William Mudford (1782–1848)
An historical account of the campaign in the Netherlands, in 1815, under His Grace the Duke of Wellington, and Marshal Prince Blucher…
London: H. Colburn, 1817
Lib.3.81.21, plate XXVI

Mudford was a novelist, essayist and prolific journalist, with a good eye for a lucrative writing project. His Historical account of the 1815 campaign, published in 1817, was one such. This plate, showing Blücher with Wellington and other Allied commanders, was engraved by George Cruikshank. In the year of the book’s publication, Mudford was appointed editor of The Courier, a hard-line Tory London newspaper strongly opposed to the more moderate government of the day—so much so, indeed, that in 1824 Mudford and his paper were accused by the foreign secretary and future prime minister George Canning of being in the pay of the French, a cutting insult in the context.

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