Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

of troops marching to defend England against the Pretender, is juxtaposed with
disorder in the muddle of soldiers getting ready to leave their wives or mistresses,
the foragers and deserters, the camp followers, all the idle apprentices in and out
of uniform, and all the natural instincts that operate against regimentation,
duty, and prudence—a confrontation that seems almost to be between art and
nature. In the middle foreground is another obvious version of the Choice of
Hercules: a grenadier with his pretty young Protestant (English) lover, a ballad
vendor, is accosted by his Jacobite wife or ex-lover, a newsvendor, wielding a
"Rembrancer" (an anti-Cumberland periodical). That the latter is Jacobite is
established by the Jacobite's Journal she sells and by the cross she wears. Min-
gled with love, pleasure, food and drink, sports and recreation, are their conse-
quences: the demands of women, venereal disease, children, drunken collapse,
and thievery, in the midst of which even conspiracy (two Jacobites whispering)
can take place. Although Rouquet was writing for his French audience—a tick-
lish matter with this print—and speaks with irony, he leaves the contrast as much
in the air as Hogarth does. The orderly column of soldiers, he notices, is con-
trasted with the foreground, where "la discipline est moins observee." But, he
goes on, "si vous vous plaignez de ce choix, on vous dira bonnement que l'ordre,
& la subordination ne convient qu'a des esclaves; car ce qui s'apelle license par
tout ailleurs s'arroge ici l'auguste nom de liberte." 40 The matter is further com-
plicated by the inscription Hogarth added to the engraving made from the
painting: "To His MAIESTY the KING of PRUSIA and Encourager of the
ARTS and SCIENCES! This Plate is most humbly Dedicated."
A contemporary would have taken The March to Finchley, with its dedica-
tion to the King of Prussia and its moiling confused troops, as a commentary on
the Mutiny Bill being violently and spectacularly debated in Commons in
1749-50, and continuing in 1751. The supporters of the Duke of Cumberland
and Henry Fox, on the side of the bill, might have seen the print as depicting the
current chaos of English martial discipline, as opposed to the Prussian standard
o£ order and precision advocated by the Duke as chief of the armed forces.
Horace Walpole, however, remarked of the proposed bill: "The penalty of
death came over as often as the curses in the Commination on Ash-Wednesday.
Oaths of secrecy were imposed on Courts Martial; and even officers on half-pay
were for the future to be subject to all the jurisdiction of military law." 41 Ho-
garth's basic ambiguity would allow opponents of the bill to read The March
to Finchley as a comment on the frequently-heard assertion that the Duke, the
incarnation of "Prussianism," treated his soldiers "rather like Germans than
Englishmen." The Prince of Wales, the Duke's political enemy (and sponsor of
The Rembrancer), might have read the dedication as a reference to his brother.
Then again, one could take the reference to the King of Prussia as "An En-
courager of Arts and Sciences!" as an ironic allusion to George II's notorious
indifference to the arts. The references are there, though neither obtrusive nor
87