State Butchers

Thomas Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching shows the Prince of Wales splayed across an operating table while William Pitt and his ministers — rendered as grinning surgeons — prepare to carve him up politically. A speech bubble trails from one figure; the caption below reads STATE BUTCHERS. The target is the Regency Crisis of 1788–89, when George III's madness forced Parliament to debate whether the Prince should govern — and on what terms Pitt's ministry would allow it. Rowlandson's figures carry the class sneering typical of late-Georgian print satire: lawyers and politicians drawn as leering tradesmen. The speech bubble, sequential crowd action, and grotesque physiognomy place this squarely in the lineage — Hogarth's narrative plates, Gillray's venom — that would feed directly into the comic strip a century later.