John Bull on a throne receiving emaciated and tattered supplicants for charity, including Napoleon. Coloured etching by G. Cruikshank, 1814.

George Cruikshank's hand-coloured etching *The Royal Beggars* crowds a throne room with grotesque petitioners—uniformed generals, gaunt civilians, and a diminutive Napoleon among them—all stretching toward a bloated, red-faced John Bull seated atop a money chest. Speech bubbles spiral from every figure, a device Cruikshank inherited from Gillray and would later pass, structurally intact, to the comic strip. The caricature employs exaggerated national types rendered with hooked noses, slack jaws, and ragged foreign dress. This visual language flowed directly into nineteenth-century newspaper comics and early comic books.