“He wished to reveal what the government wished to conceal”

John Frith was born in Westminster in 1752, according to Joanne Major and Sarah Murden’s All Things Georgian: Tales from the Long Eighteenth Century.

Frith was the younger son of a brandy merchant and veteran of the Life Guards, but by the end of 1771 his parents and older brother had died, so he inherited the family money.

Some reports say Frith dissipated that fortune, but he retained his genteel education and enough money that, with a push from Chelsea businessman David Burnsall, he bought the rank of ensign in the 37th Regiment of Foot in March 1774.

Frith was promoted to lieutenant the next year, and in 1776 the 37th was part of the Howe brothers’ invasion of New York. An item published in The British Mercury, or Annals of History in March 1790 stated:

The Major and Captain of this regiment, when in America, had, by retreating from the enemy, affixed some stains on their military character; and Mr. Frith, in a moment of irritation, or imprudence, was unguarded enough to reproach them for their dastardly behaviour. This gave rise to an implacable dislike, and brought on a series of ill treatment, which, as his feelings were exquisite, obliged him to quit the service on half-pay.

Lt. Frith retired from the army in March 1778, as noted in Gen. Sir William Howe’s orders. But four years later he rejoined as an officer of the 10th Regiment, which was posted to the West Indies. That stretch didn’t prove to be any more successful.

A man named Fuller later testified about hearing Frist complain about “his ill treatment by Major Amherst, and Ensign Steward, in the West Indies.” I believe these men appear in the 1791 Army List as Lt. Col. Jeffery Amherst (c. 1752–1815, illegitimate son of the field marshal who had led the British army at the end of the French and Indian War) and Lt. Thomas Stewart of the 10th.

As Fuller recalled:

[Frist] declared then the reason he was ill treated, was, that he wished to reveal what the government wished to conceal; for that he saw a cloud come down from Heaven, that it cemented into a rock, and out of that sprung a false island of Jamaica, and because he wished to reveal it, he had, he said, been confined one hundred and sixty-three days

According to Major and Murden, Frith’s commanders asked him to leave in 1786 because they thought he was going insane. He was officially listed on the half-pay roles as a lieutenant from the “1st Foot, 2d Bat.” among the “Additional Companies, reduced in 1783.”

In 1788 Frith went back to Hempstead, where his mother was buried. He commissioned a memorial for his family in that church, including his own name among them. Under the emblem of a sun in a double triangle beneath a rainbow were the words:

And there shall be a standard of Truth erected in the west, which shall overpower the enemy.—May 12, 1786, This glorious phaenomena in Sol of the Almighty came down for my protection in latitude 15, on the Bahama sandbanks, and where the spiritual cities of Sodom and Gomorrha came up in the West Indies. Vide Revelations.

Your dying embers shall again revive,
The phoenix souls of Friths are still alive.

One wonders what the stone carver and churchmen thought of those words, but Frith was paying the bill.

TOMORROW: Lt. Frith and the king.

(The photo above shows a recreated 37th Regiment active in the late twentieth century, courtesy of Flintlock and Tomahawk.)