A New Way to Pay the National Debt

This is one of several large and beautifully finished designs created in the Spring of 1786 for William Holland using all the print-making expertise Gillray had developed and refined during his sabbatical from caricature in 1784/85. It followed the two now-famous prints about the secret marriage of the Prince of Wales—Wife & No Wife. . . and The Morning after Marriage. . .. And it preceded by less than a month the even larger A Sale of English Beauties in the East-Indies. Symptomatic, perhaps, of this surge of confidence, Gillray, for the first time since Grace Before Meat. . . in 1778 (and with the no doubt full-throated support of the very liberal William Holland) dared to take the King and Queen of England as his satiric targets.

The immediate impetus for the print came from two sources: Pitt's bill to reduce the national debt which had been introduced in the House of Commons on April 3rd, and the continued refusal of the King and Queen to pay for the Prince's considerable personal debts.

A New Way to Pay the National Debt

A New Way to Pay the National Debt [1786]
© Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

The American War which had finally wound down in 1784 had been costly in every way: not only in the loss of prestige in the international community but in pounds sterling. Britain spent by some calculations as much as £80 million on the war and by 1786 had increased the national debt to £250 million. In early March, there was general agreement as reported in the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (March 8, page 2) to set up an investigative committee to establish

the real state of the finances of the country and judge what sum may be appropriated towards a sinking fund for the diminution of the national debt.

But the devil is always in the details. And when the report from the select committee was finally delivered, there was doubt and skepticism about the accuracy of the revenue data and open disagreement with the plans to address the problem.

Gillray (and Holland who would have had strong opinions about the matter) present perhaps the most jaundiced view of the situation. In that view, there was no debt. Indeed, the King and Queen were raking in the guineas from taxes on wines, windows, spirits, tobacco, bricks and tiles, gold and silver plate, imported silk, men's hats, women's ribbons, perfume, hair powder, horse and carriages, and sporting licenses. But all of that hard-earned wealth was going into the over-flowing pockets of the King, Queen, and loyal lackeys who, in Gillray's print, form a corridor of conspicuous wealth emanating from the Royal Treasury arch. And yet the prime enabler of such hording (William Pitt, in this view), is offering yet another bag of guineas to the King to add to an entire wheelbarrow of money bags.

The two figues outside this corridor are the poor naval man (representative perhaps of the everyday Englishmen essentially powerless to improve his own condition) and the Prince of Wales, in this view, reduced to tattered and shoeless penury, relying for assistance on a Frenchman, the Duc d'Orleans.

Numerous handbills on the walls of the treasury reinforce the satiric perspective of a rich King and Court hording wealth while the rest of the kingdom suffers. To the left of the arch, for instance, is a notice headed with a violin and bow, announcing the arrival of large assortment of musicians from Germany for the royal entertainment. (Music was one of George's passions.) This is juxtaposed to another notice containing "Last Dying Speech of Fifty-Four Malefactors executed for robbing a Hen-Roost," suggestive of the plight of a desperate and starving British populace. The juxtaposition of the two may be intended to recall the cruel emperor Nero who, in the popular phrase, " fiddled while Rome burned." A third notice suggests that charity from such a king is "a Romance," an implausible fiction.

To the right of the arch, the handbills lament the spending of the King and Court with "Oeconomy, an old Song," and suggest the feelings of the British electorate, imposed upon by Pitt's succession of taxes with: "British Property a Farce," and "Just published for the benefit of Posterity: The Dying Groans of Liberty."

Gillray even uses the signature line to reinforce the message of profligate King and a ruthless and scheming minister by suggesting that the whole print/situation was "Design'd by Helagabalis," the decadent and careless Roman Emperor, and "Executed by Sejanus," the ambitious prefect of the Praetorian Guard under Tiberius.

In point of fact, the policies of the King and Pitt were almost certainly necessary, and, in addition to taxes, included the reduction of expenses by the elimination of sinecures, and an increase of revenue by the encouragement of commerce. And the measures were very effective in reducing the national debt until the extended war with France once again intervened.

Perhaps the most unfair and unrealistic aspect of the print, however, is the portrayal of the Prince of Wales as neglected and beggarly. In 1783 when the Prince turned 21, he received a one time grant of £60,000 from Parliament, equivalent to over £6 million today, and an annual income of £50,000 (£5 million today). In spite of this largesse, his extravagant renovations to Carleton House and his addiction to gambling and horse racing required further payments in 1787 of approximately £24,000 to address.

The dedication of the print to Monsr Necker is another dig at the supposed inaccuracy of the revenue review. Necker was finance minister for France under Louis XVI who conducted and published the first ever accounting of royal finances. But the famous Compte rendu au roi was ultimately shown to have been wildly inaccurate, promoting a much rosier view of French finances than was, in fact, the case.

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