"The Prince" and Seditious Libel at the turn of Century

 

Philip Harling notes that between the years of 1808 and 1812 (the latter being the year Hunt published “The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day,” the article that would be the validation for the Hunts’ imprisonment), though the courts overflowed with libel cases, only 20 percent saw their end in a guilty verdict (110). For Harling's table on libel case figures, see libel limits of repression.pdf. This leads one to believe that though the stakes were high in terms of the risk of arrest, there was a good chance a libelous transgressor might come out un-sentenced. Perhaps the Hunts were willing to take this risk. Considering the fact that libel prosecutions were a relatively unstable means through which the British government could exert its control, as well as the inevitably extreme public nature of the trial—for example, its proceedings would be circulated in newspapers, thus bestowing a kind of celebrity persona onto those charged (110)—there can be no doubt that the Hunts understood the power of their words, but knew they would likely not have to issue those words at the expense of extreme martyrdom. Harling suggests the trials gave those charged the opportunity to play the martyr (110), and perhaps they indeed got to play it without actually being it. However, that is not to say that these prosecutions did not take a toll on those charged nor did they not work to repress future radicals; as Harling points out, the trials still exhausted the defendants both emotionally and monetarily (113). Also worth noting is the increase of libelous charges between 1808 and 1811 on account of the eager-to-persecute Prime Minister Perceval (125), just before Hunt published “The Prince.” Though many of these cases under Perceval’s reign were dropped, the threat still existed. The Hunts must have been aware that they were, in a sense, skating on thin ice.  

But what about “The Prince” differs from the earlier attacks the Hunts issued on the Prince Regent, so much so that it secured the government’s ability to incarcerate them? What are the terms of its severity? Where does or do the transgression(s) lie? We shall leave the reader/viewer to consider this question using as a point of perhaps helpful departure the OED’s definition of sedition as well as the opportunity to infer meaning from precedent trials, mandates, and general ideas about sedition and libel circulating around England in the late 18^th century up to the Hunts’ imprisonment in 1813. The following is a non-exhaustive time-line of such phenomena: 

 

 

OED on sedition:

a. “sedition n.   The speaking or writing of words that are likely to incite ordinary people to public disorder or insurrection. Sedition is a common-law offence (known as seditious libel if the words are written) if it is committed with the intention of (1) arousing hatred, contempt, or disaffection against the sovereign or her successors (but not the monarchy as such), the government of the UK, or either House of Parliament or the administration of justice; (2) encouraging any change of the law by unlawful means; or (3) raising discontent among Her Majesty's subjects or promoting ill-will and hostility between different classes of subjects. There must be an intention to achieve these consequences by violence and disorder. An agreement to carry out an act to further any of these intentions is a criminal conspiracy.”

 

 

 

Genealogy of Sedition in the late 18^th Century up to and including the Hunts’ Imprisonment: Precedent Cases, Doctrines, and Events

 

*** Sedition is a domain of common law illegal utterances (Dolin 53); the other three being heresy, obscenity, and disturbing the peace (Berke 1).

 

*** Seditious libel has its origins in blasphemy. With the rise of Christianity in the west, blasphemy—which used to be a stand-alone crime—became conflated with heresy (Berke 1). However, with the evolution of a more secular west and being that blasphemy has become virtually un-prosecutable (Viswanathan 400), sedition has become a separate estate of illegal speech.

 

Ø       1749 Eliza Haywood’s arrest for seditious libel (Ingrassia 202)

• She was connected with a pamphlet called 'A Letter form H---G--g, Esq. ... To a Particular Friend.’ She had written a slew of other political works. After her arrest for the pamphlet, she was never prosecuted (202).

Ø      1752 libel trial of William Owen

• Defense disputed that there was no malicious intention (351 Barrell)

            Ø     1768 May 10 The riot outside of the King's Bench Prison. This was incited by the imprisonment of John Wilkes, a libelor charged with slandering George III in The North                                Briton--called the Massacre of St. George's Fields ("King's Bench")

 

Ø      1770 a series of libel trials followed the publishing of Junius’ Letter to the King   (Barrell 351).

Ø      1777 Horne Tooke’s libel trial                           

• Also pleaded for innocence based on no malicious intention (Barrell 351).

Ø      1780s/1790’s, Hon. Erskine: “most brilliant defense advocate of his period” (Barrell 347)

• Represented many writers and organizers charged of sedition and seditious libel.

• Famous for repeating binary argument—not only is it about the act committed, but it is about the “intent” (347).

Ø      1783-4 William Shipley’s (the Dean of St. Asaph) trial for seditious libel

• Shipley was represented by Erskine (Barrell 348).

        

• Published an assailment of the unfair representation in Parliament.Aquitted on the grounds that Shipley’s act was marked by an “arrest of judgment” (“seditious libel” 433).

Ø      1789 THE OUTBREAK OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Ø      1789 seditious libel trial of bookseller John Stockdale

• Represented by Erskine

• These two trials were famous for Erskine’s challenge to the “Mansfield Doctrine”

ü      Mansfield Doctrine: General—the jury determines matters of fact and the court/judge determines matters of law (Barrell 348). As applied to seditious libel—if the defendant published the paper in question and the paper is proven to sustain the meanings that are charged of it, then the jury must convict despite any personal estimation of its criminality. Criminality then had to be determined at the Court of King’s Bench; here, the defendant can dispute its criminality and try to excuse its being published (349).

                               ü      For nearly fifty years, before the passage of Fox’s Libel Bill in  1792, the Mansfield doctrine was under fire (Barrell 350) especially as it did not                           

                            allow the jury the right to absorb questions of “intention” (Barrell 350-1)

Ø      13. Thomas Paine’s case

• Paine is tried “for certain false, wicked, scandalous and seditious libels inserted in the second part of the Rights of Man, before the Right. Hon. Lord Kenyon and a special jury, at Guild Hall, on Tuesday the 18th December, 1792.” (Early American Imprints, Series 1: Evans, 1639-1800)

 

Ø      1792 Fox’s Libel Bill

• “a general verdict about the whole matter put in issue”; made the jury deciders of law and fact and introduced into their consideration issues of intention  (“seditious libel” 433).

•  Juries could now judge on truth or fallacy of the material on trial; this disallowed the implication that a not guilty verdict would inevitably point to the accuracy of the slanders, which had been a resulting assumption in earlier trials. In 1843, Parliament would pass a statute that permitted a defense to take up the burden of proof, arguing for the truth of the slanderous language as a defense (Manning 121).

• Affirmed the jury’s ability to return a general verdict, considering the facts of publication and the criminality of papers charged of libel (Barrell 350).

Ø      1792 The French Republic persuades democratic factions in all nations to join the cause, by delivering its Edict of Fraternity. The result is a proliferation of Corresponding Societies in England and heightened attempts at reform. One of them being the organization of the British Convention of the Delegates of the People to take place in 1793 (Burwick 264).

Ø      1793 London Corresponding Society delegates such as Maurice Margot and Joseph Gerrald attend the British Convention with intent to support universal suffrage and annual parliaments. Gerrald especially is known for his charisma and speaking abilities and makes a name for himself at the convention. Margot and Gerrald are arrested for sedition a month later on December 5 (Burwick 264).

Ø      1794 Margot and William Skirving, the Convention secretary, are tried and sentenced to transportation. Shortly after, Gerrald is also tried and sentenced to 14 years transportation. He remains in jail for a year before he is sent to Botany Bay in 1795. He dies five months later from the exposure he experienced during the trip (Burwick 264).

Ø      Habeus Corpus suspended 1794 as result of proliferation of Corresponding Societies (Burwick 263)

Ø      1794 Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall, and John Horne Tooke, leaders of the London Corresponding Society—an organization formed in 1792 concerned with reforming Parliament and promoting workers representation, are tried for sedition (Barrell).

• Thomas Hardy’s trial, lasting from Tuesday October 28 to Wednesday November 5.  No treason trial had lasted more than 24 hours before this legendary one. Hardy was accused of conspiracy (Barrell 318). He had been arrested out of fear that he would make good his plans to convene a new convention to be held in England after the British Convention dissolved (Burwick 265). Tooke implicated himself in Hardy’s case four days after Hardy’s May 12^th arrest (Burwick 265).

• Tooke would later publish a two-volume edition of an earlier work he wrote called Diversions of Purley (second ed. 1798), in which he would re-deliberate the powers and slippage of words as inspired by his trial and year-long jail-time (Burwick 266); a notable inspiration may have been that the prosecution in his case called words “acts” (267) and that Hon Erskine, his defense attorney, attempted to distinguish the two (268).

ü      Three London booksellers were brought in as witnesses in Tooke’s trial, proving one of the charges brought against Tooke having to do with his circulation of Paine’s text and association with Paine; these booksellers, proven members of Tooke’s circle, testified that they published and sold copies of The Rights of Man (269).

ü      When Tooke was acquitted after Hardy, he was sure England would never have to see a trial like his again (Burwick 274).

Ø      From November 1794 to November 1795, booksellers were publishing blatantly seditious works (even more so than those which had been prosecuted a couple years before). As a result, there was a flourish of radical booksellers in that year (Barrell 589)

Ø      November 6, 1795: Treasonable Practices Bill and Seditious Meetings Bill are passed with full support of the King (Barrell 571).

• Seditious Meetings Bill attempted to monitor public meetings of a political nature by policing those that were not led by a public official, like the LCS (The London Corresponding Society often read and discussed passages from Paine’s The Rights of Man (Burwick 269) and was implicated in various sedition trials of its members.)
• The Treasonable Practices Bill: written to only outlast King George III; however, it remained in effect until 1848 (Barrell 573)

ü      if any person or persons whatever, …shall…compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend, death or destruction, or any bodily harm tending to death or destruction, main or wounding, imprisonment or restrain of the person of…the King, his hears and successors, or to deprive or depose him or them from the style, honour or kingly name of the imperial Crown of this realm, …or to levy war against His Majesty, his heirs and successors within this realm or without; or to move or stir any foreigner of stranger with force to invade this realm…and such compassings, imaginations, inventions, devices, or intentions, …shall express, utter, or declare, by any printing, writing, preaching, or malicious and advised speaking, being legally convicted thereof, …then every such person or persons…shall be deemed…to be a traitor and traitors…(Barrell 573-4)

Ø      The late 1790s saw an attempt to establish secure referents to certain political words in order to more clearly delineate seditious writings from others (Barrell 1-2).

• Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796) suggested locking in terms like ‘Republican,’ ‘Democrat,’ ‘Loyalist,’ ‘Royalist,’ ‘Aristocrat,’ ‘Citizen,’ and ‘Subject’ so as to counter the attempt by Government supporters to pervert the radical’s meanings (Barrell 1-2).
• Charles Pigott’s A Political Dictionary: explaining the True Meaning of Words (1795) tries to flesh out the accurate connotations of ‘Alarmist vocabulary’ and ‘the language of the aristocracy’ (his terms) (Barrell 2)
• “Alarmists” attack these kinds of texts with counter-texts charging the radical writer for perverting words. The True Briton, a ministerial paper, attempted to simplify the process of identification and prosecution of unpatriotic language and its seditious abusers by publishing ‘Dictionary of Words in general use among…reforming Philosophers’ in its August 27^th, 1794 issue (Barrell 3-4).

Ø      1795 Seditious Meetings and Assemblies Bill

• Illegal for any assembly over fifty persons to meet without approval issued by the magistrate (Burwick 264).

Ø      1799 Corresponding Societies Act

• Aimed at all privately meeting groups; rendered illegal any organization that required the swearing of an oath (Burwick 274).

Ø      1799 and 1800 Act against Combinations

• Fear of workers unrest displaces fear of backlash from the French Revolution; as a result, Parliament passes these acts aimed at suppressing labor unions and squelching, most notably, Yorkshire and Lancashire textile workers’ attempts at organization (Burwick 274).

Ø      1809 Trial of William Cobbett

• Convicted of seditious libel after he condemned the violent restraint of an uprising at the Isle of Ely (Harling 118).

Ø      1810 a seditious and satiric pamphlet condemning the concept of hereditary monarchy called A momentous address to the people of Great Britain and Ireland is circulated and after numerous vendors are arrested for its sale, its original executor is attributed to a William Evans (Harling 122).

• Evans apparently fled, after which he is noted as an outlaw and is never heard from on the legal record again. Four of the charged retailers, William Searles, Sir Vicary Gibbs, William Horne, and Jon Duncombe, pleaded innocence; and though they were convicted, the latter three suffered only to pay a fee and were apparently let go, while Duncombe, being just a poor bookseller, paid no fee and was made an example of the British Justice system’s great clemency (122).

Ø      1810-1811 an especially rough time for the publishing world in regards to libel. The reign of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval had engendered tightened restrictions and direct and numerous attacks on potential libelers. A series of acquittals helped to subdue this attack (Harling 125).

Ø      1811 The Prince of Wales is named Regent in order to rule in place of George III, whose inability to rule due to insanity has been determined in this year (Everett).

Ø      1812 Leigh Hunt publishes the “The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day” in the fifth issue of the year on March 22.

• The article is an especially harsh attack against the Prince Regent, whom the Hunts had squabbled with and about on numerous prior occasions. They were particularly disillusioned when the Prince did not make good his claims of supporting a more liberal government. This article was the final straw in the government’s eyes, and that which validated Leigh Hunt’s arrest and trial later in that year.

• "-- 'John Hunt and Leigh Hunt, you have been tried and convicted by a jury of your country, of printing and publishing a scandalous and defamatory libel upon his royal highness the prince regent. The libel is contained in the information, and ... is expressed, in the newspaper of which you, John Hunt, were the printer, and you, Leigh Hunt, the editor ... What were the motives which induced you either to compose, or to adopt the composition of others, and which in your minds appeared honourable, and not with any design to slander from personal malice, it is impossible for me to conceive; but this one may venture to pronounce, that no man filling the character of a good subject could, with any motive but a bad one, print a libel of this description, attacking and vilifying the head of the government of the country; because the individual occupying that station, standing at the head of the government of a nation, is not to be held up in public newspaper, in the manner you have held up the prince regent, as an object of detestation and abhorrence, which you endeavour to persuade your readers that he is. Whether your motive was to gratify the mischievous curiosity of the public -- to satisfy the diseased taste of the people, greedy to catch at anything which, by destroying the respect due to the constituted authorities, pulls down those at the head of affairs to the lowest possible level -- if such were the motive which you call not malicious or dishonourable, the court cannot pronounce. But when they have before them men who have been convicted of offences like the present, it behoves those who are entrusted with the administration of criminal justice to protect that government under which we all live, and to support the head of that government, without which the present state of society could not exist. In passing, therefore, the sentence of the court, it is necessary to keep in view that which is ever an object of criminal justice -- to hold forth to the world, that those who are found in your situation, must answer to the country for the mischief which their publication must necessarily occasion, since the effect of it is to destroy the bonds of society, by holding up the government to disgrace and contempt. We must point out wholesome examples to others, to deter them from being guilty of offences similar to that of which you have been convicted.

  The sentence of the court upon you, therefore, is, that you severally pay to the king a fine of £500 each; that you be severally imprisoned for the space of two years; you, John Hunt, in the prison in Coldbath-fields, and you, Leigh Hunt, in the New Jail for the county of Surrey in Horsemonger-lane; that at the expiration of that time, you each of you give security in £500 and two sufficient sureties in £250 for your good behaviour during five years, and that you be further severally imprisoned until such fine be paid, and such security given.'

  The defendants bowed, and withdrew from the court in custody" ("Leigh Hunt").

Ø      1812, May 11, Perceval is assassinated and the Tory ministry is marked by a more tolerant turnover to a Liverpool ministry (Harling 125).

Ø      1813 The imprisonment of the Hunts (“Hunt, Leigh” 1). They continue to write from jail (1).

Ø      1815 The release of Leigh Hunt; after which, he moves to Keats’s residence at Hampstead, continuing to publish works and write for periodicals (1).

 

 

 

Works Cited

Berke, Matthew. Review. Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred from Moses to  Salman Rushdie. National Review.  Nov 29, 1993.                                       >>http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n23_v45/ai_14753274<<

 

Burwick, Frederick. “The Language of High Treason: Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and the Edinburgh Seven.” The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol.              63, No. 3,  British Radical Culture of the 1790s. (2000), pp. 263-275.

 

Everett, Glenn. “Political and Economic History of Great Britain from the Civil War to the Twentieth Century (With an Emphasis on the 18^th and 19^th                         centuries).” The Victorian Web: Literature History and Culture in the Age of Victoria. November 16, 2007.                                                                                        <http://www.victorianweb.org/history/historytl.html>

 

Harling, Philip. “The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790-1832.” Historical   Journal. 44:1 (Mar. 2001), pp. 107- 134

 

"Hunt, Leigh." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 13 Nov. 2007  <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9041557>

 

Ingrassia, Catherine: "Additional. Information about Eliza Haywood's 1749 Arrest for Seditious Libel.” Notes and Queries. June 1997. 44:2. 202-04.

 

"King's Bench Prison." Sparticus. 2007. 2 Dec. 2007. <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/LONkings.htm>

 

"Leigh Hunt: 1784-1856." Literary Biographies. Blupete.com. 13 Nov. 2007. search term: "Leigh Hunt"                                                                                                                                 <http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Literary/Hunt.htm>

 

 

Manning, Roger B. “The Origins of the Doctrine of Sedition.”Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2. (Summer, 1980),                 pp. 99-121.

 

 

“Seditious Libel.” Columbia Law Review, Vol. 17, No. 5. (May, 1917), pp. 432-435.

 

Viswanathan, Guari. “Blasphemy and Heresy: The Modernist Challenge. A Review Article.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 37, No. 2.                      (Apr.,1995), pp. 399-412.