The Infant Hercules
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In 1783, at the age of twenty-four, William Pitt became the youngest person ever to head the British government. King George III, who had become fed up with the machinations of a Whig coalition led by Charles James Fox and Frederick Lord North, finally prevailed upon Pitt to accept the premiership. When Rowlandson cast Pitt as the infant Hercules he echoed popular opinion, which saw the youthful minister as a refreshing change from his corrupt, self-serving predecessors. Like the classical hero, Pitt displays amazing strength as he strangles serpents determined to dispatch him. The snakes have the heads of Fox and North, while the shield marked "Chatham" implies that Pitt inherited his zeal from his famously principled father, the Earl of Chatham, just as Hercules’s supernatural strength came from his father, the god Jupiter.
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