The Welshman in A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth (1697–1764)

And the divisions within the Hanoverian court

 

 

 

Robin Simon

 

 

 

The fourth scene in A Rake’s Progress (1735, Pl 1, Pl 2) features Hogarth’s most prominent reference to Wales in any of his ‘modern moral subjects’. The series, like A Harlot’s Progress (1732), is notable for its use of specific London locations and also for its depiction of actual people: for example, George Frederic Handel, Charles Bridgeman, James Figg and Dubois appear in A Rake’s Progress, while Francis Charteris, Mother Needham and Justice Gonson can be seen in A Harlot’s Progress.

 

 

The illustrations are of works by William Hogarth (1697–1764) unless otherwise stated

1 A Rake’s Progress, IV, ‘The Rake arrested, going to Court’, 1733–5. Oil on canvas, 62.2 x 75 cm. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

 

 

2 A Rake’s Progress, IV, 1735. Engraving

 

 

The fourth scene of the Rake is set close to Piccadilly at the top of St James’s Street, with St James’s Palace visible in the distance. The Rake is being arrested for debt at the instigation of the gentleman at the side of the composition who is a Welshman, for he is wearing a leek in his hat for St David’s Day, 1 March, the Welsh national day. That also happened to be the birthday of Queen Caroline, consort of the Hanoverian monarch, George II: hence the traffic jam of sedan chairs and coaches in the background, as people come to pay court to the Queen (as the Rake was intending to do). The arrest takes place only seconds before the Rake passes a boundary stone in the right foreground. This stone ‘marked the “verge” of the royal palace of St James’s within which the constables had no power of arrest’.^[1]

We know that the Welshman is a gentleman because he is wearing a sword and carrying a muff. In the painting (Pl 1) one of the bailiffs (in front of the sedan chair) also has a leek in his hat, but not in the print (Pl 2) where, instead, a leek appears in the hat of the servant (behind the chair) who is raising the roof of the chair for the Rake to clamber out – or, rather, to be tipped out of it. The details are all very specific: even the time of the royal levée is indicated on the palace clock as 1.40 pm (Pl 3).

 

 

3 Detail of Pl 2, clock on front of St James’s Palace showing 1.40 pm

 

 

And so, prompted by a discussion with Robert Cowley, I wondered whether the Welsh gentleman was anyone in particular. It occurred to me that he might be Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 3rd baronet (1692–1749), who was the first ‘Williams-Wynn of Wynnstay’ or, as each inheritor of the title is referred to upon succession, the first ‘Sir Watkin’. He had formerly been plain Watkin Williams, but in 1719 he inherited the Wynnstay estate and other lands in north Wales upon the death of Sir John Wynn, the cousin of his mother, Jane Thelwall (a surname, incidentally, that is cognate with ‘Llewellyn’), whereupon Williams added Wynn to his name. This was all independent of Watkin Williams’s father, Sir William Williams, 2nd Baronet (1684–1740), who remained in possession of his own ample estate and remained styled thus. Some years before he became Williams-Wynn, Watkin Williams had already gained large estates when he married Anne Vaughan in 1715:

[The marriage] brought within a decade the estates of Llwydiarth, Montgomeryshire, Glan-llyn, Merioneth, and Llangedwyn, Denbighshire; and in 1719, when he took the additional surname of Wynn, he inherited from Sir John Wynn, a cousin of his mother, Rhiwgoch, Merioneth, and above all Wynnstay, Denbighshire, his main residence thenceforth. The vast Wynnstay complex of estates straddled at least five Welsh counties and extended into Shropshire, and at his death had an estimated rent roll of £20,000.^[2]

Upon the death of his father in 1740, at which time Williams-Wynn was already the greatest landowner in Wales, he became 3rd Baronet, and inherited yet more swathes of property. When A Rake’s Progress was being created (1733–1735), Watkin Williams-Wynn was not only the richest and most prominent Welshman in London – and in Britain – but, making his presence in this scene especially apt, he was an arch Tory and an avowed Jacobite, who was forever opposed to the Hanoverian succession. Thus, in direct contrast with the Rake, he is not on his way to pay homage to the Hanoverian Queen – and indeed is in the process of preventing the Rake from attending either.

As a member of Parliament from 1708 almost uninterruptedly until his death, Williams-Wynn, a devout High Church Anglican, voted in 1710 against the impeachment of Dr Sacheverell. He was a vociferous critic of Walpole. He headed a famous Jacobite club, the Cycle of the White Rose, and even publicly burnt a portrait of George I in 1722. At the time of the 1747 parliamentary election he aligned with other leading Tories in association with Frederick, Prince of Wales – the heir to the throne who was, notoriously, in opposition to his parents.

Williams-Wynn’s presence adds a gloss of rich irony to Hogarth’s scene, because, as mentioned above, he is celebrating St David’s Day, which by coincidence was the Queen’s birthday. The rest of the world is flocking to St James’s Palace, home of the Hanoverian court, to compliment the Queen – which Williams-Wynn would never do. The Whigs favoured the Hanoverians, but the Tories, such as Williams-Wynn, did not, and seeing him in this context would have been apt because the early 1730s was precisely the period in which he rose to prominence as a leading Tory:

By 1730 he was prominent in the parliamentary opposition, a patron of Lord Bolingbroke’s political weekly The Craftsman, and a member of that inner tory council the Loyal Brotherhood. Oxford University early acknowledged Wynn’s importance in tory circles by a DCL in 1732. In the 1730s… he blossomed into a front-line speaker… By the 1740s he was a leading tory, perhaps the foremost one in the Commons.^[3]

When Williams-Wynn came to London for a parliamentary session, he would be met at Finchley and escorted into town by a procession of Welsh residents of London all the way to Westminster. Horace Walpole described him as ‘a simple Welsh knight of a vast estate… from when he was called Prince of Wales’ (ODNB) The great wealth alone of Williams-Wynn would make him an obvious person to have lent money to the Rake, and so Hogarth can be imagined as pointing a contrast between the substance of Sir Watkin’s riches and the fleeting fortune of the Rake.

In addition to the circumstances above that suggest this identification, there is a likeness observable if we compare the 3rd baronet in a portrait of 1729 (Pl 4) with the man in the engraving (see Pl 5).

 

 

4 Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 1st Bt, after Michael Dahl (1659–1743), 1729.
Oil on canvas, 126.4 x 101.6 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

5 Comparison of detail (left) of Welshman in Pl 2 and detail (right) of portrait in Pl 4

 

 

The set of the mouth, with a protruding lower lip and jutting lower jaw, and the long nose, are suggestively similar; the loosely tied long white stock is common to both. The wig, with its distinctive tied ends, is the same in each. An example of this particular kind of wig can be seen in the Victoria & Albert Museum (Pl 6). It happens to be dated 1735 –the date of the publication of Hogarth’s engraving.

 

 

6 Wig from the funeral effigy of Edmund, Duke of Buckingham, 1735.
Victoria &Albert Museum, ref. 2011FD3351

 

 

In Dahl’s portrait (see Pl 4) Sir Watkin holds a scroll with the words ‘An Act for the more effectual[ly] preventing Bribery and Corruption in the Elections of Members to Serve in Parliament / Brought’ (Pl 7).

 

 

7 Detail of Pl 4, scroll with Williams-Wynn’s anti-corruption Parliamentary Bill of 1729

 

Williams-Wynn introduced this bill in Parliament and was its principal supporter. It was passed into law in 1729, and so the portrait was evidently commissioned that year to record his triumph. Election bribery and corruption was, of course, the subject of the first scene in Hogarth’s Election series of 1755 (Sir John Soane’s Museum). It could be that in the early 1730s Williams-Wynn was something of a hero to Hogarth.

The irony of the Welsh national day’s coinciding with the Queen’s birthday was evidently in Hogarth’s mind from the start, because technical investigation of the painting has revealed that initially there was an effigy of a Welshman seated in a chair to be seen hanging from a house at the left of the painting (Pl 8). There is the outline of a leek sticking up from his hat in the manner we see in Hogarth’s finished composition.^[4]

 

 

8 Detail (left) of Pl 1 above with infrared reflectogram (right) of same detail showing seated life-size effigy of a Welshman hanging from a pole sticking out at right-angles from the top of a house. The effigy appears to be suspended from a shop-sign by a ribbon or rope, while the sign itself seems to show the head of a man in ‘Jacobethan’ costume and hat

 

 

The Tate Britain report on this investigation notes that hanging up the effigy of a Welshman on St David’s Day was a phenomenon observed by Samuel Pepys on 1 March in 1666/7

… in the streets, in Mark Lane [at the east end of Eastcheap in the City], I do observe, it being St. David’s day, the picture of a man dressed like a Welchman, hanging by the neck upon one of the poles that stand out at the top of one of the merchants’ houses, in full proportion, and very handsomely done; which is one of the oddest sights I have seen a good while, for it was so like a man that one would have thought it was indeed a man.^[5]

The Tate technical report also notes that Joanna Tinworth at the Soane Museum has suggested that Hogarth’s insertion of the feature would have brought to mind the feud between Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his parents. That is surely correct, since the effigy would have been seen to be ‘hanging over’ St James’s Palace, a typically Hogarthian visual-verbal pun. But, leaving that aside, the notoriously poor relationship between Frederick and his parents was so strained by the time Hogarth designed this scene that his so obviously featuring leeks, the emblem of Wales, in the context of activity at the court of St James’s would alone have brought it immediately to mind.

By 1732, the Prince of Wales had fallen under the influence of George ‘Bubb’ Dodington (who features as the corruptly elected MP in Hogarth’s Election series, IV) who, for personal reasons of ambition, fomented the simmering antagonism between the royal parents and the heir to the throne. The chief minister Sir Robert Walpole’s attempt to introduce his wildly unpopular Excise Bill in the same year tempted the Prince into more open opposition, which he just about managed to keep under control. But he rejected the King’s terms for a reconciliation with Walpole – upon whom the King depended, and whose Excise Bill he had hoped would increase the royal revenues. Hogarth’s depiction of the homage being paid to Queen Caroline at the court of St James’s would, at the time, have inevitably brought to mind the general belief that she ruled the King – while Walpole ruled her.

The King and his son also fell out bitterly over Frederick’s deciding, again in 1732, to support the ‘Opera of the Nobility’, which the following year became a rival of Handel’s Italian opera company, the ‘Second Academy’ – patronised by the King. Hogarth at first showed Handel in the painting of the second scene of A Rake’s Progress, where he is identified, seated at the harpsichord, by the initials ‘F H’ for Frideric Handel, indicating the Rake’s support specifically for the King’s opera company, although both opera companies were equally effective as a way for the aristocracy and aspiring gentry to waste their money.^[6] But in October 1734 Hogarth announced a delay in the publication of the engravings as he felt he had to add ‘additional characters’ to the prints. At this point he removed the initials that identified Handel as the harpsichordist in the second scene, and added a long scroll of paper that culminated in an image of the greatest castrato of the age, Farinelli, who had just joined the Opera of the Nobility, where he made his debut on 29 October that year. To add insult to injury, the Opera of the Nobility had also managed to take over the King’s Theatre, Haymarket – which up to this point had been the home of Handel’s opera. In the final form of the print, the Rake is shown to have presented Farinelli with ‘A Gold Snuff box Chac’d with the Story of Orpheus charming the Brutes’ worth £100 to indicate that he had changed his allegiance.^[7] The Prince of Wales is recorded as having presented Farinelli with £200 guineas at his benefit night on 15 March 1735, when he starred in Artaserse, for one night only, and that is the event specifically referred to by Hogarth in the published engraving – which was therefore created after that famous evening. There was much, therefore, in the engraved version of A Rake’s Progress that already pointed to the differences between the King and Queen and their elder son, before the viewer even arrived at the fourth scene.

An additional source of irritation to the Prince of Wales in 1732 was the fact that his sister, Anne, the Princess Royal, became engaged to William, Prince of Orange, that year: the marriage finally took place on 25 March 1734 (to repeat, while A Rake’s Progress was being created). Frederick deeply resented this, viewing it as yet another insult to him on the part of his parents, because his requests for his own marriage had been turned down. (Hogarth, as we shall see below, knew all about it.)

In a way, then, the disconnect between foreground and background in Hogarth’s picture reflects the division at court and may even hint, in the downfall of the Rake, at the possible fate of the still controversial Hanoverian succession. To deploy, in addition, the most famous Welshman of the day as a principal player in the action, who, moreover, was nicknamed the ‘Prince of Wales’, would make the message even clearer. It would have been yet more insistently clear had Hogarth retained the obscured detail of the suspended Welshman, but he evidently thought he done enough.

As it happens, there is a very personal reason for Hogarth’s having drawn attention to the fractured nature of the court of St James at the time he was creating A Rake’s Progress.^[8] In 1732, he had set about painting the royal family in a conversation piece that included Frederick, Prince of Wales. It was initiated by Hogarth upon his hearing of the forthcoming marriage of Princess Anne to William of Orange, for which he proposed a painting with the aim of producing an engraving. The whole unpleasant business – as it turned out to be – was recorded by George Vertue, writing in November 1732:

… upon the Nuptials of the Prince & Princess of Orange the great preparations… the particular decorations of the Chappel of St. James’s where the ceremony was to be perform’d – on that account Mr Hogarth made application to some Lady about the Queen that he might have leave to make a draught of the ceremony & chappel & paint it & make a print of it for the public. The leave was granted him & and an order from the Queen for so doing thus far being unknown to Mr Kent Painter & Master Carpenter. when Hogarth came there to begin his draught. he was by Mr Kents interest orderd to desist. Hogarth alledgd the Queens orders. but Ld Chamberlain himself in person insisted upon his being turnd out, and not to persue any such design… So that Mr Hogarth complains heavily. not only of this usage but of another, he had some time ago begun a picture of all the Royal family in one peice by order the Sketch being made. & the P. William the Duke had sat to him for one. this also has been stopt. so that he can’t proceed.^[9]

Two sketches by Hogarth of elaborate royal conversation pieces survive. The first, more finished, sketch shows the family outdoors, with oranges featuring prominently on a table at the right close to Anne, the Princess Royal, in reference to her forthcoming marriage (Pl 9). The second has a similar (not identical) arrangement, but now set indoors. It was no doubt offered as an alternative to the first composition and is noticeably less finished (Pl 10).

 

 

9 The Family of King George II, c1732. Oil on canvas, 63.8 x 76.4 cm. The Royal Collection

 

 

10 The Family of King George II, c1732.
Oil on canvas, 62 x 74 cm. National Gallery of Ireland

 

 

At the same time, Hogarth made a separate portrait of Frederick’s younger brother, the Duke of Cumberland, which is fully finished (Pl 11). The Duke was also included by Hogarth in The Conduitt Piece (Pl 12), together with two of his sisters. The Conduitt Piece was apparently commissioned in 1731, and the Duke’s figure there is identical to the individual portrait.^[10]

 

 

11 Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland.
Oil on canvas, 47.9 x 35.2 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

 

 

12 The Conduitt Piece: A performance of Dryden’s The Indian Emperor, 1732–1735.
Oil on canvas, 80 x 146.7 cm. Private collection

 

Hogarth was profoundly upset when such a promising project as a conversation piece of the royal family, holding out the prospect of the most important advance in his professional career to date, was abruptly terminated. And as a result, Elizabeth Einberg points out, Hogarth ‘fell from grace among fashionable court patrons’.^[11] Vertue recorded, ‘Mr Hogarth complains heavily… of this usage.’ As well he might. It surely informed his approach to the fourth scene of A Rake’s Progress.

 

 

1. Elizabeth Einberg, William Hogarth. A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London 2016, cat. 77. ↑
2. Peter DG Thomas, ‘Wynn, Sir Watkin Williams, third baronet’, Oxford Dictionary of Biography. ↑
3. Thomas ODNB. ↑
4. See https://www.tate.org.uk/research/features/hogarth-rakes-progress-paintings-to-prints ↑
5. https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1667/03/01/#fn1-1667-03-01 ↑
6. See Robin Simon, Hogarth. France and British Art: The rise of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain, London 2007, pp 252–271, for the ramifications of the feud between these two opera companies, which aroused remarkably strong feelings in the public. Neither of the companies could remotely cover its costs and, in a few years, both had collapsed. ↑
7. See Simon, Hogarth. France and British Art, pp271–273, for the complicated details of this operatic saga. ↑
8. Simon, Hogarth. France and British Art, p270, for a proposal of the sequence in which the eight scenes of A Rake’s Progress were actually painted, with the fourth scene identified as part of an earlier group, comprised of scenes I, IV, VI, VII and VII, followed by a later group: III, V and II. All were finished by 2 November 1734. Publication of the engravings was ultimately delayed until June 1735, to coincide with the day that ‘Hogarth’s’ Copyright Act became law. ↑
9. George Vertue, Notebooks III, p68. ↑
10. Einberg, cat. 63. ↑
11. Einberg, p104. The royal portraits are Einberg, cat. 60, 61, 61a. ↑