Frith as “Madman” and “unfortunate stone-thrower”

Although John Frith expressed his grievance against the British government using the language of rights and social contracts, his cause was personal, not political.

That didn’t stop his case from being mixed into the factional politics of 1790, however.

Ten days after Frith threw a stone at King George III’s gilded carriage, the caricaturist Isaac Cruikshank issued the print shown above, titled “Frith the Madman Hurling Treason at the King,” shown courtesy of the Yale Centre for British Art.

King George is at the right, riding by obliviously. A small fiddle-playing demon rides on his carriage and mounted guards follow.

In the middle of the picture, two men are seizing a third who holds a hatful of rocks. That central figure doesn’t look like Firth, however. Instead, it’s a caricature of the elderly Edmund Burke, bald, bespectacled, and ragged from being out of power. One of the men stopping him is dressed as a Bow Street Runner. The other looks like George, the Prince of Wales, as the British Museum expounds.

At the left are figures of a sailor and a woman carrying a basket, dismayed at the arrest. The woman’s five-o’clock shadow reveals her to be a lampoon of Charles James Fox, another opposition leader. The sailor looks like Fox’s ally Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

The message of this image is therefore that the opposition Whigs in Parliament metaphorically throwing rocks at the king.

Another, cruder image came from William Dent, shown here through the British Museum. It contrasted Frith “the unfortunate stone-thrower,” making “a follish throw for full pay” as an army officer, with the impeached India administrator Warren Hastings. As a “fortunate stone thrower,” Hastings is tossing diamonds as bribes “for a full P-rd-n.”

In this print Frith labeled is “Gulliver the little in Brob-dignag,” confronting the giants of the king and his bodyguards. In contrast, Hastings is “Gulliver the great in Lilliput,” lording over the grasping king and queen and Baron Thurlow, the former attorney general and lord high chancellor. George III and Thurlow were supporting Hastings in his ongoing impeachment trial.

The Member of Parliament who led the case against Hastings was Edmund Burke—the same man Cruikshank depicted as Frith in his print. Thus, artists on opposite sides of the political debate used Frith’s attack on the king’s carriage to convey contradictory messages.