Tourney-Spel van den Pretendent

This Dutch woodcut satirizes the failed Jacobite invasion of 1715, ridiculing the Stuart pretender through mock tournament imagery. Within a fenced arena, courtiers and soldiers enact a chaotic parade of incompetence—weapons dangle uselessly, figures strike absurd poses. The Dutch artist employs the spotprent (satirical print) tradition to lampoon both the pretender's military defeat and his supporters' pretensions. Flanking verses in Dutch heap scorn on the conspirators. This form of topical political satire, combining visual caricature with explanatory verse, established conventions that would flow through 18th-century European print culture—from Hogarth's sequential narratives to Gillray's grotesque public figures—ultimately shaping the visual language of comic narrative and the graphic novel.