Election Troops, Bringing in Their Accounts. . .
In John Bull in a Quandary a few weeks earlier, Gillray had shown a typical Westminster resident trying to decide which way to vote: Whig or Tory, Townshend or Hood. In that print, Gillray seemed clearly to favor the Tory candidate/Pitt supporter, Admiral Hood. But as it turned out, Lord John Townshend, a friend of the Whig leader Charles James Fox, won a surprising victory.
Here in this print Gillray seems to take another side, showing the essential venality of the Tory political process as the various hired Hood supporters gather before Pitt's Treasury to be paid for their unsuccessful election efforts.
© National Portrait Gallery, London
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In the 1780s, the Westminster elections had assumed an increasing symbolic importance as a bellwether of the nation's mood. So both parties not so secretly financed their preferred candidates, spending enormous amounts of money in the process. In the case of the Tories, however, Gillray suggests that the money is coming from public treasury funds. Pitt, of course, pretends that "Lord H[oo]d pays all the expenses himself." But then he secretly sends them around to the "back-door" where they wiill be paid by George Rose, one of Pitt's Secretaries of the Treasury.
At the head of the "troops" presenting bills is Major Topham, the editor of the newspaper/scandal sheet, The World "For Puffs & Squibbs, and for abusing the opposition." Immediately behind him is a pub owner presenting expenses for campaign food services, i.e. "For eating & Drinking for Jack-Ass boys." To his right a newspaper boy from the usually Whiggish newspaper, The Star, carries a bill "For changing sides; [and] for hiring of Ballad Singers & Grub Street Writers." Two of the ballad singers—a fat and a thin woman can be seen behind the soldiers. Their fee is apparently "5 Shillings per Day." Next to them, a shoemaker holds out a bill "For voting 3 times." The sailors and soldiers who both figured prominently in the newspaper accounts of the "Battle of Bow Street," the subject of another Gillray print, carry bills for creating the incident and then putting it down. And finally, a Jew with upraised arms awaits the collection of his fee "For Perjury & procuring Jew voters
Taken together with Market Day from May, which featured members of the House of Lords being bought and sold, Election Troops, Bringing in Their Accounts. . . portrays the British political system in both houses of Parliament as one in which politicians all have their price and election support is not much more than paid political theater.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary from the British Museum on Election Troops, Bringing in Their Accounts. . .
- Draper Hill, Mr. Gillray The Caricaturist, 1965, p. 32
- Joseph Grego, A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering, Chapter XI
- "Westminster," The History of Parliament Online
- Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #37
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