduction to the President of the United States:—
To General Taylor, President of the United States,
Favoured by Henry Lord Brougham, Member of the French Institute.
"Dear Taylor,
"I have much pleasure in making yourself and my friend Brougham—the Brougham whose fame is not European but world-wide—personally acquainted. With all his little drolleries, he is an excellent fellow; and with all his oddities, he has worked like a Hercules stable-boy at our Augean Courts of Law. He has cheapened costs; he has well-nigh destroyed the race of sharp attorneys. Indeed, if you would seek Brougham's monument, look around every attorney's office; and you will not see Brougham's picture."
Punch had already welcomed Brougham's espousal of the anti-Sabbatarian cause, but the full avowal of reconciliation is to be found in the following graceful