The Golden Rump

The Golden Rump is a farcical play of unknown authorship said to have been written in 1737. It acted as the chief trigger for the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737. The play has never been performed on stage or published in print. No manuscript of the play survives, casting some doubt over whether it ever existed in full at all. The authorship of the play has often been ascribed to Henry Fielding, at that time a popular and prolific playwright who often turned his incisive satire against the monarch George II and particularly the "prime minister" Sir Robert Walpole. Modern literary historians, however, increasingly embrace the opinion that The Golden Rump may have been secretly commissioned by Walpole himself in a successful bid to get his Bill for theatrical licensing passed before the legislature.

Plays, prints, pamphlets and journal articles attacking the King, Walpole and the extended Whig faction were not an uncommon feature of early 18th century London. Plays were subjected to the greatest displeasure from royal authority, and individual works like John Gay’s Polly (1729) and Fielding's own Grub-Street Opera (1731) had earlier been prevented from reaching the stage. However the trend itself survived through the 1720s and '30s, and a number of these satirical works used the devices of physical, sexual and scatological humour to mock the persons of Walpole and George II. Both the king and the prime minister were men of short, corpulent build; George II being the unfortunate possessor of a disproportionately large posterior and an affliction of piles, to which he had acquired a fistula by early 1737. All these personal deficiencies were mercilessly lampooned by Opposition satirists of the period.

The controversy of The Golden Rump dates back to an anonymous allegory published in two parts in the Opposition journal Common Sense on 19 and 26 March 1737. Titled A Vision of the Golden Rump, this work has later been attributed to Dr. William King of Oxford, a staunch Jacobite propagandist. In this satire, the “visionary” in his dream lands up in a pleasant meadow not unlike Greenwich Park, where he encounters "the Noblesse of the Kingdom" on their way to celebrate the Festival of the Golden Rump. The Pagod of the Golden Rump is easily identifiable as George II; the Chief Magician (whose “belly” is "as prominent as the Pagod's Rump”) is without doubt Robert Walpole; while the figure Queen Caroline is presented as injecting a solution of aurum potabile from time to time from a contrivance that is "a Golden Tube… with a large Bladder at the End, resembling a common Clyster-Pipe” into the Pagod's Rump, "to comfort his Bowels, and to appease the Idol, when he lifted up his cloven Foot to correct his Domesticks.”

...
Wikipedia