The Seige of Blenheim, or the New System of Gunning Discovered

James Gillray's etching lampoons the 1791 Gunning Affair, in which Elizabeth Gunning claimed a Duke's son had promised her marriage, her mother Margaret fabricating supporting letters. Gillray stages it as a mock military siege: Elizabeth rides a cannon firing paper volleys—her mother's forged correspondence—at Blenheim Palace's facade; a defender repels the assault with a counter-blast of excrement; the Duchess of Bedford proffers her petticoat as diplomatic cover while General Gunning flees ignominiously. The class anxieties are overt—an Irish adventuress family assaulting ducal respectability through feminine duplicity. Gillray's acid line work, cross-hatching, and grotesque physiognomy belong squarely to the Georgian print-shop tradition whose sequential visual storytelling and captioned speech directly seeded the newspaper comic strip.