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Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/142

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ENGLISH CARICATURISTS.

grievously provoked; and above all, because they felt that the man who was her most powerful and relentless persecutor, was the very last who was justified in casting a stone against her. The ministerialists and their supporters, however, attributed the sympathy which was shown by her professed admirers exclusively to a political origin, and thus stigmatized the motives of their opponents (with more justice than poetry) in one of the jingling rhymes of the day:—

"What's the Queen to Reformists? as Queen was to France,
Round her head and her consort's they'd equally dance.
They care not for Caroline, nor king, nor for queen,
A pretext they want their intentions to screen,
'The Queen!' is the Radicals' rallying cry;
A queen bears the standard the king to defy."

How entirely unfitted this mistaken woman was to figure in the august position of a queen of England may be judged from her subsequent conduct. Instead of contenting herself with her victory, such as it was, she had the ill taste, in spite of the remonstrances of her friends and advisers, to communicate to the Lord Mayor, through the medium of her "vice chamberlain," her intention to proceed to St. Paul's in a public manner on Wednesday, the 29th of November, there and then to offer up her thanksgivings for the result: and this resolution she actually carried out. The details of her procession, which really reminds us of the entry of a company of equestrians into some provincial town, need not be entered into here; suffice it to say that it comprised trumpeters without number, stewards' carriages, gentlemen on horseback, the corpulent queen herself, with her attendant, Lady Ann Hamilton, and the indispensable Alderman Wood, the whole closing with "the various trades with flags and banners." It would appear to us that one of the rarest of the caricatures on the ministerial side has reference to this triumphal entry. It is labelled, Grand Entrance to Bamboozlem, and was published by Humphrey shortly afterwards. The queen is represented at the head of a procession, all the members of which (herself included) are mounted on