This month I stumbled into a period of history that I know little about and which I have made it a policy to avoid: the 18th century. [1] Chasing references for some of anti-Catholic graphic satires published in the 1670s led me down a series of garden paths until I found myself panting, dizzy, and in the 1730s, confronted with a series of nasty prints bashing bishops. I almost ran away. Previous attempts to grapple with anything after 1688/9 left me with a sore head and an inferiority complex, but something about the jokes in these prints pulled me in. ‘Be brave’, I said as I zoomed in on one satire, ‘they may not even mention the South Sea Bubble’. They didn’t. Other things I don’t understand – nonjuring, natural religion, the country opposition, Bolingbrook, the national debt – were blessedly absent, too. One of the prints – Tartuffe’s Banquet (1736) – eventually got its hooks in me because of the ferocity of its rudeness about its subject, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London [Figure. 1]. [2] The print portrays Gibson with an oversized head, waving his likeness about as a placard daubed with a spiteful invitation: LAUGH AT ME. I had to know more. Why did Gibson provoke such ridicule? And what was that ridicule trying to do?

Figure. 1. Tartuffe’s Banquet (1736). Copyright of the Trustees of the British Museum. CC,3.200.

One thing became clear quickly – few people liked Edmund Gibson. The bishop was subjected to hostility so febrile it could not be contained in one insulting nickname, so he was branded with two, ‘Dr Codex’ and ‘Walpole’s Pope’. ‘Dr Codex’ referred to Gibson’s magnum opus, the Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani (1713), an annotated history of English canon law that was applauded in some quarters as a testament to the rights of the Church of England and damned in others as a manifesto of priestcraft. Gibson, his critics feared, aspired to subject England to a High Church tyranny. That fear was captured in ‘Walpole’s Pope’, a reference to Gibson’s position as Church Minister in the Whig government of Robert Walpole between 1727 and 1736. It was a mutually beneficial alliance. Gibson would ensure that the church voted for the government in the Lords and supported it in the pulpit. In return, Walpole would protect the church’s place in English society by ensuring his government did nothing to encourage the three groups that High Anglicans saw as enemies of the church, deists, dissenting protestants, and heterodox Anglicans.

Gibson waged war on all three. He blocked the promotion of latitudinarian churchmen (provoking the ire of the Whigs, the court, and the liberal wing of his clergy), called for the censoring and punishing of deists and freethinkers (leading to charges that he led an Anglican Inquisition), and damned campaigns to secure further liberties for dissenting protestants. This relentless pursuit of orthodoxy was a product of Gibson’s conviction that his job as Church Minister was to protect the church’s place in the constitution of 1688/9. But that conviction played into the hands of those who saw the church as a threat to the constitution, a sink of priestcraft whose authority and privilege must be checked by the state for the health of the nation. Those voices were loud in the parliaments of the 1730s. Opposition Whigs submitted bills bent on curbing the church’s wealth, status, and scope to interfere in lay life, bills that were debated in sessions marked by heated anticlericalism. Gibson had become spokesmen for the church’s interests when those interests were most under attack, and although Walpole ensured the defeat of most of those bills, he could not prevent Gibson being pilloried in the press as the worst of all churchmen, corrupt, ambitious, tyrannical, and unchristian, the archpriest of priesctcraft. Lord John Hervey, no friend of Gibson, noted with distaste that the bishop was “pelted with all the opprobrious language that envy and malice ever threw and eminence and power”.

Tartuffe’s Banquet was one of those attacks.[2] Its title was taken from Moliere’s Tartuffe (1664), a farce in which a hypocrite fools the world with displays of piety, a charge Tartuffe’s Banquet levels at Gibson’s feigned Christianity. The print’s humour rests on a contrast of actions and words announced by Gibson hanging his bishop’s hat on a Janus-faced carving at the top of his chair [detail 1]. To be a bishop is to be two-faced. And so it proves. Gibson, courtly and corpulent, tucks into a lavish meal before four gaunt Anglican clergy with whom he shares nothing. Even the bishop’s pug, slavering over a plate of meat, is treated better than his starving charges, and cocks its leg on one of them to underscore the contempt. In the verses below, Gibson, ‘Brimfull of meat’, yawns, adopts a ‘sagely’ tone, and admonishes his clergy for their failure to cultivate the virtue of abstinence:

My loving Brethren, we should rest content

With the Small Pitance gracious Heav’n has sent:

‘Tis better much to want than much abound;

Hunger and Thirst hereafter will be crown’d.

Such was the clergy’s lot, he continued. Their silken robes were like the simple leather belt of John the Baptist, humble dress to remind them of their duty to do the lord’s work. As such, Gibson reminds them, ‘Bread and Water, we should ne’er complain’, before snapping at his butler, ‘Here, John, give me a – Bumper of Champaign’

The print calls Gibson’s lecture ‘A Seasonable Reproof’. The irony, of course, is that the satire reproved him. That reproval was political. Tartuffe’s Banquet was published after the defeat of the Mortmain Bill in early 1736, a bill that Gibson had whipped the bishops to sink. Mortmains were gifts of land or property left in wills, a major source of the church’s income that the bill proposed tightening regulations on. Debates on the bill in parliament and the press were savage. Those in favour condemned the injustice of a vastly rich institution benefitting from tax exemptions and sucking wealth from other parts of society. They also accused the church of corruption, raising fears of rapacious clergy haunting deathbeds on the hunt for gain, and of families disinherited by their parish priests. Gibson saw the bill as a part of a broader anticlerical conspiracy against the church. Mortmains funded core elements of the church’s mission, supporting Anglican charities and subsidising the stipends of clergy in poor parishes where the tithe could not support a minister. In attacking Mortmain’s, the church party claimed, the bill attacked the very notion of Christian charity.

Satirists were quick to note that this concern with charity was rich coming from a bishop as haughty as ‘Dr Codex’. Was so lordly a bishop really that concerned about poor parsons? Tartuffe’s Banquet’s depictions of Gibson gorging himself in front of them argued not. But the ridicule cut deeper, implying that Gibson’s defence of Mortmains on the grounds of charity was a cloak for something else. The clue to that ‘something’ was in the print’s title. In Moliere’s play, Tartuffe worms his way into the house of Orgon, who is spellbound by the hypocrite’s ostentatious displays of virtue, oblivious to his plans to seduce his wife, Elmire, and deaf to any attempts to expose him. Orgon eventually signs over his house and goods to Tartuffe – like a mortmain – leaving his family destitute. The print calling Gibson ‘Tartuffe’ was therefore an arch comment on the Mortmains bill. Mortmains enriched the church at the expense of society just as Tartuffe enriched himself at the expense of Orgon. Gibson was a hypocrite who feigned piety to fool the world.

The print riffs on that theme. Two paintings hang behind Gibson [detail 2.] On the right, a scene from the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) shows the Levite (dressed as an Anglican bishop) passing the wounded man. The point is blunt: the church preaches charity but doesn’t practice it. On the left, a scene from the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector shows both praying at the temple (Luke 18: 9-14). The proud pharisee (also dressed as an Anglican bishops) flaunts his piety and thanks God that he is not a sinner like the tax collector. The humble tax collector is ashamed of his sins and begs for mercy. Christ explains that it is the tax collector who is justified, “for everyone that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted” (Luke 18:14). Gibson, the Anglican pharisee, makes exalted claims of charity to his clergy (and, in the mortmain debates, of the church’s charity to English society). The joke is that he is beyond shame, a joke underlined by the quotation from Horace’s Satires that surrounds the scene, spoken by the rich miser who holds the crowd in contempt: Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo/ Ipse Domi. [‘The public hisses at me, but I applaud myself in my own house and think about the money in my chest’. Horace, Satire 1, 66-7]. The Mortmain debates had exposed Gibson for what he was, and he was too proud to be troubled by the jeers of the public. Tartfuffe’s Banquet made him doubly ridiculous – a hypocrite too proud to feel shame.

The satire was ferocious. Hissing captures the tone perfectly: the purpose of ridicule was contempt. And yet its ferocity relied as much on the viewer as it did the print. The audience was expected to bring a lot to Tartuffe’s Banquet. An understanding of biblical iconography, the parables, classical literature, and the minutiae of contemporary politics was necessary for the print’s character assassination of Gibson to make sense. This is true of graphic satires more generally, which are not confined by their textual and visual content but gesture and allude to events and material beyond their frame. Graphic satires were made for knowing viewers who would pick up on those allusions. Knowingness cultivated intimacy between satirist and viewer that involved the latter in the act of ridicule. In the case of Tartuffe’s Banquet that intimacy was no doubt increased by reference to the hit play of the 1736, Henry Fielding’s Pasquin: A Dramatic Satire of the Times (1736). Pasquin was a play about the rehearsal of two plays, a comedy (on the abuse of the law) and a tragedy (on the abuse of priestcraft). The villain of the latter was called Firebrand Tartuffe, a thinly veiled spoof of a high churchmen who is ultimately outwitted by the Queen of Common Sense. Tartuffe’s Banquet’s gave Gibson “A Seasonable Reproof” in the sense that Tartuffe was the hit of that year’s season.

At a gulf of three centuries, we share none of those intimacies. This is a problem. It means that we see graphic satires differently to how they were first seen. When we see Tartuffe’s Banquet we understand that it is satire, but we do not grasp more than the most simple aspect of its humour, the clash between words and deeds. We are deaf to the register of that humour, the thematic unity of the print’s jokes, and the end to which they were put. And yet the people for whom Tartuffe’s Banquet was intended – the knowing viewer immersed in the cut-and-thrust of political events in the daily news – would have ‘got’ the print’s insults, following the links in the satire’s intricately interwoven, often unspoken, references to current events, the classics, theatre, and biblical imagery, with ease. For them, a graphic satire’s many barbs would have snapped into place instantly with a unity of purpose, like the separate flails lashed together in one cat o’ nine tails. Researching prints is an excavation, of digging to find the origins and resonances of jokes to grasp how they were experienced at the political moment when they were uttered.

Our job, in short, is to see prints the way they were seen at first sting.

[1] Though I have tried. See Adam Morton, ‘Laughing at Hypocrisy: The Turncoats (1711), Visual Culture, and Dissent in early-eighteenth century England’, Studies in Church History 60 (2024).

[2]. The print was formerly attributed to William Hogarth. It is now believed to be the work of Gerard van der Gucht. It was published by Lawton Gilliver. See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works (3rd ed: London, 1989), p. 35. The print was reproduced as late as the nineteenth century. See, for example, the aquatints of 1827 by William James Smith (BM Z,1.6].

[3]. The attacks spanned graphic satire, ballads, news, and pamphlets. For other graphic satires, see The Hierarchical Skimington (1735), BM Satires 2149, and The Parallel (1736), BM 1868,0808.3584.

Hissing At The Bishop

Integrating the Image: Conference Report.