Unrecorded
[WALPOLE.]
The Norfolk Congress versified. To the Tune of, King John and the Abbot: or, the Cobler’s End. London, ‘A. Moore’, [1728?]
Folio, pp. 9, [1]; title-page dusty, fore-edge neatly strengthened, old repairs to tears at inner margin, a few spots and stains; in late nineteenth-century quarter roan, marbled paper sides; old pen shelf-mark to head of title; from the library of the Walpole family at Wolterton.
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The Norfolk Congress versified. To the Tune of, King John and the Abbot: or, the Cobler’s End.
Apparently unrecorded issue of a biting satire on Robert Walpole, with a final leaf printing a ‘Quadrille, as now play’d at Soissons’ not mentioned in ESTC or Foxon but quite evidently from the same press.
Robert Walpole had been remodelling the family home, Houghton Hall, in Norfolk, since 1720 as a country retreat for political allies and simultaneously a state property for official visits, ‘a statement and celebration of Walpole’s power and prestige as the king’s minister’ (ODNB). Walpole held two annual meetings at Houghton, a select gathering of the cabinet in the spring, and a larger ‘congress’ in the autumn at the start of the shooting season, at which he kept a public table. The latter events were expensive, wasteful, and riotous, and drew both the ire and the satire of the opposition, which are freely vented here. A prose satire, The Norfolk Congress, used a description of the feast as a means to satirise the Government and the ongoing negotiations at the Congress of Soissons, at which Robert’s brother Horatio Walpole (1678–1757) was Britain’s chief negotiator, concluding with a punning prayer that all attendees might ‘hang together in unity and a-cord’. The prose text is repeated here, prefaced by a loose versification (pp. 3–6).
The Norfolk Congress versified is very rare in any form – ESTC lists copies at the British Library, Southampton and Harvard only – but all of those are in 8 pp. The present copy is apparently unique, from the same setting of type but with an extra poem on a final leaf: ‘Quadrille, as now play’d at Soissons’ (the card game rather than the dance), with lines spoken by all the protagonists, from the King and Queen of France to the ‘Sophi of Persia’ and the ‘Ostend Company’ – ‘I tremble to lose all my capital stock’.
‘A. Moore’ was a standard false imprint for plagiaries, piracies, and surreptitious works in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Cf. ESTC T127544; Foxon N318.