By Stephen Basdeo

Whenever a politician proposes raising a new tax or cutting a public service, a newspaper columnist will often respond that the proposed changes are ‘Reverse Robin Hood’. Alternatively, those who look favourably upon governmental tax and finance reforms might attempt to portray the politician in question as embodying Robin Hood values. We see this in the case of Donald Trump’s recent tax reforms, in which newspaper comic artists, as well as some gifted and not-so-gifted meme-makers on both sides of the debate portrayed Trump as an outlaw who steals from the rich to give to the poor, or who steals from the not-so-fortunate to give to the rich.

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Robin Hood, as previous research of mine has shown, has always stood in for politicians when satirists wish to make a point about a politician’s – or indeed any public body’s – financial management of the country. Back in 1727, two ballads entitled Robin Hood and the Duke of Lancaster and Little John’s Answer to Robin Hood and the Duke of Lancaster equated the ‘robbing’ Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, with the outlaw of medieval legend.[1] Other writers in the Georgian era went further and argued that robbing civil servants are more skilled at hiding their frauds than Robin Hood ever was:

Had [Robin Hood] turn’d his head to politics, had he been placed in the finances, or promoted to the station of Paymaster, Receiver General, Treasurer […] and robb’d the Exchequer, as Falstaff says, with unwash’d hands; had he plunder’d the publick, in a civil employment, till he had been almost the only rich man in the kingdom, we may conclude from many passages of history that there would have been no signs of him at this day.^[2]

And it was no different during the Victorian era. Railway fares have always been the bane of workers in the United Kingdom and we see in this era satirical poems depicting Robin Hood and Little John tiring of their life in the greenwood and opting to become railway bosses instead, so they can steal from people legally.

One of the most famous satirical magazines in Victorian Britain was Punch, and British politicians were not immune from the Punch Brotherhood’s pens. In 1894, the Liberals were in power, and Sir William Vernon Harcourt introduced a new budget which proposed a very modest form of wealth redistribution to help the poorer classes of society, but it was a measure to which the conservative press objected.^[3] The measures included financing modest increases in ‘dole’ for working families using funds raised from increased death duties. The ‘Graduation’ to which the ballad refers was Harcourt’s introduction of an estate tax, payable upon a person’s death, of one per cent on properties worth £500, and eight per cent on properties worth £1 million.^[4] Harcourt tried to sell it as a graduated income tax which would be paid by only the wealthiest, and this would be sure to go down well with working-class householders (the male heads of working-class households could vote since 1867).

Thus in the poem Bold Robin Hood: A Fytte of Forest Finaunce, which is written in faux-Middle English, Robin stands in for Harcourt who robs a merchant in Sherwood Forest:

“There thou speketh soothe,” the Merchaunte cried,

“Thou scourge of Propertie!

But the thing thou dubbest ‘Graduation,’

Is Highway robberie!”

“Robberie?” quoth Bold Robin Hood,

“Nay that’s a slanderous statement.

Redistribution it is not Theft –

Nor Exemption, nor Abatement.

“I robbe thee not, thou Mammonite!

The aim of all my Labours

Is – to ease thee of superfluous wealth

For the goods of thy poorer neighbours!”^[5]

The poem was accompanied with a full page illustration depicting ‘Sir Robin Hood Harcourt (addressing “The Marchaunt”)’ saying ‘“Nay, Friend, ‘Tis no robbery! I do but ease you of this to relieve your poorer brethren”’.^[6]

Clearly the writer of this piece was opposed to the measures, like the Tory opposition were. And it the fact that this rather small poem was given such prominence tells us something about the political leanings of the magazine in the so-called ‘golden age’ of Punch. When it was originally founded in the 1840s, it was a fairly liberal magazine which, being founded by Henry Mayhew of London Labour and the London Poor fame, was sympathetic to the plight of the poor. Yet during its golden age, it became a magazine that was (small ‘c’) conservative in its outlook and enjoyed in the middle-class drawing room. Although it hardly liked Disraeli, it often favoured the Tory party over the Liberals. The complaint expressed in this poem, therefore, is, what we might term today, a ‘middle-class problem’. It was not the working class who had to worry about death duties so, very oddly, although readers of Punch were supposed to disapprove of Harcourt’s redistributive graduated tax, Robin Hood is still, in spite of the fact that readers were meant to disapprove of Harcourt’s actions, a man of the people.

References

[1] Stephen Basdeo, ‘A Critical Edition of Little John’s Answer to Robin Hood and the Duke of Lancaster (1727)’, Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies, 1 (2017), 15-31.

[2] ‘Bravery: The Characteristic of an Englishman’, The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, No. 8 (1738), 300.

[3] ‘Sir William Harcourt’s Possible Budget’, The Spectator, 24 March 1894, p. 7.

[4] Donald Read, The Age of Urban Democracy, 1868-1914 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 295.

[5] Anon., ‘Bold Robin Hood: A Fytte of Forest Finaunce’, Punch, 5 May 1894, p. 210.

[6] Anon., ‘Bold Robin Hood’, Punch, 5 May 1894, p. 211.