Bleeding Neptune, or A Scotch Experiment!!

A crowned, half-naked Neptune sits submissively, blood-money cascading from his arm into a bowl held by a kneeling young man—Alexander Trotter, Paymaster of the Navy, accused of embezzling public funds. Behind him looms Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, dressed in tartans and a feathered bonnet, stage-managing the extraction. The speech bubble marks him as the scheming 'confidential Agent.' Cruikshank's etched line is sharp and economical, the colour applied in the flat, rapid washes typical of London print-shop production. The Scottish dress is not incidental: it signals the era's routine ethnic sneering at Scots in English public life. This single sheet belongs to the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of political caricature—cheap, widely circulated, instantly legible—whose narrative sequencing and visual exaggeration fed directly into the first comic strips decades later.