Twofold Vision in Eighteenth-Century Writing

I

In the Sutherland Collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, there is an engraving of an eighteenth-century gentleman in body-armor and wig, bearing the inscription: “His Royal Highness George Augustus, Prince of Hanover Electoral Prince of Brunswick & Duke of Cambridge Grandson to the Most Illustrious Princess Sophia,” in other words the man who would become George II in 1727. The only problem is that the face of the man seems to be that of the Stuart claimant to the British crown, James III, also known as the Old Pretender. The resemblance becomes plain when we put this engraving in a series of undoubted images of James III. Various explanations of this curiosity might be offered, from the commercial to the prudential, but even if we were to reject the most recent and expert one, that the inscription was “presumably a device to frustrate prosecution” it would remain the case that the English printseller designed to retail this ambiguous artifact to his customers. ¹ It is not a unique instance. Richard Sharp includes another, on which the false inscription is if anything a more clear example of a safeguard against prosecution. ² They fall into the category of the altered plate, which was the particular study of G. S. Layard. ³ Another curiosity was sufficiently remarkable to be noted by Sir John Percival in his diary of 1701. It was an engraving on which “if you look’d full you might See king Williams Head & underneath Gulielmus 3 Rex dei gratia &c. if you look’d Slanting towards the right it was King James picture w^th Jacobus 2:Rex:&c., and if Slanting to the left Carolus Secundus &c.” ⁴ Not too much, probably, should be made of the fact that while Charles II was a dead predecessor of William III, at the opening of 1701 the deposed James II was alive and keeping up his claim. More important, no doubt, is the visual trick and its mental equivalent according to which a slight shift of viewpoint revealed the image of a different king.

Consider evidence of a slightly different kind. Commemorative medals were, at their best, works of high art and persuasive pieces of propaganda. Unlike prints they were three-dimensional, sometimes with portraits in high relief, sometimes with inscriptions printed around the edge between the obverse and reverse sides. Above all images on both obverse and reverse sides are in unsimultaneous yet often dramatic relation with one another. Late in the reign of Queen Anne a medal was produced with, on the obverse, a handsome image of the Queen, the legend “Anna Augusta” around her head, a recognizable affirmation of her serene power for peace. On the reverse (where it would perhaps have been conventional to depict the heir to Anne’s throne) appeared not the Elector of Hanover, designated heir by the Westminster Parliament’s Act of Settlement in 1701, but the Pretender, James III, his head surrounded by the legend “Cuius Est”: “Who is this?” ⁵ This medal is evidently the work of John O’Brisset, a medallist working in England and not for the court in exile. He has taken for the reverse of his medal what had usually been the obverse in explicitly Jacobite medals produced by Nicholas Rottier for the exiled Stuart court. Clearly, the question “Cuius Est” has a different force here than when combined (as obverse) with a reverse depicting the British Isles with the legend: “Reddite Igitur,” “return it therefore”. This together with the English provenance of O’Brisset’s medal persuaded Noel Woolf to designate it as “anti-Jacobite propaganda” and this may be correct. ⁶ At a time, however, when there was much speculation as to who in fact would succeed the ailing queen Anne, the Elector of Hanover or James III, the appearance of James’s image with its provocative question could hardly fail to suggest alternative futures to those who saw this medal. Anne herself was in doubt as to whom she wished to succeed to the throne, and was capable of giving the impression that she sympathized with James to those...