King George II as an Ass: The Dunciad Variorum Engravings and Their Consequences

Abstract

In his An Epistle from Mr Pope to Dr Arbuthnot, published in January 1735, Pope points explicitly for the first time to the hostility with the court that had pervaded his career since the publication of the Dunciad Variorum in April 1729.¹ He defines the conflict sharply, responding to the advice not to name queens, minsters, and kings by exclaiming,

The particular focus of this couplet has been explained in a brilliant, pioneering essay on literature and print technology by the late J. Paul Hunter: the Dunciad reveals its secret through its engravings, which represent George II as an ass.³ The engraving on the title page shows him as an ass burdened by poor writing (Fig. 1), while the headpiece at the beginning of the poem identifies him with the asses’ ears placed prominently over ‘the Ear of Kings’ (Fig. 2). In this essay I offer support for Hunter’s identification of the king by examining the first engraving’s motto, the capping of the pile of books on the title page with the name of Leonard Welsted (1688–1747), and the shaping of the ass’s ears. Attention to Welsted as the prime dunce then provides evidence confirming the suitability of Sir Robert Walpole for the role of ‘the first who brings │ The Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings’.⁴ Pope’s correspondence suggests that William Kent was the designer of the engravings and that the Earl and Countess of Burlington may have been party to the jest, with Burlington involved in publishing to the court as well as to the town.

fig. 1.

Alexander Pope, Dunciad Variorum, title page. Bodleian Library, Vet. A4 d. 128 (2).

Open in new tabDownload slide

fig. 2.

Alexander Pope, Dunciad Variorum, p. 1 of poem. Bodleian Library, Vet. A4 d. 128 (2).

Open in new tabDownload slide

In the second part of the essay, I argue that that recognition of Pope’s gross insult to the king lay behind the court’s hostility to him and his friend Charles Jervas (1675–1739) in the period 1730 to 1735, a hostility that could not be openly explained by either side. The insult had been aggravated and dramatized through the presentation of the Variorum to the king by Walpole in the presence of his queen before publication.⁵ The vehemence of the subsequent attacks on Pope, the complaint of ingratitude in To Burlington and the casting out of an enemy to humanity in To the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, as well as the sudden withdrawal of royal patronage from Pope’s friend Jervas, are interpreted as expressions of resentment at the Variorum’s insult rather than as quarrels over minor offences. Pope’s struggle to reply is evidenced by two works he found himself unable to publish, A Master Key to Popery and A Letter to a Noble Lord, because the real offence could not be addressed, but this failure led finally to the outing of the Dunciad’s attack in To Arbuthnot and hostility to the court in Works II (1735).

To Arbuthnot, which constituted an apologia central to the second volume of the Works, declared Pope’s insult, defiantly, if not explicitly. After the opening section of the poem, in which he portrays himself besieged by admirers, the subject changes to provocations to satire.

Omitting the first part of this story, in which King Midas is punished for his want of taste by being given ass’s ears for preferring Pan’s music to Apollo’s, Pope begins his account with Midas trying to conceal his ass’s ears from his court.⁷ Arbuthnot’s intervention, advising against naming ‘Queens, Ministers, or Kings’ is a late addition to Pope’s text (line 76 is really line 78), adding specificity to the debate.⁸ At first Arbuthnot’s seems a misplaced concern (after all Midas is a mythical figure), but it provides the opportunity for Pope to proclaim the Dunciad’s attack. The transition from the Midas story to the Dunciad looked problematic to Pope’s Victorian editor, W. J. Courthope, who remarked that ‘This apostrophe to the Dunciad [line 77] is somewhat obscure’, but Hunter’s identification of the king in the ass engravings explains it.⁹

The Dunciad Variorum was the first product of Pope’s period of independence from the usual controls of the book trade, employing his own printer and dictating terms to a young bookseller.¹⁰ He was free to shape his own book in typography and illustration.¹¹ The Variorum has only two engravings, an oblong plate at the centre of the title page (Fig. 1) and the headpiece to the first page of the poem (Fig. 2).¹² Because of the Variorum annotation, only two lines of verse appear on the first page:

Above the ‘Ear of Kings’ comes the headpiece and the ears of two asses. The asses appear, separated by thistles, on either side of a scowling owl wearing a jester’s cap.¹⁴ Above them in a scroll is the motto ‘Nemo me impune lacessit’ (No one assaults me with impunity), the motto of the Order of the Thistle. As Elias F. Mengel has argued, the thistle is appropriate to a satirist, and the motto is unquestionably suited to a work in which the author has included as an appendix ‘A List of Books, Papers, and Verses, in which our Author was abused’. But the Order of the Thistle, instituted by James I (VI of Scotland) and revived by Queen Anne, was particularly associated with the Stuarts, and its motto might also be used to represent a form of Jacobite retaliation.¹⁵ The two asses (perhaps George I, died 11 June 1727, and George II) who face to the side of the headpiece, their ears appearing, as Hunter suggests, like quotation marks, may feel impervious to attack, but the engraving and poem show otherwise. The keyword of line 2 was changed from ‘ears’ in the first edition of 1728 to ‘Ear’ in the Variorum, and Jonathan Richardson’s annotation shows ‘ears’ was itself a change from ‘courts’.¹⁶ The movement seems to be towards linking the king with the ears and then making an adjustment to make the identification deniable. In a similar manoeuvre, Pope adds a note on the first two lines that reinforces the possibility of a reference to the present king by denying it. He reports that the critique in Sawney (1728) identified the ‘Man … who brings’ as the poet ‘as if he vaunted that Kings were to be his Readers (an Honour which tho’ this Poem hath had, yet knoweth he how to receive it with more Modesty.)’¹⁷ Smithfield might be brought to the king directly, by Walpole, for example, or indirectly, by the satirical poet.

The placing of the engraving of the ass at the centre of the title page is unusual. Some of Pope’s later quarto books have a medallion with the author’s image on the title page (the Letters of 1737), or a combination of medallion and putti (Works II), but the 1717 Works had only a lyre and trumpets; nowhere is there a symbolism as vivid as this ass.¹⁸ The presence of the engraving on the title page suggests that it is central to the meaning of the work. The ass chews a thistle and carries a burden of named books and papers, while other papers are scattered around it. The pile of books on its back has an owl on top, while a swirl beneath its tail suggests defecation. In the background is a building that Mengel suggests is a bakery. Unusually, the motto is not below the engraving but runs in capitals down either side, suggesting a narrow pathway. Hunter is clear that the ass could be identified with the king: ‘It is certainly a Hanoverian: the broad, long nose suggests a celebrated family trait, and the ass is uncharacteristically white, like the emblematic Hanoverian horse’ (63–4). More remarkable than the long nose are the upright parallel ears, closely resembling the ‘II’ in the new king’s name, ‘Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first’.¹⁹

A key to interpreting the ass’s significance lies in the motto to the sides: ‘DEFEROR IN VICVM │VENDENTEM THVS ET ODORES’. The motto is from the close of Horace’s poem to the Emperor Augustus, the First Epistle of the Second Book. At this point, Horace has been considering his own relation to Augustus. Great men need great poets to praise them, and Augustus has wisely chosen Virgil and Varius. Horace himself, or so he professes, would not be good enough: ‘sed neque parvum │carmen maiestas recipit tua, nec meus audet │rem temptare pudor quam vires ferre recusent’ (‘but neither does your majesty admit of a lowly strain, nor does my modesty dare to essay a task beyond my strength to bear’).²⁰ Horace would not want to be represented in poor art:

(‘Not for me attentions that are burdensome, and I want neither to be displayed anywhere in wax, with my features misshaped, nor to be praised in verses ill-wrought, lest I have to blush at the stupid gift, and then, along with my poet, outstretched in a closed chest, be carried into the street where they sell frankincense and perfumes and pepper and everything else that is wrapped in sheets of useless paper’).²¹

You cannot avoid the consequences of bad art: it is a burden; your features are distorted or the poem about you carries you with it as wrapping paper. Although the reflection applies directly to Horace, the implication is for Augustus. He too should fear poor art and stick with Virgil and Varius. It is easy to see why these lines, with their opportunity for double reference, appealed to Pope and could be reflected in an engraving. The illustration shows poor literature as a burden (for both poet and king) and its being carried into the street.

The pile of books borne by the ass in the Variorum is larger than the one that was used for the frontispiece of the 1728 Dunciad, and a significant change has been made at the top. In 1728 Cibber, Newcastle, and Dennis supported a large volume of Ogilby, which in turn supported Theobald’s ‘Shakesp. Restor’d’, which was topped by Blackmore’s ‘P. and K. Arthur’, on which an owl stood. In the 1729 Variorum a much larger pile of books is topped with ‘Welsted Po’.²² The choice of Leonard Welsted to top the pile is significant. He had attacked Three Hours after Marriage in The Triumvirate in 1718, and in his ‘Dissertation concerning the Perfection of the English Language, the State of Poetry, &c’, he had adopted critical positions that Pope opposed.²³ Pope had responded by including him in the Peri Bathous, where he is noted for ‘quiet thoughtlessness’,²⁴ and in a very limited way in the 1728 Dunciad, where there are references to him in ‘The Publisher to the Reader’ and the poem (II. 283–8).²⁵ The key to his enhanced status, however, is provided by his appearance at Variorum, II. 197 (p. 238), where authors are vying for the patronage of ‘my Lord’ and ‘Welsted his mouth with Classic flatt’ry opes’.²⁶ That is, Welsted had earned his place of honour by excessive flattery. He had excelled in praise of the two Georges. He had lavishly praised George II when he was Prince of Wales in his An Ode on the Birth-day of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales (1716). He begins by explaining, ‘I have, in a former Poem address’d to Sir Richard Steele, described, as well as I could, the Great and Glorious Character of the King…. [Here] I have endeavoured to celebrate, according to the Nature of an Ode, the Conduct of his Royal Highness the Prince, at the Battel of Oudenard’ (A2^r–v). He does not hold back: ‘blooming Prince’, ‘immortal Honours’, ‘Victor’s Crown’ (st. II); ‘Hero, as soon as Man!’ (st. V);

This panegyric alone might have earned Welsted his position as the leading product of the Smithfield muses, but he had recently added weight to his candidature by praising the man controlling access to the king’s ear, Sir Robert Walpole. Welsted had approached Walpole for support for his translation of Horace with a special degree of sycophancy in A Discourse to the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole (1727). He begins with his high regard for both the minister and the king: ‘I know, I am now speaking to one of the greatest Subjects in Europe; a Subject, by whose counsels his Master is the greatest Prince’. And he emphasizes that Walpole has his power through merit: he ‘owes his greatness to his Virtues’ (3). Welsted then moves on to describe a patronage that might inform the opening of the Dunciad:

Your praise mingles with my Subject without my care, and there is one amiable part of Your character, I cannot help mentioning, because it leads me into it [the request for support with the translation of Horace]; I mean, Sir, your love of arts and literature, and the generous encouragement which You are known to have given them on all occasions: Who ever proposed any thing with a face of public good, that went from You discontented? What Philosopher, what Poet, has applied to You without reward? (4)

Pope would doubtless have reflected negatively on Walpole’s treatment of his friend, John Gay,²⁸ but the absence of discrimination in Walpole’s patronage identified here by Welsted is surely reflected in the Dunciad’s opening lines (‘the first who brings │ The Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings’).²⁹

Hunter does not consider who designed the two engravings, but the likelihood that they are the work of William Kent draws into play the question of the role of the Earl and Countess of Burlington in publishing the Dunciad Variorum. It is unclear how far Pope himself was responsible for the design of the engravings. He discusses the ass in correspondence with Lord Burlington, so there is no question it was part of his planning. Perhaps he made an original sketch, because Jonathan Richardson’s note on the first Broglio manuscript is striking: ‘The Title was torn off on purpose’.³⁰ Neither the designer nor the engraver of the two ass engravings in the Dunciad Variorum is identified, even though two new plates for the Dunciad in Works II (1735) bear the initials of William Kent, as designer, and Paul Fourdrinier, as engraver, and they had also been responsible for the Odyssey engravings (1725–1726). Although the Variorum headpiece is open, while Kent’s other headpieces are framed, Nicholas Savage in his valuable essay on ‘Kent as Book Illustrator’ assumes Kent is responsible for the Variorum headpiece, as well. He notes that Kent is associated with the Dunciad by the presence at Chatsworth of the drawing of an owl related to the 1728 Dunciad frontispiece.³¹ Pope’s correspondence, though the evidence is fragmentary, suggests that this assessment is correct: that Kent was involved in preparing the Variorum, and that he had the support of the Earl and Countess of Burlington. The first relevant letter is from Pope to the Earl on 23 December 1728. It begins, ‘I had sooner troubled you with the papers you so kindly offerd to show Mr Fazakerly’, and ends, ‘these are what Mr Kent sent me some days since; The book I can’t attend, & have beggd a Friend to correct ye press for me, who has made some mistakes’ (Correspondence, 2. 532–3). Another letter, probably from early in 1729, clarifies Fazakerley’s role:

The whole Question is only this: If there be any thing in these sheets (for the other two [not yet printed] can have nothing of that sort) which an Action may be grounded upon? and if there be, which those things are? that Mr F. would mark or alter them in this Copy… . Your Lordship needs not even name me as any way concern’d in that publication, which Mr F. will observe is guarded against by the manner in which it is publish’d, but the apprehension is only, lest if the Printer & Publisher be found, any such Action could be brought; for we would be safe even against this. (Correspondence, 3. 4)

A postscript reads: ‘I beg my Lady Burlington’s Patronage of the Ass & the Dunciad, me and my burden’ (Correspondence, 3. 4). Lady Burlington seems to have a particular share in the joke about the ass, because Pope writes in another note, ‘If my Lady Burlington cares to be troubled with the Weight of Mr Pope, and his Dunciad, her Ladyships Coach will carry them all to day to Chiswick: and they may wait upon her, and ask Blessing of the Ass their Grandmother there, about one or two a clock’ (Correspondence, 3. 20).

It may be that the role of Nicholas Fazakerley (1682–1757) in relation to the Variorum has been misinterpreted: Pope and the Burlingtons might have been more concerned with the court than with the dunces. Fazakerley was the lawyer who in December 1729 was to appear as leading counsel for the Craftsman in a trial for seditious libel. Craftsman, no. 140 (8 March 1729) had argued for censorship of renaissance texts for their criticism of ministers, with, of course, the implication that this criticism applied to current ministers. Pope was to address a related argument in his ‘Advertisement’ to the Horatian and Donne imitations in his 1735 Works (TE, 4. 3). Fazakerley must have argued successfully against identifying the implications of this particular historical criticism in the 1729 Craftsman trial, because a verdict of not guilty was returned.³² His advice on the Dunciad may have been needed simply through fear of action by the dunces, but it is possible that Pope, the Burlingtons, and their protégé, Kent, were concerned about potential action for seditious libel, in which the engravings might have had a significant role. The two publications, the Dunciad Variorum and Craftsman 140, come interestingly close together, the Craftsman appearing four days before the presentation of the Dunciad Variorum to the king. We do not know what Fazakerley might have changed—was this the point at which ‘ears of kings’ became ‘Ear of Kings’?—but what is clear is that Lord and Lady Burlington knew about the title-page engraving, because Kent had been working on it, with the result that it was a standing joke. The quotation from Horace permits two readings, the ass as poet and the ass as king, one of which Pope refers to in the second letter, ‘the Ass and the Dunciad, me and my burden’, but the other, while it would be inappropriate for correspondence, might inform Fazakerley’s engagement. The reference to ‘the Ass their Grandmother’ in the final note to Lady Burlington is probably to an ass at Chiswick that was Kent’s model. An article on the poet laureate that first appeared in the Grubstreet Journal of 19 November 1730, but was reprinted as Appendix VI of the 1743 Dunciad, suggests a procession for the laureate in which, if an elephant cannot be found, a large ass should be substituted ‘particularly if that noble one could be had, whose portraiture makes so great an ornament of the Dunciad, and which (unless I am misinform’d) is yet in the park of a nobleman near this city’.³³ Although there is no reference in the correspondence to the Hanoverian interpretation of the ass, the excitement about the symbol in these letters makes such an interpretation more rather than less plausible.³⁴

Lord Burlington was one of the three lords (the others were Oxford and Bathurst) who, on the basis of legal advice (presumably Fazakerley’s) took on the publication of the Dunciad Variorum. Pope’s surviving correspondence is with the Earl of Oxford—advising him about delivery of books (3. 25–7) and asking for a declaration that the lords were the publishers (3. 31–2)—but the surviving document, the three lords’ transfer of the copyright to Lawton Gilliver (16 October 1729), is primarily sealed and delivered by Burlington in the presence of all three peers. Burlington’s signature is witnessed by William Kent.³⁵ There is no evidence that Burlington’s role in the publication of the Variorum was known at court, nor is it clear that he had any role in promoting the presentation to the king, but that he was involved in this conspiracy against the king seems likely.

Hunter’s final argument for the representation of the king identifies Pope’s success in arranging a court enactment of the poem’s first lines. In his edition of the poem in his Works II (1735) Pope notes: ‘We are willing to acquaint Posterity that this Poem (as it here stands) was presented to King George the Second and his Queen, by the hands of Sir R. Walpole, on the 12th of March 1728/9’.³⁶ The notes to the Dunciad Variorum had been moved to the back of the volume in the Works, but this information becomes part of the first note.³⁷ It brings together the potential actors in the Midas passage in To Arbuthnot: ‘His very Minister who spy’d them first, │(Some say his Queen) was forc’d to speak, or burst’ (71–2). The minister speaks by presenting the book that depicts the king as an ass, to him, in her presence. This performance of the Dunciad’s opening must have been difficult to plan and arrange; perhaps it was done directly with Walpole or through his private secretary, William Fortescue, but perhaps through Lord and Lady Burlington. Pope’s correspondence shows he knew those in power had taken an interest in the 1728 Dunciad. A letter to the Earl of Oxford of 17 June 1728 tells him he has prepared the annotated edition Oxford asked for and that ‘I have received a Command for the same thing from the Highest & most Powerful Person in this Kingdom’ (Correspondence, 2. 502); that might be the king or it might be Walpole. Richard Savage, in the Collection of Pieces in Verse and Prose, p. vi, specifies that the king and queen had read the poem before it was presented.³⁸

If the reflection of the king in the engravings had been recognized, it would have been deeply resented. Maynard Mack, sensitive to Pope’s relations with the ministry, wonders how long it would have taken Walpole to take in the anti-Hanoverian aspect of the Dunciad’s satire: ‘Though himself no reader of poems, Walpole must soon have been alerted to the possibility that “Dunce the second,” in the poem he had with his own hand presented to the King, might refer as easily to a royal dunce as to Lewis Theobald’.³⁹ But the poem’s initial reception from the dunces on its publication on 18 May 1728 suggests its anti-Hanoverian elements were easily ignored. For today’s readers that is problematic, but, as Pat Rogers shrewdly observes, ‘Only in comparatively recent times have we begun to understand how deeply political a poem The Dunciad is.’⁴⁰ Bertrand A. Goldgar in his well-researched study in 1975 was still cautious in disqualifying Pope’s political neutrality, and notes that ‘For the most part, Walpole’s newspapers refrained from a political reading of The Dunciad.’⁴¹ In responding to the 1728 edition, even Curll’s deeply hostile A Compleat Key to the Dunciad initially missed the potential criticism of the king in ‘Dunce the second’ at I. 6, while the second edition (ESTC T480, 4 June 1728) showed how the allusion to Mac Flecknoe threw the royal family into the shade: ‘Meaning that Mr Theobald succeeds Mr Settle if he has not a worse Meaning’, with the ‘worse meaning’ unexplored (7). At III. 251, ‘Thy dragons ** and ** shall taste’, Curll had to provide his own emendation of the asterisks to ‘Kings and Princesses’ in order to justify his commentary: ‘Here, the Court is impudently made the Seat of Dulness’ (18). The third edition (T101143, 2 July 1728) simply adds further to the identification of the literary meaning at I. 6: ‘Alluding to the Royal Privilege, before Mr Theobald’s Play—Double Falshood’ (7), and tidies up the presentation at III. 251 (18).⁴² Concanen’s A Compleat Collection of all … occasioned by the publication of Three Volumes of Miscellanies (T31000, 12 June 1728), one of Curll’s rare allies in this political interpretation, is more open in its stance. Beginning with Pope’s claim in the ‘Postscript’ to the Odyssey that he is no party man,⁴³ it goes on to quote Dunciad, I. 1–2 and III. 251–6, noting that the court is given responsibility for cultural deterioration and that names are required to replace the asterisks at III. 251, which it quotes accurately: ‘Names, which of all mortal Names ought to be the most Sacred, and the most exempt from any Ridicule in English Poetry’ (vi). It challenges Pope to fill in the asterisks. Edward Ward’s Durgen. Or, a Plain Satyr upon a Plain Satyrist (T35035, 12 December 1728) is a third in the field to challenge Pope’s attitude to the king and queen, but its approach is more general, though it recognizes Pope’s potential association with the ears of an ass (20).

The material detailed here is not a strong response from Pope’s enemies. As Valerie Rumbold has argued, part of the appeal of the 1728 Dunciad was its openness, its presentation as a puzzle, with blanks to be filled in.⁴⁴ That character, in spite of (in some respects, because of) the apparatus, remained an aspect of the Variorum; as Abigail Williams puts it, ‘a sense of bewilderment at the names and the references, the confusions of the apparatus, was and is part of the design of the poem’.⁴⁵ There were non-political, literary readings available to protect Pope, and, even as he prepared the illustrated Variorum, he showed he could safely replace the asterisks at III. 251 (‘Thy dragons Magistrates and Peers shall taste’), while still using the notes to draw into view Concanen’s charge that the king and queen were meant.⁴⁶ In any case, Walpole would have been inclined to take a positive view of the poem because he had been working to draw Pope into his circle. Pope’s relation with Walpole, and with George and Caroline, had been good in the late 1720s.⁴⁷ The list of subscribers for the Odyssey had been led by King George I, followed by George and Caroline, as Prince and Princess of Wales; Walpole had subscribed for 10 copies and arranged a treasury order for £200 in support of the translation. Pope was friendly with William Fortescue (Gay’s schoolfellow), who served as Walpole’s private secretary from 1724 to 1736, and he was a visitor to Walpole’s home. Pope can be spotted attending Walpole’s Sunday dinners between 17 February 1726 and 7 June 1730 (Correspondence, 2. 368, 3. 112). On 10 May 1725, Pope even told Fortescue that Walpole had been exceptionally kind to him, but from the middle of 1730, as Mack notes, relations cooled, with Walpole denying Pope admission.⁴⁸

The decline in Pope’s relation to Walpole and the court dates, therefore, from the year after the presentation of the Variorum to the king. It is unlikely to have emerged from the court’s careful study of the text, but it may well have resulted from a reassessment of the drama of the engraved Variorum’s presentation to the king.⁴⁹ In his lines in To Arbuthnot, Pope associates the revelation of the king’s ears with biting and kicking from the courtiers (To Arbuthnot, lines 77–8, TE, 4. 101), and he believed that there had been a parallel presentation to the king and queen of the excoriating To the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace in 1733 (Prose Works, 2. 444). By November 1734, Lord Hervey could speak of the opposition between the Court and Pope as something generally accepted. Writing in his Memoirs of the departure from Court of Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk, he gives one of the reasons for her disgrace as ‘her intimacy with Mr Pope, who had published several satires, with his name to them, in which the King and all his family were rather more than obliquely sneered at’.⁵⁰ In comparison with the presentation of the Variorum, the references to George in the Imitation of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, lines 20–24 (TE, 4. 7) and Caroline in To Cobham, line 120, both in the context of flattery, are only mildly offensive.⁵¹ They would hardly have registered without there being other, more critical, material.

An incident recounted by George Vertue in relation to Pope’s close friend, the painter Charles Jervas, and the queen may be representative of the court’s resentment of the Variorum’s title page. One morning in 1732, Queen Caroline visited Jervas’s studio with some courtiers and then went on to John Wooton’s studio, where she examined among other works, ‘a great picture of his Majesty painted on horse-back a grey horse. for Lord Hubbard the face of the King by M^r Jarvis & all the other parts by M^r Wooton—the Horse. &c was much approv’d of, but the Kings not thought to be like, was much spoke against from thence.’ Vertue claims that this visit brought a decline in Jervas’s career, especially at Court, and ‘lessend his character and business’.⁵² Jervas had been popular with Queen Caroline and he had painted the coronation portraits of the monarchs.⁵³ The visit to Wooton’s studio followed immediately after one to Jervas’s, where no complaint seems to have been made. To the modern eye, the faces in such portraits are not very distinctive, and accurate representation seems unlikely to have been the main aim. Wooton’s horse is very well painted, and seeing the face of the white horse in close proximity to a representation of the king may have reminded the queen of the Dunciad’s ass and the insult to her husband. She may have believed that Jervas, such a close friend of Pope’s, had been the artist involved. The complaint, which the courtiers joined in, was precisely that the king was not accurately represented.⁵⁴ The story of how Jervas lost favour so suddenly has perplexed commentators but this association with Pope may provide the explanation.⁵⁵ Ironically, when Jervas died in 1739 his place as Principal Painter in Ordinary to the king was taken by William Kent.

Recognition of the insult offered to the court by the Variorum engravings, with any consequent reinterpretation of the poem, would explain the vehemence of the court-led attacks on Pope in the early 1730s. The two elements usually focused on as the casus belli, the ridicule of Lord Fanny and of Sapho in the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace and the Timon episode in the Epistle to Burlington, were inadequate provocations, the response to them disproportionate. The insults to Lady Mary, cruel and misogynistic though they were, were thrown out casually in Pope’s poems rather than providing the works’ focus, while the identification of Timon as the Duke of Chandos was never adequately justified nor the charge of Pope’s ingratitude given any specificity until late in the affair.⁵⁶ The problem in understanding the hostility that led Pope to own ‘that Critics of this Sort can intimidate me, nay half incline me to write no more’ (TE, 2/3. 132) is that the court was not going to draw attention to Pope’s calling the king an ass and a dunce, and neither was Pope—or not before To Arbuthnot. The Duke of Chandos and Lady Mary were proxies for the king, and as a consequence Pope felt himself powerless to respond. He had been ridiculed as a poet and translator, but now he had become a monster.⁵⁷

The decline in Pope’s relationship with Lady Mary has been fully detailed by Isobel Grundy, but it is interesting to observe the apparent shift in Walpole’s relation to the antagonists.⁵⁸ In a letter to Fortescue Sherburn dated 13 September 1729, Pope had said he had been complaining to Walpole about Lady Mary and warning him that she would one day satirize Walpole himself (Correspondence, 3. 53). But by 8 March 1733, Walpole had allied himself with Lady Mary and was asking Pope through Fortescue to retract what he had said of her in The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated. Pope thanks Fortescue for his message and for

the Friendship & Concern shown in it, to suggest what you thought might be agreable to a Person whom you know I would not disoblige [Walpole], I take particularly kindly. But the affair in question of any alteration is now at an end, by that Lady’s having taken her own Satisfaction in an avowed Libell, so fulfilling the veracity of my prophecy. (Correspondence, 3. 354).

The poem taken to be Lady Mary’s ‘Libell’, To the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, probably written by Lord Hervey (Walpole’s representative in the Lords and at court), with contributions by Lady Mary, was in many respects, as Isobel Grundy has shown, the foundation of To Arbuthnot.⁵⁹ Guerinot summarizes the poem’s charges—‘Pope ignorant of Greek’; ‘Pope ungrateful to Chandos’; ‘Pope incapable of loving’; ‘Pope deformed’ (224–6)—but the emphasis is not on specific charges but on Pope as a threat to humankind. Chandos is worth no more than a footnote; the monarchy is mentioned in passing (‘Nor Age, nor Sex, nor Thrones, nor Graves revered’, line 41), but Pope has committed some terrible crime that cannot be ignored:

Running in parallel with the quarrel with Lady Mary was the more developed campaign over the Epistle to Burlington, and once more Lord Hervey was closely engaged, possibly as the instigator. To Burlington was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 7 December 1731 and Lord Oxford received his copy on 13 December, but the newspaper advertisements (‘In a few days’, London Evening Post, 14 December; ‘This Day’, Daily Post, 16 December) suggest that it was published on 16 December. The first person we find in action is Hervey, who wrote to Stephen Fox on 21 December 1731, ‘Everybody concurs in their opinion of Pope’s last performance, and condemns it as dull and impertinent. I cannot but imagine, by the 18 lines in the last page but one [the visit to Timon’s villa], that he designed ridiculing Lord Burlington as much as he does the Duke of Chandois.’⁶¹ It is a clever manoeuvre: the identification of Timon with Chandos is just assumed, and followed by what looks the more antagonistic charge, developed in recent studies, that Pope was satirizing his addressee.⁶² It would have been impossible to demonstrate that the Timon episode in To Burlington was a particular attack on Chandos, and none of the attacks on Pope attempt it, but it could be taken for granted. If the court had any sense of the Earl of Burlington’s role in preparing and publishing the Dunciad Variorum, a poem linking him and Pope was an opportunity for retaliation not to be missed. And, as a surrogate for the king was needed, James Brydges (1673–1744), first Duke of Chandos, was a good choice: a Whig but not a courtier, associated with Pope through the period of his patronage of Handel at Cannons (1717–1719), a generous subscriber to the Iliad (12 sets) and Odyssey (10 sets). He could serve, therefore, to represent the court’s sense of Pope’s ingratitude.

The first public attack on To Burlington came from ‘Orator’ Henley in the Walpole-supporting Hyp-Doctor of 21 December 1731. It took the form of ‘Mr Pope’s Epitaph, occasion’d by his Poem of Taste of Building’. Repeatedly quoting from the poem, it sought to show Pope lacked taste. It did mock ‘His Taste of Honour in dineing with Lords to Lampoon them’ and ‘His Taste of Court-breeding in styling Kings Imitating Fools’, but it was too unidiomatic and unfocused to do much damage. Notably, it neither identified Timon as Chandos, nor manoeuvred to prevent identification of Timon’s villa with Walpole’s Houghton. Henley could have served as Pope’s best witness for the non-specificity of the representation of Timon and his residence. A few days later, the Chandos campaign against Pope was begun in print, entirely appropriately, by the other prominent victim of the Variorum ass engraving, Leonard Welsted. Of Dulness and Scandal. Occasion’d by the Characters of Lord Timon. In Mr Pope’s Epistle to the Earl of Burlington was published on 3 January 1732. On Friday, 31 December, it was advertised in the Daily Journal as published the following Monday. The next day, 1 January, Chandos wrote to Anthony Hammond, asking him to contact Welsted: ‘I make it my request, that he will forbear printing any thing, on my behalf, that may tend to y^e prejudice of a Person, who from what he has wrote, I ought to beleive neither hath nor had any ill will towards me.’⁶³ But he was ignored. Presumably the poem was already printed, but it is also likely that Welsted was attacking Pope on behalf not of Chandos but of Walpole and the court. He had written a poem in praise of Chandos in 1720, but his new poem takes very little interest in its declared subject; it is something of a patchwork, probably making use of existing material. The first part of the poem is taken up with a lament for Victoria, whose reading of the translation of the Iliad is implausibly blamed for her death. The second part, on a very general basis, laments the attacks on Polio, who stands for Chandos, but the detail has little to do with the duke himself.

The poem then launches into a denunciation of rancour and malignancy before turning to Pope’s religion. It ends with a reflection on his borrowings from Walsh and Wycherley and what seems a gratuitous reference to Charles Jervas the painter: ‘The Verse, that Blockheads dawb, shall swift decay, │And Jervase’ Fame in Fustian fade away’. The references to the ‘brave’ and ‘heroes’ in the lines before ‘Catiline, and Tully’ have little to do with Chandos (who had been paymaster general of the forces abroad, a lucrative but not valorous role) and much to do with Welsted’s George II, praised for his bravery at Oudenarde. Catiline was famed for conspiracy against the state, not for his satire on his benefactor, and Maynard Mack correctly identifies a reference to Bolingbroke, as the opponent of Walpole. Mack’s puzzlement at this point is significant:

Yet, what evidence existed in 1732 when Welsted’s poem was published, apart from the Timon portrait that Pope was Walpole’s ‘Foe’? Welsted seems to be aware of something that so far as we can tell had to come to him from special understanding, not from any overtly published avowal by Pope. This special understanding need not have consisted in the awareness that Timon was Walpole, but it may have.⁶⁴

If Mack’s and Kathleen Mahaffey’s argument that Timon’s villa was Walpole’s Houghton is rejected—and the several different identifications of the villa show that rejection is right—there has to be another reason for identifying Pope as Walpole’s foe, and the Variorum presentation provides the most powerful one.⁶⁵

Welsted’s poem’s epigraph from the Aeneid (X. 503–4, XII. 948; LCL 64: 206–9, 366–7) in which Aeneas avenges Pallas’s death, also suggests that something politically important is at stake. By presenting himself as Aeneas, Welsted might seem over-parted; but if he is thought of as offering the court’s delayed response to the wound to the king’s dignity, the comparison is appropriate. Lord Bolingbroke catches the peculiar nature of the outcry against the Timon episode in his Letter to Mr Pope, published by David Mallet in 1753: ‘By the authority that employed itself to encourage this clamor, and by the industry used to spread and support it, one would have thought that you had directed your satire in that epistle to political subjects’ (433).

Welsted’s attack on Jervas (‘And Jervase’ Fame in Fustian fade away’) at the start of the year in which Caroline made her recorded visit to Wooton’s studio may also have been significant. Pope had published a poem warm in Jervas’s praise in 1716, but only as an introduction to Du Fresnoy’s The Art of Painting; it was hardly prominent in Pope’s oeuvre.⁶⁶ It may be that Welsted's criticism of Jervas, rather than of one of Pope’s more recent friends, was the consequence of the false identification of the collaboration that lay behind the of the Variorum engravings.

A ‘second edition’ of Of Dulness and Scandal was published three days after the first (Daily Journal, 6 January 1732) and a ‘third’ two days after that (London Evening Post, 8 January 1732), but these are reimpressions and the Grub Street Journal (13 January 1732), noting that ‘donit’ on the title page had not been corrected to ‘donat’, was surely right in suggesting the popularity of the poem was an invention. Welsted published a second poem, Of False Fame, a month later, on 10 February (Daily Courant, 9 February 1732 ‘To morrow’) and that too advertised an immediate ‘second edition’ (Daily Journal, 15 February 1732) but the second edition seems not to exist; the advertisement was part of an attempt to magnify the importance of the complaint against Pope. Of False Fame does have some direct comment on Chandos, the rabble’s cry cannot ‘take from Chandos Taste’, but the attack on Pope focuses on ingratitude:

The final line here hardly applies to Pope’s relationship with Chandos but fits perfectly the presentation of the Dunciad Variorum in 1729.

Pope was perturbed by the protests over To Burlington. Guerinot lists seven pamphlets in the few months after its publication, and notes that the attacks continued into 1733, ‘a year which produced more pamphlets for or against Pope than any other’ (xxiv). Pope’s bewilderment at the outcry was surely genuine. In a letter to Burlington of 21 December 1731, he says, the character of Timon is collected from ‘twenty different absurditys & Improprieties’, not denying that some of those may be shared by Chandos, a claim that is supported by the ingenuity of modern critics in finding models for Timon’s villa.⁶⁷ He adds, ‘I fancy your Lordship is not so easy to be persuaded contrary to your Senses, even tho the whole Town & Court too should require it’ (Correspondence, 3. 259). The same day he wrote to Aaron Hill about the difficulties in combatting the accusations: ‘It’s an aukward Thing for a Man to print, in Defence of his own Work, against a Chimæra: You know not who, or what, you fight against: The Objections start up in a new Shape, like the Armies and Phantoms of Magicians, and no Weapon can cut a Mist or a Shadow’ (Correspondence, 3. 260). Pope’s early efforts to defend himself emphasized the differences between Timon’s villa and Cannons, though he was also prepared to argue the need for personal satire.⁶⁸ At this point, he was taking the criticism at face value, but that was to change.

Pope finally drafted a fuller reply to the critics of To Burlington, though he never published it. Probably in early 1732, he wrote ‘A Master Key to Popery’, which survives as a manuscript John Butt found with the Burlington papers at Chatsworth.⁶⁹ It pinpoints the failure of To Burlington to defer to aristocratic taste and argues for the diversity of its satire, but what is most striking is its preoccupation with gossip in high places. The ‘Key’ sets out ironically, in response to ‘the Request of Several Persons of Quality’, to expose the affront to ‘all the Nobility & Gentry’ of the kingdom, by making public the opinions ‘vented & propagated in all Conversations’ (Prose Works, 2. 410). Those who lay claim to know Pope’s inner thoughts include ‘so honourable Persons as Lord Fanny, M^r Dorimont, the Lady De-la-Wit, the Countess of Methusalem & others [Lord Hervey, Bubb Dodington, Lady De La Warr, ?Lady Nottingham]’. To these he adds ‘his Majesty’s Poet Laureat, his Illustrious Associate S^r William Sweet-Lips, the Lady Knaves-acre’ [Colly Cibber, Sir William Yonge, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu] and some Grub Street writers, including Welsted.⁷⁰ It is noteworthy that Hervey heads this list, as he heads the roll of those identifying Timon as Chandos, and that it includes so many important Court figures. The preoccupation with the court may explain why the ‘Key’ was never published. It was of close interest to the Burlingtons but not to the public; it would be fully intelligible only to insiders.

A longer, more ambitious and insightful response to the court attacks was provided by ‘A Letter to a Noble Lord’, which had been provoked by Hervey’s An Epistle from a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity, published, without Hervey’s connivance, in November 1733.⁷¹ The Epistle from a Nobleman had dismissed Pope’s claims to be a successful poet, but the real focus of Pope’s prose reply to Hervey is not on that poem but on To the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace of 9 March 1733. Pope accuses Hervey of being in league with the ‘Gentlemen of the Dunciad’: ‘If your Lordship destroys my poetical character, they will claim their part in the glory; but, give me leave to say, if my moral character be ruin’d, it must be wholly the work of your Lordship’ (Prose Works, 2. 448). Given the attacks of Welsted alone, it would be difficult to justify this claim, unless Hervey was behind the poetic campaigns against him, as he probably was. Throughout his Letter, Pope is concerned with his reputation at court. He denies the application of the lines on Lord Fanny in Satire 2. 1 to Hervey and is appalled by the consequences:

Your Lordship so well knows (and the whole Court and town thro’ your means so well know) how far the resentment was carried upon that imagination, not only in the Nature of the Libel you propagated against me, but the extraordinary manner, place, and presence in which it was propagated; that I shall only say, it seem’d to me to exceed the bounds of justice, common sense, and decency. (Prose Works, 2. 444)

The suggestion must be that the Verses were presented to the king and queen, a presentation that reversed the positive one of the Dunciad Variorum. That impression is confirmed in a passage in which Pope expresses the vulnerability he must have felt in this whole episode:

Above all, your Lordship will be careful not to wrong my Moral Character, with THOSE under whose Protection I live, and thro’ whose Lenity alone I can live with Comfort. Your Lordship, I am confident, upon consideration will think, you inadvertently went a little too far when you recommended to THEIR perusal, and strengthened by the weight of your Approbation, a Libel, mean in its reflections upon my poor figure, and scandalous in those on my Honour and Integrity. (Prose Works, 2. 455)

Choosing his words carefully (the denial concerns his writing), he goes on to describe himself as ‘A Man, who never wrote a Line in which the Religion or Government of his Country, the Royal Family, or their Ministry were disrespectfully mentioned’ (Prose Works, 2. 455). But then he seems to be drawn like a moth near the flame of the actual offence:

he [Pope himself] may deserve some Countenance, even from the GREATEST PERSONS … Your Lordship knows of WHOM I speak. Their NAMES I should be as sorry, and as much asham’d, to place near yours, on such an occasion, as I should be to see You, my Lord, placed so near their PERSONS, if you could ever make so ill an Use of their Ear as to asperse or misrepresent any one innocent Man. (Prose Works, 2. 455)

As Rosemary Cowler points out, Hervey’s association with the ear of monarchy is repeated in To Arbuthnot (‘Or at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad’) and Fourth Satire of Donne (‘When half his Nose is in his Patron’s Ear’).⁷²

The decision not to print the ‘Letter to a Noble Lord’ must have been made alongside a resolve to offer a more open opposition to the Hanoverian court. It may be coincidental, but the Earl of Burlington resigned all his court offices in May 1733 and went into opposition to Walpole.⁷³ Pope published his epistles to two opposition figures, Bathurst and Cobham, in 1733 and 1734, while the complete Essay on Man became addressed to Bolingbroke in April 1734. Plans for a new collected Works were already underway. What might not be said in individual publications might be revealed in the Works. There was a plan to attack the Duke of Marlborough in a revision of the Essay on Man, while the Duchess of Marlborough (though the identification is disputed) and Queen Caroline herself were to be satirized in To a Lady.⁷⁴ Hervey was to be named Sporus and the master/miss antithesis included in To Arbuthnot. And the Dunciad’s ass engravings were to be included in volumes in which Midas’s story was told in To Arbuthnot, bringing that poem into harmony with those earlier in the volume.⁷⁵ The court’s retaliation had injured Pope in public opinion, but it had freed him for the opposition that was to shape the final part of his career.⁷⁶

Footnotes