The Cartoon in the Eighteenth Century

Though this country was late in the field where Martin Luther had been a pioneer, political prints—not yet, strictly speaking, caricatures—were established in England as a powerful political weapon before the eighteenth century. In France and Holland prints had been largely used against the foreign enemy; and in 1672 Henry Stubbe published a pamphlet contending that the “curious prints” circulated by the Dutch were ground enough for a declaration of war. Employing Romeyn de Hooghe as his chief artist, William III used satirical prints, in the grand manner and on a grand scale, to ridicule James II and Louis XIV; but the English share in the campaign consisted mainly, if by no means entirely, of copies and adaptations of Dutch prints. This was also true of the South Sea Bubble plates. It was in England, nevertheless, that the satirical print became established as a normal method of political warfare—a development of the long campaign against Sir Robert Walpole.