A comic print of King George IV sitting on a high-backed chair. He is very fat, holding a glass of red wine, and dressed in an Elizabethan-style ruff, yellow shirt with lace cuffs, yellow stockings, a red coat and red breeches. Sitting on his lap is Lady Conyngham, also very fat, in a blue dress with lace trim and striped puff sleeves and a pointed hat. She puckers her lips at him for a kiss. On the floor in front of them is a sword; a bottle sits on a table to the left. In the background, a man peers through a doorway on the left. On the right, two figures in similar Tudor costume stand in conversation: a man with an enormous red nose wears a red coat, ruff and plumed hat; a thin-faced person wears a blue dress and pointed hat. On the wall behind them hang hunting trophies. A wall hanging in the background depicts an older man embracing a younger one; behind the younger man there is a pig. The title is printed above the print: 'King Henry IV.' Below, the two central figures are identified as 'Geo. IV' and 'Lady Conyngham,' and dialogue from Shakespeare's Henry IV is provided as follows: Falstaff: 'Thou dost give me flattering busses.' Doll: 'Nay truly, I kiss thee with a constant heart.' Falstaff: 'I am old, I am old.' Doll: 'I love thee better than I love e'er a sunny young boy of them all.'

King Henry IV

William Heath

1825-29

Etching, hand-coloured

37.5 x 26.3 cm

British Museum 1868,0808.8797

Image credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Heath’s print reflects a growing despair with George, now morbidly obese, plagued by gout and towards the end of his reign as George IV. ‘Prince Hal’ has aged into Falstaff.

His pristine sword lies useless at his feet, he is in danger of being smothered by his mistress, Elizabeth Conyngham, and her husband, Lord Conyngham, is the bawd Mistress Quickly to her Doll Tearsheet. The only remnant of any former hope for the wayward Prince of Wales is the forlorn Prodigal Son on the wall.

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False Liberty Rejected or Fraternizing & Equalizing principles discarded

Isaac Cruikshank, published by S W Fores

1793

Cruikshank-False-LIberty-Yale.tiff

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Shade of Falstaff

Anonymous, published in Punch, 1891

1891

Punch Crop

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