Crumbs of Comfort...
This is one of several prints created in the aftermath of Fox's "fall" from office when the First Minister, Rockingham, died suddenly and the King nominated Lord Shelburne as Rockingham's successor. Fox hated Shelburne and much to the King's surprise and displeasure, he refused to serve in the new Shelburne administration. Gillray had recently portrayed Fox as a rebel and traitor for his actions, comparing him to Milton's Satan and to Ahithophel from the biblical Book of Samuel.
© National Portrait Gallery, London
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In Crumbs of Comfort, we see Fox once again closely associated with the Prince of Darkness. In this case he appears, along with Burke, one of the few ministers who followed Fox out of office, receiving crumbs of comfort from Satan, dressed as a kind of 18th century evil archangel. To each of them, Satan offers the consolation to which they would be most tempted given their respective characters. Fox was a notorious gambler, so Satan offers him a pair of dice and a dice box. To Burke he offers what would seem at first like a strange bit of consolation: a rosary and a flail.
Burke was born in Dublin, the son of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. Although raised as a Protestant, he married the daughter of an Irish Catholic doctor. And in 1778, he was instrumental in the passage of the Catholic Relief Bill, which removed some of the harsher restrictions on Catholics in Britain.
As the son of a Moravian sexton, Gillray reacted strongly against anything that suggested support for the return of Popery. In his earlier print, Grace Before Meat, or a Peep at Lord Peter's, Gillray had protested the King's visit to the house of the Catholic Lord Petre, showing a monk leading the saying of grace. And later Gillray will surround the Catholic Mrs. Fitzherbert with the hated symbols of extreme Catholic practices.
So here and elsewhere, Gillray portrays Burke as a crypto-Catholic, all too ready to return to his "real" Catholic identity.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary from the British Museum on Crumbs of Comfort...
- John Derry, Charles James Fox, 1972
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