Charles Churchill's Political Journalism

Abstract

IN THE GREAT war that was fought at the beginning of King George III's reign in the early 1760s over his Scottish adviser Lord Bute and the Treaty of Paris, no writer was more in the public eye than Charles Churchill. His poetic career, beginning with the spectacular success of The Rosciad, and continuing with such propagandistic poems as The Prophesy of Famine and The Duellist, earned him widespread contemporary fame. But less known today, and yet of enormous interest in his own time, was his work on the North Briton, perhaps the most influential political essay journal of the eighteenth century. His contributions are worth studying for several reasons: for their literary merit as examples of sophisticated irony, for their relevance to the development of the reform movement in politics, and for their biographical interest as constituting a salient episode in Churchill's meteoric and tragic career. At the outset of the paper war, when political cartoons began to multiply against Bute, one in particular attracts the interest of the student of Churchill's career as a political propagandist. The Hungry Mob of Scriblers and Etchers depicts the radiant figure of Bute somewhat foppishly dressed with a feathered hat and long cape, proudly displaying his newly won symbol of the Order of the Garter on his delicately slender calf. Daintily descending a staircase above a crowd of meanly garbed journalists and printmakers, Bute carries a moneybag in one hand and with the other flings coins toward his supporters and apologists, among whom can be identified Dr. Samuel Johnson and William Hogarth. The crowd, however, also contains some of Bute's literary opponents. Matthew Darly, for example, prominently displays one of the most scabrous anti-Bute etchings, The Screen, which alludes to Bute's love affair with George III's mother, the Princess Dowager. Meanwhile, the unmistakable