“The price of her husband’s blood”

In April 1770, Matthew and Patrick Kennedy were hauled back to London to answer for killing watchman George Bigby the previous Christmas Eve.

This time the prosecutor wasn’t the Crown. Rather, as stated yesterday, Bigby’s widow Ann was suing them under an old and little-used English law that allowed murder victims’ families that privilege.

The Kennedy brothers had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang in criminal court, but then reprieved by the Crown. They were about to be transported to America.

Activists opposed to British government corruption seized on this murder case because rich friends of the Kennedys’ sister Kitty, a popular courtesan, had obviously intervened on her brothers’ behalf.

In a public letter dated 28 May, the political writer Junius complained about “the mercy of a chaste and pious Prince extended chearfully to a wilful murderer because that murderer is the brother of a common prostitute.”

The Rev. John Horne and others in the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights encouraged Ann Bigby to sue. And if she won, the death penalty was back on.

So in May the Kennedy brothers were once again in a courtroom. Most of that first proceeding was filled with legalistic arguments of whether the procedure was even valid. The brothers were sent back to jail to await the next hearing. Their supporters complained that, too, was unjust (though other people were in the same jails for far less).

In August 1770, the American press started to run stories about the Kennedy brothers, catching their readers up with articles from London newspapers in March and May. Richard Draper devoted almost the entire fourth page of the 9 August Boston News-Letter to the case.

At the next court session in November, Ann Bigby “allowed herself to be non-suited.” Accounts offer different details, but they all agree that Kitty Kennedy’s friends paid off the widow.

One London publication said:

When she went to receive the money (£350) she wept bitterly, and at first refused to touch the money that was to be the price of her husband’s blood; but, being told that nobody else could receive it for her, she held up her apron, and bid the attorney, who was to pay it, sweep it into her lap.

Decades later, John A. Graham wrote in his Memoirs of John Horne Tooke:

this gentleman [attorney Arthur Murphy, shown above] stepped in between them [the Kennedys] and the laws. The widow Bigby, the nominal prosecutor, was tempted by him, with a sum of money, to desist; and, after some hesitation between duty and avarice, actually accepted of three hundred pounds, which had been offered her in paper, on condition, that, to prevent the risk of forgery, the bank notes were converted into gold!

Still, it took until the spring of 1771 for the murder case to be formally resolved. Then the criminal sentence and the commutation were both confirmed. As the 10 June Pennsylvania Chronicle told American readers, Matthew would be coming to America for life, Patrick for at least fourteen years—“which they accepted of.”

Drew D. Gray’s Prosecuting Homicide in Eighteenth-Century Law and Practice states that the Kennedy brothers arrived in Virginia before the end of the year. Like Elizabeth Canning, they seem to have shed their British notoriety and disappeared into colonial society—helped by having fairly common names.

(Or did they? In 1909 Horace Bleackley wrote in Ladies Fair and Frail that Matthew Kennedy was “seen in gaol at Calais, a prisoner for debt,” in 1775—but he offered no source for that statement.)

As for Kitty Kennedy, in August 1773 she married Robert Stratford Byron or Byram and retired from celebrity life. However, a few years later, she was back with the Hon. John St. John, one of her main lovers and helpers during her brothers’ court case. She died in late 1781 of consumption.

TOMORROW: This is supposed to be a story about Ebenezer Richardson.

“The Bill of Rights people that have spirited her up”

In April 1770, as recounted yesterday, the convicted murderers Matthew and Patrick Kennedy escaped hanging through the intervention of their sister Kitty’s upper-class friends.

The brothers’ death sentence was changed to transportation to the American colonies. Matthew, convicted of fatally striking a watchman named George Bigby, was to stay out of Britain for life; Patrick for fourteen years.

One of the members of Parliament who championed the Kennedys’ cause, the Earl of Fife, wrote to another, George Selwyn, on 28 April:

Just after I wrote to you this morning, I went to Mr. Stuart, on Tower Hill. I settled the free passage for Kennedy, for which I gave him fifteen guineas, and I got a letter of credit for ten, in order that the poor fellow might have something in his pocket; I also got a letter of recommendation to a person in Maryland, who will be vastly good to him.

Mr. Stuart told me he believed the ship was sailed; however, I resolved to spare no pains to relieve the poor man, and therefore directly set out for Blackwall, and very luckily found the ship not gone.

I went on board, and, to be sure, all the states of horror I ever had an idea of are much short of what I saw this poor man in; chained to a board, in a hole not above sixteen feet long; more than fifty with him; a collar and padlock about his neck, and chained to five of the most dreadful creatures I ever looked on.

What pleasure I had to see all the irons taken off, and to put him under the care of a very humane captain, one Macdougal, who luckily is my countryman, and connected with people I have done some little service to! He will be of great service to Kennedy; in short, I left this poor creature who has suffered so much, in a perfect state of happiness.

Presumably the other four “dreadful creatures” remained chained together. Neither they nor the fifty-plus other people in that hold had a sister who was a popular courtesan. Only for Kitty Kennedy would Fife have bribed John Stewart, the Contractors of Transports, to obtain special treatment.

Some people in London didn’t like that. They viewed the commutation of the Kennedys’ sentences when so many other people were being hanged for lesser crimes than murder as an example of government corruption.

In 1770 the Londoners most concerned with government corruption were the Bill of Rights Society, radical activists gathered (at least for a few more months) around John Wilkes.

Prominent among those men was the Rev. John Horne (shown above). He was also active in the case of McQuirk and Balfe, the printers’ case, and even a state trial turning on who fired first at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Those radicals found an unusual way to restore the possibility of executing the Kennedys. As Horace Walpole later wrote:

Horne, the clergyman, and other discontented persons complained of the pardon, and not only complained of it to blacken the King, but, horrible spirit of faction! instigated the watchman’s widow to appeal against it, which, if sentence should again follow, would bar all pardon; nor could the King do more than reprieve from time to time. The woman did prosecute; and the young man was again remanded to his gaol and terrors, a second punishment, unjustly inflicted; for, though probably guilty, he had satisfied the law.

The Hon. John St. John, one of the lovers and patrons of the Kennedys’ sister Kitty, told Selwyn about the widow Ann Bigby: “It is certainly the Bill of Rights people that have spirited her up.” According to the author Horace Bleackley, the recorder of London didn’t want to issue this writ for the widow, but the Wilkesite lord mayor, Sir William Beckford, insisted he do so.

This dispute reverses stances we might normally expect. Radicals interested in limiting government and guarding personal liberties were demanding the death penalty be applied without mercy. Aristocrats who wouldn’t have intervened to help any other young Irishmen convicted of a drunken murder were bending all the rules they could to preserve Kitty Kennedy’s brothers.

TOMORROW: The resolution of the case.

“Not the only Instances of the unexampled Goodness”

As I quoted yesterday, on 24 May 1773 the Boston Gazette ran a delightfully bitter attack on Commissioner Charles Paxton for finding a job for Ebenezer Richardson in the Philadelphia Customs office.

A couple of paragraphs below that invective, Edes and Gill printed:

Some Time last Week Ebenezer Richardson, Esq; who lately had such a fortunate and surprizing Escape from the Gallows for the Murder of young SEIDER; through the extraordinary Clemency of our pious and gracious Monarch, set out for the City of Philadelphia, being appointed an Officer in the Customs, for this notable Exertions in Behalf of Government———

Balf, McQuirk & Kennedys are not the only Instances of the unexampled Goodness of George the Third.

This writer obviously expected readers to recognize those names, but I didn’t.

Laurence Balfe and Edward McQuirk (or Quirk or Kirk) were accused of hitting George Clarke on the head during a riot sparked by a by-election at Brentford in West London on 8 Dec 1768, as shown above.

The rival candidates in that election were Sir William Beauchamp-Proctor, a Rockingham Whig, and John Glynn, lawyer for the radical John Wilkes. (Glynn won and served in Parliament till his death in 1779.)

A “gentleman of very considerable fortune” testified that he had seen McQuirk and Balfe among Proctor’s supporters on the first day of voting. The two men were carrying clubs, and McQuirk was “very active in the fray.”

That night, the wealthy gentleman spoke to McQuirk and Balfe, letting them believe he was on their side. McQuirk admitted to having been in the brawl and hinted he might have to flee the country. Balfe said he’d been paid “a guinea for going down to Brentford.”

The gentleman took his information to a “parson Horne,” no doubt the political radical John Horne, then still a Wilkes ally. That man arranged for McQuirk and Balfe to be arrested by Sir John Fielding, the London magistrate. Clarke died on 14 December, elevating the charge to murder.

In January 1769 McQuirk and Balfe were convicted of murder at the Old Bailey, with the jury deliberating only twenty minutes. Proctor immediately launched a public campaign for royal clemency, calling this verdict unjust.

Advocates for mercy pointed out that the prosecutors never accused either defendant of hitting Clarke. Indeed, there was no evidence Balfe hit anyone, just that he was in the crowd. The Earl of Rochford also reported there was “some doubt whether Clarke’s death happened in consequence of the blow he received.”

On 10 March, the Crown pardoned McQuirk and Balfe.

Proctor was a supporter of the Marquess of Rockingham, and Rockingham had been mostly supportive of America during this first term as prime minister in 1765–1766. Furthermore, the case against McQuirk and Balfe really was flimsy, and they were obviously pawns in a much bigger game. We might therefore expect colonials to support clemency for them.

However, American Whigs were enamored of John Wilkes. They suspected any attack on his party as oppression by the establishment. Thus, Edes and Gill could present “Balf [and] McQuirk” as an example of George III or the ministers around him abusing the royal pardon power to benefit political supporters, just like Ebenezer Richardson.

TOMORROW: The case of the Kennedys.

John Sawbridge, M.P.

John Sawbridge (1732–1795) was of the radical Whigs who joined the Rev. John Horne in supporting John Wilkes during the 1760s, forming the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights, and then leaving that group to form the Constitutional Society instead, as discussed yesterday.

Sawbridge first tried to run for Parliament in 1763, but bowed out when a more prominent Kentish gentleman wanted the seat. Reportedly, Tories tried to keep him in the race in hopes he’d split the Whig vote—the first time he had to deal with the rough and tumble of genteel Georgian politics.

Five years later, Sawbridge entered Parliament as a member for the town of Hythe, succeeding Lord George Sackville (Germain). At first he appeared to be one of the Duke of Grafton’s men, but he started to push Wilkes’s cause. As a result, Lord Grafton dropped Sawbridge, but the city of London adopted him, making him a sheriff and an alderman.

Then came the split with Wilkes. In 1771 Sawbridge was up for the post of Lord Mayor of London, but Wilkes threw his weight behind the incumbent instead. That year, the ministry’s preferred candidate won the office—Wilkes and Sawbridge had split the Whig vote.

Wilkes became increasingly vituperative, saying that “in politics [Sawbridge], poor man,…[could] see no farther than his nose.” Sawbridge had a big nose, but the cross-eyed Wilkes was hardly the one to criticize someone else’s vision. When that didn’t work, Wilkes complained that Sawbridge was a “proud Colossus of pretended public virtue.”

In response, Sawbridge kept talking about the importance of remaining politically independent of parties and, more radically, serving the people by voting the way they wanted. Most politicians preferred the approach Edmund Burke argued for, voting the way that you knew was best for them.

In the spring of 1774 Sawbridge and Wilkes reconciled. Sawbridge bowed out of the race for Lord Mayor in favor of Wilkes, who promised support in the fall’s parliamentary election. Sawbridge lost his seat in Hythe but won one in London. The next year, he also succeeded Wilkes as Lord Mayor.

Both men opposed Lord North’s policy toward the American colonies, but they were part of a small minority in Parliament. Over the next few years, Sawbridge allied with the Marquess of Rockingham and the Earls of Shelburne and Chatham rather than the more radical opposition. As Charles James Fox rose to lead the Whigs in the House of Commons, Sawbridge deferred to him.

In 1780, Sawbridge supported the Roman Catholic Relief Act. That proved to be wildly unpopular; the Gordon Riots paralyzed the city. Sawbridge lost support among Londoners, apologized humbly for taking a position that they didn’t like, and still came in fifth in a race for four seats.

However, one of the four frontrunners, John Kirkman, died on the day the polls closed. There was a special by-election, and this time Sawbridge won with no contest.

Four years later, the new prime minister, William Pitt, spent £2,000 supporting his own candidate in London. His party called Sawbridge a “republican” and “an avowed enemy to the constitution, to monarchy.” It didn’t help that Sawbridge’s older sister was the celebrated republican historian (and now married widow) Catharine Macaulay Graham.

Sawbridge insisted he wanted only reform in the Commons and protection for “the Rights of the People.” He pulled out a win in 1784 by only nine votes. He promptly resumed pushing for parliamentary reforms, which still went nowhere.

In 1790, Sawbridge sought reelection mainly for old times’ sake, even asking for the privilege to die in political service to the city of London. Voters chose him overwhelmingly. But then he suffered a stroke, so while he remained an M.P. until his death he was at least partially paralyzed.

Though contemporaries and historians agree that John Sawbridge was an ambitious man, he also stuck to his principles, which were ahead of his time.

Splitters!

At the History of Parliament blog, Dr. Robin Eagles just discussed a development I’d been curious about: the rift between John Wilkes and his fellow radical English Whigs in the 1770s.

Eagles focuses on the dispute between Wilkes and the Rev. John Horne (later John Horne Tooke). When Wilkes became the bane of the royal government in the late 1760s, Horne helped to found the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights. (The painting above shows, from right, Horne, Wilkes, and Wilkes’s lawyer, John Glynn.)

Horne viewed that organization as devoted to protecting citizens’ rights, with Wilkes happening to be the most prominent man being oppressed at the time. Wilkes seems to have seen it as his personal fan club. Eagles writes:

By the spring of 1770, the Society had managed to secure the funds necessary to keep Wilkes out of debtors’ prison, allowing him to walk free on 17 April without fear of being rearrested. With its original object now satisfied, the Society turned to campaigning on other reforming issues and helping to co-ordinate the nationwide petitioning movement. Here, though, lay the beginnings of its downfall. . . .

as Alexander Stephens, author of a memoir of Horne suggested, Wilkes and Horne were fundamentally incompatible:

It was almost impossible, from the nature of human affairs, that two such men as Mr Wilkes and Mr Horne could agree during any long period; for their characters, dispositions, and ultimate aims, were entirely dissimilar. [Memoirs, i. 176]

Horne thought Wilkes feckless. Wilkes found Horne overly serious and complained he ‘cast a gloom’ wherever he went. By December 1770 the two had fallen out dramatically. Horne wanted the Society to publish the details of all Wilkes’s debts, so they might be settled once and for all. He also pushed for other deserving causes to be underwritten by the Society. Wilkes counter-attacked, securing an agreement that nothing more would be done until his own finances had been straightened out.

Then came the Printers’ Case of 1771, which I discussed back here. At a meeting that Wilkes didn’t attend, Horne convinced the Bill of Rights Society to give those printers some money. At the next meeting, there was a blow-up.

Horne and some supporters left that group and founded the rival Constitutional Society. He and Wilkes started to snipe at each other in the press. Horne trumpeted Wilkes’s personal failings, but, as Eagles writes, those were already public knowledge; “Most of Wilkes’s supporters and admirers did so in full knowledge that their hero was a very fallible character.”

“Opposition to established error must needs be opposition to authority”

In May, prompted by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’s new acquisition of a double portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, I started writing about the life and public image of historian Catharine Macaulay.

Then I broke off to address other matters, but at last I’m getting back to her. But first a running start with another historian, David Hume (1711–1776, shown here).

Hume began publishing philosophical essays with his Treatise on Human Nature in 1738, earning about as much as philosophers have usually earned. But in 1754 he published the first volume of his History of England. In eight years he wrote six volumes covering time from Julius Caesar to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That series was popular enough to make Hume moderately rich and famous.

As a national history, Hume’s work was notable for a couple of themes that might seem contradictory:

• He was skeptical or critical about religion, casting it as an impediment to progress.
• He was favorable about England’s monarchs, even the Stuarts.

Hume thought of himself as an independent Whig or standing politically between the Whigs and Tories, but the Whigs of the 1750s felt he had created a Tory history of their country.

In 1763 Catharine Macaulay published the first volume of her History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line. She and her readership saw her as providing a truly Whiggish response to Hume. For her the Stuarts were bad kings, and the uprising against them a Good Thing.

The two authors exchanged letters in 1764. Hume stated, “I look upon all kinds of subdivision of power, from the monarchy of France to the freest democracy of some Swiss cantons, to be equally legal, if established by custom and authority.” Macaulay disagreed:

Your position, that all governments established by custom and authority carry with them obligations to submission and allegiance, does, I am afraid, involve all reformers in unavoidable guilt, since opposition to established error must needs be opposition to authority.

Whigs extolled Macaulay in the mid-1760s. Artists issued portraits of her as a Roman matron “lamenting the lost liberties.”

In 1768 Macaulay, recently widowed, published the fourth volume of her history, covering the trial and execution of Charles I. Even that event she portrayed as a Good Thing, arguing that “Kings, the servants of the State, when they degenerated into tyrants, forfeited their right to government.” Though she criticized Oliver Cromwell, she praised the Commonwealth of the 1650s.

That went too far for the British political establishment. People began to view Macaulay as a “republican,” someone who didn’t think any monarchy was necessary in Britain—and perhaps no social hierarchy, either. The Earl of Rockingham, his Whig faction, and his mouthpiece Edmund Burke distanced themselves from her. Having been celebrated, she was becoming controversial.

Macaulay herself had no formal role in politics, but in 1769 her brother John Sawbridge, a Member of Parliament and London alderman, helped to found the Society of the Gentleman Supporters of the Bill of Rights with the Rev. John Horne. Their original goal was to support John Wilkes in his battles with the government, but within a couple of years Sawbridge and Horne thought the group had become too focused on that one man. They wanted broader reforms, and Macaulay was part of the same circle.

Catharine Macaulay published the fifth volume of her history in 1771. And then she appears to have hit a wall. No sixth volume appeared for a decade.

To be sure, Macaulay did issue shorter works, such as her Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland, on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs in 1775. That crisis was of course the outbreak of war in America, and Macaulay made clear which side she was on:

With an entire supineness, England, Scotland, and Ireland, have seen the Americans, year by year, stripped of the most valuable of their rights; and, to the eternal shame of this country, the stamp act, by which they were to be taxed in an arbitrary manner, met with no opposition, except from those who are particularly concerned, that the commercial intercourse between Great-Britain and her Colonies should meet with no interruption.

With the same guilty acquiescence, my countrymen, you have seen the late Parliament finish their venal course, with passing two acts for shutting up the Port of Boston, for indemnifying the murderers of the inhabitants of Massachusets-Bay, and changing their chartered constitution of government:

Macaulay also jumped ahead of her big history to publish the first volume of a History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in 1778, but she adopted the less demanding form of “a Series of Letters to a Friend.” In those pages she went so far as to criticize the Glorious Revolution of 1688 for not putting enough curbs on the powers of monarchy.

TOMORROW: Moving to Bath, traveling to France.

“I suppose they have all read it years ago”

In defending himself against the Crown’s charge of seditious libel in July 1777, the Rev. John Horne wanted to show it was reasonable of him to write two years before that Americans had been “inhumanly murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.”

As a radical political activist, Horne probably also wanted to get the evidence behind that belief out to the public.

The Crown authorities, meanwhile, wanted to squelch Horne and his message.

One of Horne’s sources was a deposition signed in April 1775 by Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould, then a wounded prisoner in American hands. The trial record shows Horne’s struggle to get Gould’s words out in court over the obstacles of his prosecutor, Attorney General Edward Thurlow (shown here), and the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield.

Horne’s questioning of Gould continued like this:

I shall ask you no questions that you dislike; give me a hint if there is any one you wish to decline—Did you make any affidavit?

Yes, I did.

Will you please to read that? [Giving the witness the Public Advertiser, May 31, 1775.] I believe that to be the exact substance of the affidavit that I made.

Lord Mansfield. It cannot be read without the Attorney-General consents to it.

Attorney General. I don’t consent.

Lord Mansfield. If he consents to it, I have no objection.

Mr. Horne. May I give it to the jury?

Lord Mansfield. No; I suppose they have all read it years ago.

Mr. Horne. My lord, that is my misfortune that it is so long ago. [Mr. Horne begins to read it.]

Lord Mansfield. You must not read it.

Mr. Home. I have proved the publication by the printer.

Lord Mansfield. It will have a different consequence, if you only mean to prove that there was such an affidavit published. If you mean to make that use of it, then you may produce the affidavit, or have it read.—If you mean to prove the contents of it, they must come from the witness, and then you will have a right to have it read.

Mr. Horne. I mean both to prove the contents true, and the publication of the affidavit: that indeed, I have already proved.

Lord Mansfield. Then you may read the affidavit, if you make use of the publication of it.

Mr. Horne. I make use of both; that it was so published, and charged, and that it is true. “The Public Advertiser, Wednesday, May 31st, 1775.” [The affidavit read.]

Gould’s deposition still wasn’t included in the published trial record.

The former lieutenant agreed that the published text was accurate, but he reminded the jury he had said those things “at the time I was wounded and taken prisoner.”

Gould then went on to testify about how he and other officers marching to Lexington could see and hear the Middlesex County militia mobilizing around them. He talked about hearing “alarm guns,” even “cannon.” (“Did you say cannon?” asked Lord Mansfield.)

A juryman asked for clarification: “Pray who did the alarm guns belong to; to the Americans or our corps?” Gould affirmed those were signals from the provincials to each other.

The testimony that Horne elicited thus portrayed the Massachusetts populace as turning out for a military fight. He decided not to call Lord Percy, then in the courtroom, to add any details and rested his case.

Attorney General Thurlow then delivered a long legal argument, calling no witnesses. Chief Justice Mansfield summed up the case, particularly citing Gould’s testimony.

The jury took ninety minutes to decide the Rev. John Horne was guilty of seditious libel. He spent the next year in prison.

“Were you present at Lexington and Concord?”

The Rev. John Horne (later John Horne Tooke) was one of Britain’s political radicals in the 1770s.

He started the decade as a minister allied with John Wilkes. They quarreled, and he resigned his pulpit in order to study law (though eventually the bar wouldn’t accept him on the excuse that he had taken holy orders).

When London received the first word of the Revolutionary War breaking out, Horne immediately criticized the royal government. He even announced that he was raising money for the families of Americans “murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.” He had fully adopted the version of the first day of the war propagated by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

The Crown brought Horne into court on the charge of seditious libel for using the word “murdered.” On 4 July 1777, coincidentally one year after the Declaration of Independence, he went on trial in London with Lord Chief Justice Mansfield presiding. A detailed record of the trial was made and published many times since.

Horne tried to call Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State, and Gen. Thomas Gage as witnesses. When the judges unsurprisingly didn’t allow that, he called Edward Thornton Gould, a former lieutenant in the 4th Regiment.

That young, wealthy officer had been wounded and captured in the battle. While in American hands, Gould signed a deposition that I quoted way back here.

In describing the skirmish at Lexington, Gould said, “which party fired first I can not exactly say.” About Concord he stated, “the provincials came down upon us, upon which we engaged and gave the first fire.” While this was far from supporting the charge of “murdering,” it differed from most army officers and Gen. Gage’s official report in not blaming the provincials for firing first.

At the trial, Horne, representing himself, questioned Gould this way:

Did you in the year 1775 serve in a regiment of foot belonging to his majesty?

I did.

Were you present at Lexington and Concord on the 19th of April 1775?

I was.

How came you to be there?

As a subaltern officer, ordered there.

Ordered by whom?

General Gage.

At what time did you receive those orders?

I don’t recollect immediately the time.

Was it on the 19th, 18th, or 17th of April?

I believe it was on the 18th in the evening.

Did you receive them personally from general Gage?

No such thing.

Whom then?

From the adjutant of the regiment.

When did you set out from Boston for Lexington?

I cannot exactly say the time in the morning, but it was very early, two or three o’clock.

That is in the night in April, was it dark?

It was.

Did you march with drums beating?

No, we did not.

Did you march as silently as you could?

There were not any particular orders given for silence.

Was it observed?

No, it was not observed, not particularly by me.

Were you taken prisoner at Lexington or Concord, or either of them?

At the place called Monottama, in my return from Lexington.

Then Horne turned to introducing the testimony that Gould had sworn to when he was a wounded prisoner.

TOMORROW: Getting testimony on the record.

Looking into The Lady’s Magazine

Prof. Jennie Batchelor and her colleagues at the University of Kent created the website The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre to explore an influential publication that debuted in 1770.

The Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement followed The Gentleman’s Magazine by nearly forty years. It offered a similar mix of news, essays, fiction, poetry, and more, though slanted to what the London publishers (male) considered women’s interests.

Thus, The Lady’s Magazine contained less about formal politics—but it still hit political topics. As the website notes, “an article purporting to be about women’s dress might make an impassioned plea for reforms in female education.” The magazine offered an admiring illustrated profile of the radical John Horne Tooke in 1794 when he was locked in the Tower of London on charges of treason.

The central project of Batchelor’s team is a free and annotated index of more than 15,000 items from the first series of The Lady’s Magazine, 1770 to 1819. (Further series carried the magazine until 1847.) This work involved sifting original content from the reprinted material every magazine depended on, listing all the subjects of every article, and trying to identify writers' pseudonyms.

The blog reporting progress on that work shared some specific stories, such as how clues from various sources let Batchelor name a prolific contributor labeled “R—” as the overlooked author and translator Radagunda Roberts. Another posting discussed how much of the magazine’s poetry was copied or closely adapted from others, but also asked whether people of the eighteenth century would have considered that plagiarism.

While touching on many topics, The Lady's Magazine devoted a lot of pages to clothing. At first the articles focused on what was appropriate, economical, or characteristic of other countries. After 1800, there were regular reports on the latest changing fashions. Many more items covered the womanly arts of sewing.

Batchelor was particularly interested in the embroidery patterns printed in the magazine, counting about 650 listed in the contents tables. However, those pages were designed to be removed and used, so most surviving copies offered no more than tantalizing descriptions of missing patterns.

After hunting intact issues for years, Batchelor pieced together enough pages to coauthor Jane Austen’s Embroidery with Alison Larkin. She just unveiled another spin-off project—Patterns of Perfection, a growing web archive of embroidery patterns as they appeared in The Lady’s Magazine, such as “A new Pattern for a Winter Shawl” and “Pattern for a Gown,” both from 1796.

A Pyrrhic Victory in the Printers’ Case

In Parliament, 250 years ago this season, there was a big step forward in press freedom to report about how English-speaking governments worked.

Back in 1731, Edward Cave launched the Gentleman’s Magazine, which among its features included detailed reporting on the debates in Parliament, going beyond the official House Journals record of motions and whether or not they were adopted. Cave had actually been jailed a few years earlier for publishing such reports. This time he issued his proceedings only during parliamentary recesses, which provided legal cover.

According to James Boswell, Cave passed “scanty notes” on the debates to a young writer named Samuel Johnson to turn into oratorical arguments. It’s not that surprising, therefore, that these reports were often distorted—or so the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, complained.

In 1738, the House of Commons resolved:

That it is a high indignity to, and a notorious breach of the privilege of, this House for any news-writer in letters or other papers…to give therein any account of the doings or other proceedings of this House, or any Committee thereof, as well during the recess as the sitting of Parliament, and this House will proceed with the utmost severity against such offenders.

The London Magazine and Gentleman’s Magazine then started to report on the debates as if they had taken place in ancient Rome, Lilliput, or the Robin Hood Society, thinly disguising legislators’ names. Another trick was to replace some letters of the Members’ names with asterisks or dashes. Because of the magazines’ slow publishing schedule and upper-class audience, it appears, the government didn’t press its objections.

In the 1760s, however, John Wilkes brought more populist politics to London, with the business community and big crowds behind him. The capital’s newspapers increased their coverage of Parliament’s debates. That meant quicker reporting to a larger and closer readership.

The Houses responded by clearing all spectators out during debates, sometimes by force. At the end of 1770 the Whig M.P. Isaac Barré complained about how he’d been pushed out of the House of Lords as if by “a very extraordinary mob” headed by two earls.

On 5 Feb 1771, a Member named George Onslow asked for Parliament’s old rule against printing the proceedings to be read again. Onslow had started in Parliament as a Rockingham Whig, opposing the prosecution of Wilkes and the Stamp Act, but he’d become a strong supporter of Lord North’s government, and he didn’t like how printers were representing it.

Opposition members of the House disagreed with Onslow’s proposal. Charles Turner argued that “not only the debates ought to be printed, but a list of the divisions [i.e., votes] likewise.” Edmund Burke said he wished all debates were fully recorded in the House Journals.

Naturally, the press reported on that debate. John Horne, a radical clergyman, prefaced the coverage in the Middlesex Journal for 7 February with this line:

It was reported, that a scheme was at last hit upon by the ministry to prevent the public from being informed of their iniquity; accordingly, on Tuesday last, little cocking George Onslow made a motion, that an order against printing debates should be read.

Onslow took the bait on 8 February, rising solemnly to complain that the Middlesex Journal and another paper, the London Gazetteer, had misrepresented Parliament and brought it into poor repute. He demanded that the printers Roger Thompson and John Wheble be summoned to explain themselves. By a vote of 90 to 50, the House adopted Onslow’s resolution.

But those printers didn’t show up. They didn’t come to their front doors to accept warrants. On 8 March the Crown issued a proclamation offering £50 for apprehending the two men. Meanwhile, newspapers heaped more criticism on Onslow: “That little insignificant insect, George Onslow, was the first mover of all this mighty disturbance.”

On 12 March, Onslow demanded to hear from six more publishers who continued to run parliamentary reports. On the first vote the House supported him, 140 to 43. Another member suggested summoning not only the proprietor of each newspaper but “all his compositors, pressmen, correctors, blackers and devils,” which produced more argument over both legalities and language. The Whigs kept moving to cancel the discussion and adjourn; the majority kept voting to proceed.

One account said, “There were so many divisions, and such strong and personally offensive expressions used during the course of this debate, that the Speaker [Fletcher Norton, shown above] said, ‘This motion will go into the Journals—what will posterity say?’” After more votes Norton declared, “I am heartily tired of this business.” Barré spoke up: “I will have compassion on you, sir; I will move the adjournment of the House.” That motion produced another round of debate.

Of all the printers Onslow had named, two appeared in the House, ritually knelt in penance, and paid fines. The rest made excuses to stay away or just lay low. Some replied that they would come when the legal situation was resolved.

Wilkes orchestrated the next move. Wheble and Thompson let themselves be apprehended by fellow printers and brought before the aldermen of London—namely Wilkes and his political allies. Those officials demanded to know under what authority the printers had been seized. When the captors pointed to the proclamation, Wilkes declared such an order “contrary to the chartered rights of this city, and of Englishmen.”

The conflict between levels of government grew. The Crown arrested Alderman Richard Oliver and the Lord Mayor, Brass Crosby, for defying parliamentary authority. They remained in the Tower of London until the end of the legislative session, then came out to a twenty-one gun salute and a parade of carriages. Crowds hanged Onslow and Norton in effigy on Tower Hill.

Legally the “printers’ case” of 1771, as it was called, ended in a victory for the House of Commons. Courts upheld its authority to determine how its proceedings would be published. But politically everyone realized that the press and society were operating under new rules. British citizens now expected to read full reports of what their legislators were saying. Parliament never tried to exercise its authority so strictly again.

The only way legislative houses could regain control of the reporting process was to issue their own official or semi-official transcriptions of debates. John Almon and John Debrett launched the Parliamentary Register in 1775. William Cobbett began publishing more detailed Parliamentary Debates in 1802, and that became the modern standard Hansard Debates. That tradition transferred over to the U.S. of A., with the Congressional Record, the Capitol press galleries, and C-SPAN as the offshoots.

Lord Bute, Meserve, and the Devil

Thursday I quoted from the Rev. Jeremy Belknap’s account of the Stamp Act protests in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Here’s a more lively account from Charles Warren Brewster’s Rambles About Portsmouth, published in 1859.

The London government appointed George Meserve, who was in England at the time, as stamp agent for New Hampshire. But he didn’t last long in office.

on arriving at Boston on the 6th of September, (about seven weeks before the law was to take effect), the excited state of the public feeling induced him to resign his office of stamp master.

His resignation was not known here [in Portsmouth]; so the indignant populace, on the night of the 11th of September, placed on the hill in front of the jail a triple effigy, representing Lord Bute, who was father of the bill, Meserve and the Devil. A board was extended from the mouth of the Devil to Meserve’s ear, on which was written:

George, my son, you are rich in station,
But I would have you serve this nation.

The effigies stood through the day, and in the evening they were carried about the town with much clamor, and then burnt.

Making effigies of two men and the Devil and throwing them in a bonfire at the end of the day was how Portsmouth, and other New England seaports, traditionally celebrated the 5th of November, Pope Night. I don’t know why folks almost always hung two effigies, but they did.

John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute, had been the tutor of George III, and served as First Minister in 1762-63. He brought the Seven Years’ War to a close, but lost favor with the British people and the king. Bute’s Tory politics made him an enemy to the Whigs, and his Scottish background made him an easy target. John Wilkes lambasted him with The North Briton, and John Horne accused him of having an affair with the king’s mother. American politicians blamed Bute for the Stamp Act of 1765 even though he had been out of office and favor for years when it passed.

Back to Portsmouth. As described yesterday, Meserve publicly repeated his resignation when he arrived home in the fall of 1765. But the controversy wasn’t over. With the new year, Meserve received his formal commission as stamp agent again. A committee of locals called on him. Brewster related the story this way:

He takes from his desk the commission he has just received, gives it up to them, and submits to the administration of an oath by Wiseman Claggett, that he would not directly or indirectly attempt to execute the office. The commission is taken—on the point of a sword it is elevated, and the procession moves down Vaughan and up King street, bearing the trophy, hailed by the shouts of the “sons of liberty.”

Carrying the commission around on a sword conveyed the symbolic message that the document was too foul to touch. Other processions of the time bore stamped paper at the end of long poles.

Lorenzo Sabine’s reference to American Loyalists added:

After the repeal of the [Stamp] Act, and on the arrival of Secretary [Henry Seymour] Conway’s circular in 1766, enclosing a resolution of Parliament to the effect that the Colonies should make recompence to such persons as had suffered injury or damage in consequence of their assisting to execute the Act, Meserve applied to the Assembly of New Hampshire for compensation, which application was referred to a committee, who made a report adverse to his claim, and it was dismissed.

Meserve ended up going with the British military to Halifax in 1776.

Sorting Out the Gossip about Horatio Gates

I’ve been exploring the rumors that Gen. Horatio Gates was secretly the son of a British aristocrat, most likely his mother’s employer, the Duke of Leeds. In The Generals of Saratoga, Max M. Mintz writes:

Enemies and detractors of Gates, skeptical that the son of servants should receive a commission in the British army, have alleged that he was Leeds’s illegitimate son. . . . The unanswered questions haunted Horatio all his life. When he aspired to advancement, he was accused of illegitimate pretensions. If he earned a promotion, it was ascribed to his birth.

Really? This is one of the passages in Mintz’s book that goes beyond the sources cited.

The eighteenth-century British genteel class loved to gossip. Indeed, it often appears that the society was held together by gossip. The third Duke of Bolton’s affair with the actress Lavinia Fenton was talked about almost immediately, and retold often. It appears in a delightfully dishy 1779 publication called The R—l Register, which also says of “the D— of B——“:

no man was ever more indebted to rank and title than this nobleman; for no man stood more in need of the consequence which is derived from them. Weak and whimsical, but persuaded, like many other good mistaken people of the same kind, that he possessed the opposite qualities, he naturally became no infrequent subject of mirth, raillery and cajolement.

Other chapters of that volume discuss the “E— of H——,” “Ld. D—,” “B— of Carlisle,” various monarchs, and so on. (The authors have good things to say about “E— P—,“ or Earl Percy.)

In 1751 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote that the Duke of Bolton’s first wife “failed to give passion”—i.e., wouldn’t have sex with her husband—“and upon this plan threw away her estate, was despised by her husband, and laughed at by the public.” Montagu wrote that with some sympathy, referring to “My poor friend the Duchess of Bolton,” and she wrote it in a letter to her own daughter.

That daughter was the wife of the third Earl of Bute, George III’s favorite minister in the early 1760s. John Horne and others suggested Bute was having an affair with the king’s mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales. Georgian gossip reached very high.

In October 1777, as Londoners were wondering how Gen. John Burgoyne’s attack on the rebel colonies from Canada was going, Horace Walpole wrote of that officer:

He is a natural son of Lord Bingley, who put him into the entail of the estate, but when young Lane [George Fox-Lane, Bingley’s son-in-law] came of age the entail was cut off. He ran away with the old Lord Derby’s daughter, and has been a fortunate gamester.

Walpole and his contemporaries would have been equally interested in sharing the juiciest gossip about Burgoyne’s conqueror, Gen. Horatio Gates.

But the worst they could come up with was that he had no claim to aristocratic status at all.

• Israel Mauduit, though supporting the American cause, reminded London readers that Gates had been “in the service of Charles Duke of Bolton, was never thought to possess an understanding superior to other men; and…[was] scarce equal to the command.”
• Horace Walpole recorded in his diary that Gates “was the son of a housekeeper of the second Duke of Leeds, who, marrying a young husband when very old, had this son by him.”

No biographer of Gates has quoted any eighteenth-century British source suggesting that the general was the secret love-child of a peer.

The first recorded hint that Gates had noble blood in his veins surfaced in America after his death, in guesses by the Stevens family of New York. They had weak evidence, and guessed totally wrong. Only decades later, after Walpole’s diary was published, did writers suggest that Gates had a biological connection to the Duke of Leeds.

As I wrote before, the Stevenses were admirers of Gates, and heirs of his second wife. I also suspect they heard hints about Gates’s father being more than an army captain, “respectable victualler,” or clergyman, as authors wrote in the mid-nineteenth century.

Who was the source of those hints? I think the search has to start with the question of who in America would benefit from people believing that Gates wasn’t simply an ambitious child of hard-working servants who convinced their employer to help him become a British army officer. Who in American would like people to think that the retired general, remarried to a wealthy British heiress, was actually the son of a British lord? I can’t help but think that that list starts with Gen. and Mrs. Gates themselves.

Lt. Gould Testifies in London

John Horne (1736-1812; he added the surname Tooke in 1782; color portrait here) was a British political activist. He believed in a Bill of Rights, full publication of government proceedings, the rule of law, and curbs on governmental power, and he wasn’t afraid to say it. Which, in the late 1700s, made him a dangerous radical.

Horne was inspired by John Wilkes but later feuded with him, just as he worked and feuded with a number of other British politicians on the left. Since the 1820s authors have suggested that he wrote the famous Junius letters. However, some of those letters were addressed to Horne, and indicate he and Junius were at odds—though he seems quite capable of having picked a fight with himself.

During the Revolutionary War, Horne spoke up for the American cause. In June 1775 he announced in the Public Advertiser that his Society for Constitutional Information had raised over £100 for:

the relief of the widows, orphans, and aged parents of our beloved American fellow subjects, who, faithful to the character of Englishmen, preferring death to slavery, were, for that reason only, inhumanly murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.

The government disliked that, fined the printers of Horne’s announcement £100 each, and took Horne to court for libel.

The state trial began under Lord Chief Justice Mansfield on 4 July 1777. Horne undertook to defend himself, which had its good points and its bad points. He gave an impassioned account of his case, but then had to admit it had “made me forget to examine my witnesses.” So he interrupted Attorney-General Edward Thurlow and asked to be allowed to return to his case.

Mansfield agreed. Horne called Thurlow himself. Mansfield squashed that. Horne then called Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for America and chief prosecutor of the war. Germain didn’t appear. Horne made a remark about Gen. Thomas Gage also being unavailable—he’d heard Gage was in Germany—and finally called his third witness: Edward Thoroton Gould, former lieutenant in the 4th Regiment and former prisoner of war, who had returned to England in mid-1775.

After a bit of squabbling over procedures, Horne read out the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s deposition from Gould (quoted yesterday), in which the lieutenant had said he couldn’t tell who had fired first at Lexington, and that British soldiers had fired first at Concord. Then Horne got down to questioning. Unfortunately for him, he hadn’t had the chance to examine Gould in advance, and some of the former officer’s replies surprised him.

Horne: “Was you, at the time when the orders were given to you to go to Lexington and Concord, apprehensive of any attack by those Americans against whom you went?”

Gould: “We were as soon as we saw them; we found them armed.”

Horne: “Before you went from Boston?”

Gould: “That day we did.”

Horne: “How many miles is Lexington or Concord from Boston?”

Gould: “The farther is about 25 miles, the nearer is about 12.”

Horne: “Did you know, had you any intelligence that the Americans of Lexington and Concord were, at that time, marching, or intending to march to attack you at Boston?”

Gould: “We supposed that they were marching to attack us, from a continued firing of alarm guns, cannon, or they appeared to be such from the report.”

And that caught the Lord Chief Justice’s attention.

Mansfield: “Did you say cannon?”

Gould: “Cannon.”

Mansfield: “When was that?”

Gould: “As soon as we began the march, very early in the morning.”

Horne tried to pull it out by arguing that the alarm guns were simply a logical response to the army’s actions, not a provocation or escalation or sign that the army might have been justified in using deadly force.

Horne: “But did you hear those alarm guns before your orders for the march were given, or before your march began?”

Gould: “No.”

Horne: “But after you had begun your march?”

Gould: “Yes; after we began our march the alarm guns began firing.”

Horne: “Did you suppose those alarm guns to be in consequence of your having begun the march?”

Gould: “I cannot say.”

Horne: “I will not desire you to suppose (though the gentleman has supposed that they were coming to attack him) but do you know if any intelligence whether the persons who fired the alarm guns, whether those were the persons who were killed at Lexington and Concord?”

Gould: “No; I do not.”

And the jury also wanted to be certain about the militia alarm.

Juryman: “Pray who did the alarm guns belong to; to the Americans or our corps?”

Gould: “From the provincials.”

Horne: “What do you mean by an alarm gun?—Alarm may be misunderstood.”

Gould: “That is, what they term in the country an alarm gun; it is a notice given to assemble the country.”

Gould’s testimony about the Massachusetts militia’s alarm system proved decisive. Lord Mansfield summed up his conclusions like this:

Now what evidence has Mr. Gould given? Why, he says, that he was sent with a part of the king’s troops, by the orders of general Gage, the governor of the province, the commander of the king’s troops; that when they began their march (which was about two or three in the morning) he heard (I think he says he heard) a continual firing of alarm cannon, which is a signal, at certain distances, used in America to raise the country; and that they heard as soon as they began their march; and from thence they concluded that the provincials were marching to attack them.

When they came within sight of them, they found them armed, in bodies of troops armed. This was not a stated time of peace when the king’s troops, under the authority of the governor, go from one part to another; to have bodies of men, in military array, armed, and signals fired!

After about ninety minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty against Horne. According to a relative of another officer in the 4th Regiment, “Before Mr. Gould gave his testimony, many present believed that our troops had murdered the natives sleeping in their houses, and that it would be proved by Mr. Gould’s evidence.”

Instead, Horne was imprisoned for a year, and then retired to the country for a while. He resumed his political career after the American war. In 1794 the British government arrested Horne Tooke again, this time on the charge of high treason, for criticizing the kingdom’s war against Revolutionary France. That jury acquitted him after only eight minutes. Though barred from sitting in Parliament because he’d taken clerical orders early in his career, Horne Tooke made his house in Wimbledon a center of British reform politics for the next two decades. He also published a popular book on language called The Diversions of Purley.

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to Edward Thoroton Gould? (It gets juicy.)