Shrine at St Ann's Hill

This is the first of two prints published in 1798 and supposedly set "at St Ann's Hill," the home of Fox's long-time mistress, Elizabeth Armistead. Fox had retreated there in late May, 1797 after a series of resounding defeats in Parliament in attempts to censure the Pitt administration for failing to negotiate a peace with France, enact parliamentary reform, and restore habeas corpus. The other Gillray print is Nightly Visitors, at St Ann's Hill {September 21, 1798)

The Shrine at St Ann's Hill shows Fox, puportedly in his most private of retreats, (and therefore at his most honest and authentic) praying before an altar to French Jacobinism. Behind and above the altar (where a cross would typically appear in Christian shrines) we see a cross-shaped tri-coloured ribbon, attached to the top of a still bloody guillotine, Gillray's favorite symbol of French excess. Hanging from the ribbon are two tablets identified as "Droit de l'Homme" (the Rights of Man). In a parody of the Judeo-Christian Decalogue, there are 10 "Rights" (instead of commandments) not all of which sound as revolutionary and threatening to present-day ears as they did to the Tory members of Gillray's audience. But to them, it would certainly represent an attack on British church and state as it was then constituted.

1. The Right to Worship whom we please.
2. Right to create & bow down to any thing we chuse to set up.
3. Right to use in vain any Name we like.
4. Right to work Nine Days in the Week, & do what we please on the Tenth.
5. Right to honor both Father & Mother, when we find it necessary.
6. Right to Kill.
7. Right to commit Adultery.
8. Right to Plunder.
9. Right to bear what Witness we please.
10. Right to covet our Neighbour[s] House & all that is his.

On the altar itself before the mouth of the guillotine is a bonnet rouge labeled "ÉGALITÉ," one of the three parts of the French revolutionary motto—Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. But beneath it is a death's head and the words "Exit Homo" suggesting that the vaunted "equality" of the actual revolution is the fact of death by guillotine, the great equalizer. On either side of the bonnet rouge are busts of Robespierre and Buonaparte who both made extensive use of the guillotine to grab and maintain their hold on power.

The crossed daggers on the skirts of the altar recall The Dagger Scene, or the Plot Discover'd (1792), one of Gillray's earliest prints attacking Fox as a co-conspirator with the French to overthrow the British Constitution. In Fox's pocket, appropriately, protrudes a book labeled "New Constitut[ion]."

Finally, though this is a private moment, Fox is joined (at least in spirit) by the usual Whig suspects represented as birdlike apparitions, flying in from an open window or emerging from billowing clouds of incense (?) on the altar. They include (from top to bottom and left to right): John Nicholls, George Tierney, the Earl of Lauderdale, the Duke of Bedford, the Marquess of Lansdowne, and the Duke of Norfolk—all of whom had been satirized for their French inclinations in earlier Gillray prints.

Now that Fox had "seceded" from Parliament and was no longer engaged in the day to day debates, Gillray had to, in effect, invent scenes like this one or activities that would characterize Fox and the Whigs without being able to tie their behaviour to an actual event. In March, for instance, he had imagined many of same figures in this print as conspirators meeting in secret in a tawdry room with a box overflowing with daggers (Search Night, or State Watchmen Mistaking Honest Men for Conspirators). And in April, he had portrayed all of them (and then some) in Habits of New French Legislators, and other Public Functionaries, dressed in the ceremonial robes of members of the French Directorate as if the revolution in England had already taken place.

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on Shrine at St Ann's Hill.
• "Charles James Fox," Wikipedia
• "Elizabeth Armistead," Wikipedia
• "St. Ann's Hill," Chertsey Museum
• Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #199.
• Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; With the History of His Life and Times, p. 242.