The Golden Rump

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 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.

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.

The reference clearly draws attention to the self-titled Rumpsteak Club that gathered at that time around the figure of Frederick Louis, the disenchanted son of George II and heir apparent to the English crown.

A later reminiscence by Thomas Davies informs that Griffard received a mere amount of one hundred pounds as a compensation for providing the Prime Minister with his most effective weapon for placing a censor over the stage.

The anonymous authorship of The Golden Rump has often been attributed to Henry Fielding, who was certainly no stranger to writing political satires on sensitive subjects, having produced on stage and published his latest works The Historical Register for the Year 1736 and Eurydice Hiss’d around roughly the same time.

His attitude towards political factions can be surmised succinctly from a declaration made on 26 March 1748 edition of The Jacobite's Journal, where he wrote: In a Time therefore of profound Tranquillity, and when the Consequence, at the worst, can probably be no greater than the Change of a Ministry, I do not think a Writer, whose only Livelihood is his Pen, to deserve a very flagitious Character, if, when one Set of Men deny him Encouragement, he seeks it from another, at their Expense; nor will I rashly condemn such a Writer as the vilest of Men, (provided he keeps within the Rules of Decency) if he endeavours to make the best of his own Cause, and uses a little Art in blackening his Adversary.