Mary Darly has been called the mother of British caricature, a pioneer who – with her husband Matthias – paved the way for the ‘golden age’ of satirical prints. This chapter reveals new details of her life and her twenty-four-year career gleaned largely from study of the Darly prints and newspaper advertisements. Mary saw the importance of prints in influencing political affairs: she produced satires before her marriage in 1759 as well as after her husband’s death in 1780, and she published some of the most virulent prints in the campaign against prime minister Lord Bute in 1762–1763. Appealing to the new fashion for images that exaggerated facial features, in 1762 she published the first how-to book in English, The Principles of Caricatura Drawing. The Darlys produced a wide range of prints but their greatest success came in the 1770s with a series of caricatures of well-known people described as ‘Macaronies’. Designs were provided by enthusiastic amateurs and people flocked to the Darly shop near Charing Cross for their annual exhibitions – the first commercial print shows in London.

American examples led British reformers to mobilize as they never had before. Amid the John Wilkes controversies of the late 1760s, which became a flash point for concerns over the unrepresentativeness of the British Parliament, government corruption, and rights to free speech, liberal supporters organized the Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights with a Virginian as its secretary. Seeking to affiliate reformers’ support across Britain and the empire, while endeavoring to also support Americans during the prerevolutionary controversies, the Supporters and their successor organizations provide structure to the reform movement, whereas previously politicians had sought to maintain their “independence“ and avoid formal organizations.

This chapter considers Burke’s most famous text in defence of party: Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontent (1770). With political life having been essentially purged of Jacobitism, an unapologetic case for party was now possible. This party, posing as the Whig party, viewed itself as the protector of Britain’s Revolution Settlement and its mixed and balanced constitution in opposition to what was perceived as a revived Toryism supporting George III and his favourite Bute’s ‘court system’. Burke viewed men and measures as interlinked and believed that a party had to seek office and negotiate with the monarch as a corps. This was diametrically opposed to the earlier ‘not men, but measures’ slogan at the heart of John Brown’s writings and the Pittite patriot platform.