Andreas Whittam smith: If only the Windsors faced satire as biting as George III did

'I had travelled from the censorious 21st century to the unbuttoned, licentious 1790s'

Straight after viewing a video work containing horrific scenes of cannibalism at the British Board of Film Classification in Soho Square, London, recently, I went to the wonderful James Gillray exhibition at the Tate Britain and found ­ more cannibalism. There was the 1792 etching Un Petit soupèr a la Parisiènne ­ or ­ A Family of Sans-Culotts refreshing, after the fatigues of the day. On the table is a severed head without an eyeball. One of the diners is about to tip the missing part into his mouth as if it were an oyster. Other members of the party are stuffing choice pieces of human flesh down their throats. Another guest gnaws at an elbow joint. The children seem to be dining off intestines and an old hag bastes a baby roasting on a spit. If this had been moving image, I am not sure that it would have got a certificate.

But I had travelled from the censorious 21st century to the unbuttoned, irreverent, bawdy, licentious final decades of the 18th. Working in the 1790s and early 1800s, Gillray was one of the greatest caricaturists of any age. What a time, though, to be at work. He was able to mock the excesses of the French revolution, make fun of the political battle between Pitt and Fox, comment on the incipient madness of King George and deplore the excesses of the Prince of Wales. And there were plenty of social scandals at which he could have a go. Remarkably one still feels the sheer power of Gillray's invective.

The hand coloured etching of the sans-culottes feasting on human flesh was published on 20 September, 1792. Two weeks earlier in Paris there had been a bloody massacre. Some 1,400 priests and political prisoners, prostitutes and common criminals had been slaughtered. The Princesse de Lamballe was cut to pieces with axes and pikes, her body stripped and her head stuck on a pole to be paraded through the streets. Some reports state that mutilated genitalia were displayed. News of the butchery had reached London on 8 September. Gillray remembered the engraving of Pieter Brueghel's The Poor Kitchen and turned Flemish poverty into French excess. Very quickly, the print was on sale.

I do not believe that today's royal family is any less worthy of caricature than was the family of George III. The King detested his son, the Prince of Wales. That rings a bell. The Royal Dukes had their mistresses. That, too, sounds familiar. It was no more a model family then that it is to-day. Gillray went at them with an unequalled ferocity. We see the King and Queen and their eldest son gorging themselves on great bowls of guineas inscribed "John Bull's blood". In Sin, Death and the Devil, the Queen is portrayed as a ghastly creature, half serpent, her breasts withered and her hand on Pitt's crotch, whether concealing or stimulating his private parts it is hard to say. In The Crack'd Jordan, the Duke of Clarence's mistress, Dorothy Jordan, is transformed into a giant chamber pot with a huge fissure, into which the Duke plunges his body, gleefully shouting "Yeo, Yee, Yeo". The Duke's naval uniform is hanging up nearby.

Cartoons of the Windsor's are regularly published in newspapers, but the satire is mild compared with Gillray. It is hard to know what he would have done with the Duke of Edinburgh on the occasion of his 80th birthday. He might have accentuated the Duke's foreignness, his bad relationship with Prince Charles, or perhaps taken the royal consort's hobby of carriage driving with young aristocratic ladies beside him as his theme. I am pretty certain that the result would have been a drawing with such unabashed, crude directness (albeit full of refinement in the details) that no contemporary newspaper would publish it. As for Camilla Parker Bowles, the caricature of the Duke of Clarence and Dorothy Jordan could have been re-worked into the The Crack'd Bowle. No need to change the naval uniform or the strange shouts of pleasure. Equally, I think, no chance of it being published today.

Even more extraordinary is that the subjects of Gillray's caricatures could, so to speak, take it. The young George Canning, who was later to be foreign secretary and then prime minister, was desperate for Gillray to include him in a cartoon, however undignified. It would at least have shown that he was somebody to be reckoned with. Many leading politicians were Gillray's customers. Fox and Sheridan, for instance, were avid collectors. And the most regular buyer of Gillray's work at Mrs Humphrey's shops in New Bond Street and St James's Street was the Prince of Wales himself. From 1803 onwards he bought as many prints as he could.

Of course, the powerful and the privileged could afford to be magnanimous. They didn't have to seek a mandate from the people. The prints circulated only among the aristocracy, gentry and professional and commercial classes. Yet one cannot withhold one's admiration from a period in politics when leading figures were subjected to pitiless caricature yet rose above it. If only it could be so today.

aws@globalnet.co.uk