Ode to Lord Moira

This print has no visible title, publisher, or publication date on it, and the blank pages of the books in the right foreground (which Gillray would typically fill with allusive text or titles) suggest that it was never actually finished. And since copies of the print are absent from other major Gillray collections, it was likely never formally published.

But whoever assigned the current title at the British Museum was certainly on the right track. The print is clearly associated with the The Ode to Lord Moira published in The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner in 1798, the same poem for which Gillray eventually created Lord Longbow, the Alarmist as an illustration.

Ode to Lord Moira

Ode to Lord Moira [March 1798?]
© Trustees of the British Museum

The Ode was part of the ministerial response to Lord Moira's accusations before both the English and Irish Parliaments of atrocities committed by British soldiers against the Irish in the name of the preservation of order. In a series of appearances before Parliament, Moira complained of a prevailing environment of suspicion, fear, and brutal reprisals in Ireland where curfews were rigorously imposed with fires and tapers forbidden, where firearms for even basic defense were routinely seized, where people could be arrested and imprisoned without charge, and where piqueting and half-hanging of Irish citizens were used to extract false confessions implicating themselves or their neighbors, and where as many as thirty houses in a night could be burned for supposedly harboring traitors.

The ministerial response was various: 1) to deny that any such atrocities occurred; 2) to claim that they were but necessary responses to a perilous situation; 3) to assert that any such incidents would have been isolated instances, not a deliberate government-supported program.

The poem and print present a variation of number one: denying that the atrocities ever occurred. They do so by portraying Moira as a fabulist, a teller of tall tales, cozening his listeners and perhaps himself, whether intentionally or not.

Tell then your stories, strange and new
Your Father's fame shall vouch them true
So shall the Dublin papers
Swear by the stars that saw the sight
That infant thousands die each night
While troops blow out their tapers.

But Moira's arguments did gain some support among Whigs and independents and that too is suggested in both the poem and print.

Each day new followers crowd your board,
And lean expectants hail my Lord
With adoration fervent. . . .

Moira is seated before an audience of prominent Whigs mostly identified in the key below the image. They include 1) Sir William Pulteney, 2) Thomas Erskine, 3) D.J. Nicholls, 4) Lord Moira himself, 5) Sir George Shuckborough, and 6) Horne Tooke. Other Whigs, not identified in the key, likely include Edmund Bastard, not completely visible in the smoke surrounding Moira, the Duke of Norfolk at the punchbowl, Charles James Fox, and Sir John Macpherson, next to Fox. Seven of these Whigs are mentioned in the next two verses of the Ode. Some had been rumored as possible members of a new pro-French ministry, headed by Moira, discussed among Whigs and independents in 1797/98. (See the letter by Moira reprinted in Bell's Weekly Messenger for January 7, 1798).

Beyond Moira in the supposed billowing clouds of his rhetoric are scenes of "infant thousands" dying in a variety of cruel and horrific ways while "troops blow out their tapers." From left to right we see Irish children crying out from a boiling cauldron, hanging from a makeshift gibbet, having their house blown apart by surrounding troops for having a candle burning in the window, being used as virtual shuttlecocks in a grisly game of badminton, and being basted and eaten by hungry troops. Beneath the stars and a horrified moon, a skeletal death and black bat provide a fife and drum accompaniment while a witch, (Moll Coggins mentioned elsewhere in the poem) flies by on a magical steed with broomstick.

We know from Draper Hill that the text of "The Ode to Lord Moira" was initially approved by Pitt for publication in The Anti-Jacobin in February, 1798, but, on second thought, then postponed.* It did not actually appear until some weeks later in reprints of the Anti-Jacobin, probably in March. By that time, the Ode was illustrated by Gillray's, Lord Longbow, the Alarmist, based on a drawing supplied by an amateur (which I have not seen) described in the British Museum commentary for Lord Longbow). Did Pitt see this print as well as the text of the Ode? Was it rejected/postponed because of the print?

We will likely never know. But what we CAN say with certainty is that the poem was postponed and the image unused, so we can, I think, safely assume that the print preceded rather than followed Lord Longbow. That would place the creation of the print sometime before March 12, 1798. And we can speculate why this first attempt might have been rejected.

One reason may have the numerous specific caricatures contained in the print. The editors The Anti-Jacobin, Frere and Canning seem to have wanted to keep the satire in the publication more generalized, perhaps for fear of alienating voting members of Parliament. But in this case, the more likely reason has to do with the fact that there are really no negatives in images. And so in spite of Gillray's attempts to portray Moira as unreliable, the evidence of atrocities is there in the print. We see with our own eyes what the print is simultaneously claiming never happened. The images are simply too detailed and too vivid. This is a problem for a ministerial publication seeking to discredit Moira's accounts.

Gillray never had any trouble imagining the cruelty of war, but such depictions were usually reserved for the French. But as the son of a soldier and Scotsman, he may well have heard about the brutality of the British military in the face of another, earlier uprising in Scotland 1745, and felt more than a little unconscious sympathy for the downtrodden Irish.

* Draper Hill quotes from George Canning's Journal of February 25th, 1798. "Working hard at the A.J. all morning. Question whether G. Ellis's Ode to Ld. Moira be put in—Sent to Pitt who decided yes—After he was gone repented and decided no. . . ."

Sources and Reading

Comments & Corrections

NOTE: Comments and/or corrections are always appreciated. To make that easier, I have included a form below that you can use. I promise never to share any of the info provided without your express permission.

First Name:
 Last Name:
Email Address:
Comments/Corrections: