A satirical depiction of the electoral violence at the hustings in Brentford which disrupted polling for the Middlesex by-election of December 1768. Supporters of the ministerial candidate, Sir William Beauchamp Proctor, are shown wielding bludgeons against both voting and non-voting supporters of rival candidate John Glynn. One Proctor supporter shouts 'Bring down the Poll Book P[rocter] shall be the Man'. Glynn was backed by the sitting Middlesex MP John Wilkes, who is also satirically portrayed smiling at the right-hand side of the scene.
The British Museum; Museum Number: Y,4.574
Image © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
