The Dean of St Asaph's Trial: Libel and Politics in the 1780s

The Dean of St Asaph’s Trial: Libel and Politicsin the 1780s

A N T H O N Y PAG EUniversity of Tasmania

Abstract: In the early 1780s the Society for Constitutional Informationpoured much time and money into defending a charge of libel against one ofits supporters, Jonathan Shipley, dean of St Asaph. This effort has beendismissed by historians as a waste of resources and a reflection of the waningof the campaign for political reform. This article examines the politicalsignificance of the Shipley trial in light of recent scholarship that stresses theimportance of the courtroom and print culture in reformist agitation.

Keywords: British politics, popular politics, seditious libel, Church ofEngland, Dean of St Asaph, Society for Constitutional Information

In recent years historians have made much of the ways radicals used the 1790sseditious libel and treason trials to promote their political views throughcourtroom counter-theatre and press publicity.1 This paper revisits animportant seditious libel case in the early 1780s with an eye to the light it shedson the evolution of British political culture in the decade prior to the FrenchRevolution. In 1783 William Davies Shipley, Dean of St Asaph, was chargedwith seditious libel for re-publishing an English political pamphlet in Wales.The pamphlet in question was The Principles of Government, in a dialogue betweena Scholar and a Peasant, in which William Jones (the Orientalist) argued for anarmed citizenry and parliamentary reform to allow greater representation of‘the people’. The trial of the Dean of St Asaph in 1784 has been called ‘the mostimportant seditious libel prosecution since the Seven Bishops’ Case’.2 At thetime the Whiggish Monthly Review observed that ‘this momentous case in thegreat cause of freedom had caused widespread public interest’.3 The debateoccasioned by this case helped generate Fox’s 1792 Libel Act, and as such it hasa well-established role as an important moment in legal history. This case canalso, however, further reveal the extent to which key elements of modernBritish political culture were already in place prior to the 1790s, and were onlydeepened and intensified by the impact of the French Revolution.

The role of juries in trials for seditious libel was a contentious issuethroughout the eighteenth century. The basic question was: should, as judgesgenerally directed, juries be confined to determining the fact of publication of

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 32 No. 1 (2009)

© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

a supposed libel? Or should juries be able to find a general verdict that, inaddition to determining that the accused had in fact published a text,determined the question of whether the publication was a seditious libel?4

With the rise of the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ agitation of the 1760s thatchampioned the rights of voters, called for parliamentary reform andprotested government coercion of the American colonies, the tussle betweenjudges and juries in cases of seditious libel became more intense. Championsof the rights of juries drew on a mixed bag of historical and natural rightsarguments, and depicted juries as a key pillar of ‘English liberties’.5

In various cases through the 1760s and 1770s juries in seditious libel casestried to express a verdict on the question of seditious intent. This could bedone by such measures as determining ‘not guilty’ of the fact of publicationin a case where the evidence pointed to the accused having published the text;or by declaring ‘guilty of publishing only’, as was done by several juries in the1770 trials of newspaper editors for publishing the letters of Junius. LordMansfield CJ led efforts to confine the powers of juries in cases of seditiouslibel. This desire stemmed from Mansfield’s conservative political sympathies.In the field of commercial law Mansfield was a reforming judge, often askinghis special juries in London and Middlesex to ‘help him “make the law” bydrawing upon mercantile custom’.6 Mansfield arguably fits within whatJ. G. A. Pocock has identified as a conservative Anglican Enlightenment inBritain: rational and reforming in the area of commercial law, a paternalist,authoritarian supporter of the post-1688 mixed constitution in Church andState, and an opponent of ‘enthusiasm’ and sectarianism.7 As a supporter ofthe established political system and, at a time when popular political agitationwas on the rise, Mansfield worked to restrict the power of juries to simplyjudging the fact of publication. For him, the contemporary ‘jealously ofleaving the Law to the Court’ was ‘puerile rant and declamation’ as ‘Judgesare totally independent of the Ministers that may happen to be, and of theKing. Their temptation is rather to the Popularity of the Day.’8 At base,Mansfield and the champions of the rights of juries were divided by ‘adiffering vision of government’.9 For Mansfield (as later for Burke in thisReflections on the Revolution in France), 1688 had created a system that securedrightful political authority and should not be altered. Mansfield thus ignoredthe Seven Bishops Case, and consulted post-1688 legal decisions on seditiouslibel.10 In contrast, there were many ‘Real’ or ‘Honest Whigs’ who viewed the‘Glorious Revolution’ as only one step towards greater political and religiousliberty, and who appealed for inspiration to the actions and writings of thosewho resisted the Stuart monarchs of the seventeenth century.11

This conflict between judges and juries became increasingly unworkable inthe course of the late eighteenth century, and was eventually settled in favourof the rights of juries by Fox’s Libel Act of May 1792, passed at the height ofthe debate over the French Revolution and the ‘Rights of Man’. In a typicallydramatic tone, E. P. Thompson saw the 1792 Act as the Whig leader CharlesJames Fox’s ‘greatest service to the common people, passed at the eleventh

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© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

hour before the tide turned towards repression’.12 Ironically, in the few yearsfollowing the 1792 Act more were convicted of seditious libel than everbefore.13 The Act, however, can be seen as reflecting the growing importanceof the public sphere in the late eighteenth century and a widespread feelingthat issues should be debated and determined according to public opinion.

The trial of the Dean of St Asaph for seditious libel in the early 1780sstimulated debate that culminated in the 1792 Libel Act. Proceedingssurrounding the case also reveal the innovative use of the courts and printculture by reformers, and the degree to which radical and conservativeideologies were forming and polarising in the wake of the AmericanRevolution.

With the American war dragging on, costing much and going badly, in1780 a network of ‘Associations’ for political reform sprang up in variousparts of Britain, spearheaded by Christopher Wyvill, an Anglican clergymanin Yorkshire, and London Rational Dissenters and radicals.14 Lord North’sgovernment was pressed hard by parliamentary and ‘out of doors’ oppositionfor some months. But then, in the first week of June, London was torn apartby the anti-Catholic Gordon riots. As Iain McCalman has observed, ‘thesubsequent impact of the French Revolution has tended to obscure thecontemporary trauma caused by the riots’.15 In over a week of rioting Londonsustained more property damage than Paris did during the FrenchRevolution. With the parliamentary opposition having failed to bring thegovernment down during the initial flood of Association petitions for reform,and the nation’s elite shocked by the Gordon Riots, realistic hopes forimmediate political reform started to fade. With William Pitt the Youngerelected Prime Minister in 1784 and presiding over a period of post-warprosperity, the Association movement gradually fizzled out. This has led somehistorians to be dismissive of the Association movement as short-lived and ledby excitable, but ultimately timid, armchair radicals who had little popularsupport.16 It is misplaced, however, to measure these British reformers againsta criteria of revolutionary willingness to resort to armed force. They werewell-connected members of the British elite and had a Whig cultural biastowards the path of gradual rather than revolutionary change.17 While theymight talk about the need for an armed citizenry and well-regulated militia,they were culturally conditioned to look toward gradual change over the longterm (which included the recovery of supposedly lost or diminished ‘ancientliberties’) and to emphasise the importance of education. Looked at in thislight, the early 1780s reform agitation can be viewed as significant andsuccessful. In 1795 Lord Lansdowne (formerly Lord Shelburne) told the Houseof Lords that the ‘mode of proceeding, by association and affiliation’,displayed by Paineite radicals, ‘was a discovery of as much moment in politics,as any that the present century has produced in any other science’.18 Asystem of nationwide committees associating and corresponding in asustained campaign for parliamentary reform had been pioneered byreformers in London and Yorkshire in the early 1780s. Their tactics were

The Dean of St Asaph’s Trial: Libel and Politics in the 1780s 23


further developed by the late 1780s campaign for the abolition of slavery.19

While political agitation had flared up and faded away throughout theeighteenth century, the early 1780s reformers set in place programmes andpractices that formed the core of political reform agitation for the followingseven decades. Among the Association agitation, the Society forConstitutional Information was a pioneering organisation. Established inApril 1780 to publish and disseminate gratis pamphlets and extracts thatwould promote political education, the society ended during the treason trialsof 1794.20 This society became deeply embroiled in the trial of the Dean of StAsaph.

William Davies Shipley, Dean of St Asaph, was charged in 1783 withseditious libel for publishing in Wales an edition of the English politicalpamphlet The Principles of Government, in a dialogue between a scholar and apeasant. Written by the renowned linguist, poet, Orientalist and lawyerWilliam Jones, it was originally published anonymously in London in August1782 and disseminated by the Society for Constitutional Information. TheDialogue reflected the character of the Society for Constitutional Information,which was composed of scholarly minded gentlemen who saw themselves asworking to enlighten the masses. Opening with a peasant declaring that it isbest for him to focus on farming and leave national politics to king andparliament, in the course of the Dialogue he is helped to understand his rightsand duties as ‘a free member of a free state’. Jones has the scholar explainbasic Lockean political principles via analogy with a Saturday afternoon clubof which the peasant was a member. Asking the peasant to describe thenature of his voluntary association, the scholar learns that they ‘agreed upona set of equal laws, which are signed by every new comer’, and at eachmeeting they elect a ‘master’ for the following week’s meeting. ‘What shouldyou do, if any one member were to insist upon becoming perpetual master, andon altering your rules at his arbitrary will and pleasure?’ asks the scholar. ‘Wewould expel him’, replies the peasant. If he were to raise an armed force tosubdue them, they would resist; if the master and his men took money fromtheir club box, it would be robbery; and if they could not be captured, ‘wemight kill them’ reflected the peasant, and ‘if the King would not pardon us,God would’. And on it goes. By the end of the Dialogue, popular sovereignty,frequent elections and a nationwide voluntary militia are established asnecessary pillars of ‘a free state’, which ‘is only a more numerous and morepowerful club’.21 Reprints of the Dialogue opened with an ‘advertisement’responding to the attack emanating from gentlemen in North Wales. ‘Thefriends of the Revolution will instantly see’, it declared, that the pamphlet

contains no principle which has not the support of the highest authority, as wellas the clearest reason. If the doctrines, which it slightly touches in a mannersuited to the nature of the Dialogue, be ‘seditious, treasonable, and diabolical’,Lord SOMERS was an incendiary, LOCKE a traitor, and the Convention-Parliament a Pandaemonium.22

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This tract belongs to the tradition of seeing the Revolution of 1688 asunfinished business.23 For the likes of William Jones and the Society forConstitutional Information there needed to be further reform, in line withreason and the principles of the ‘ancient constitution’, in order to broaden thefranchise and make elections more frequent. In the eyes of John Jebb, aleading figure in the Society for Constitutional Information, if necessary asovereign people could and should ‘new-model’ their form of government.24

Shipley, whose sister was due to marry Jones, was chairman of the FlintAssociation for parliamentary reform in North Wales. Without having readover the pamphlet prior, Shipley read the Dialogue aloud to a meeting of theAssociation in January 1783, and carried a motion that it be translated intoWelsh. This caused a stir among loyalist gentry in North Wales who wereconcerned about the promotion of sedition among the Welsh. There weresome in Wales who embraced the republicanism of the American Revolution,in which many Welsh migrants played a role.25 In the words of one historian,however, in late-eighteenth-century Wales ‘the bulk of the population,traditionally obedient, deferential and fearful, were cowed into submission bytheir masters and as yet had no real conception of the workings of democracyor how they might profit from it’.26 Most of the Welsh gentry wished to keepit that way. An 1801 census revealed that nine in ten of the population ofWales spoke Welsh, and seven in ten were monolingual Welsh-speakers. Inlight of this demographic fact and the outraged reaction of some of thegentry, Shipley postponed the provocative act of translating the work intoWelsh. In an effort to allay fears among the gentry about the pamphlet,however, he had some English-language copies re-published in Wales with asmall but significant modification: the characters in the dialogue werechanged from scholar and peasant to gentleman and farmer. This effort tosoften the democratic flavour of the tract failed. Thomas Fitzmaurice, HighSheriff of Flintshire and brother of Lord Shelburne (Prime Minister untilFebruary 1783), condemned Shipley as a preacher of sedition, and travelled toLondon to urge the Government to prosecute the Dean. His timing, however,was unfortunate as a new coalition government had brought Charles JamesFox, the self-styled ‘man of the people’, and his reform-minded friends intopositions of power. When the Law Officers (including John Lee, a financialsupporter of the Essex Street Unitarian Chapel and well known in reformistcircles), declined to prosecute Shipley, Fitzmaurice’s assistant, William Jonesof Ruthin, initiated a private action. The Dean was indicted at Wrexham inApril 1783 for publishing a seditious libel and pleaded ‘not guilty’.

The Society for Constitutional Information was provoked to action by thetrial. It resolved that Richard Brocklesby should ‘intimate to the Dean of StAsaph the intention of this Society to interest themselves, as far as they canwith propriety, in the prosecution commenced against him’, and ordered theprinting of hundreds of new copies of the Dialogue.27 Brocklesby and ThomasOldfield were sent into North Wales to distribute Society for ConstitutionalInformation pamphlets and, if possible, divert the prosecution onto itself as



the original publisher, for which a trial would be held in London in front of asympathetic jury. Among the publications distributed were extracts from themulti-volume British Biography by Joseph Towers on John Lilburne and JudgeJefferies, which argued that juries should judge points of law as well as fact. Atthe opening of the trial at Wrexham in September 1783 the prosecutionargued that, owing to the society’s publication campaign, no unprejudicedjury could be selected. Judge Lloyd Kenyon responded by postponing the caseuntil April 1784. At that time the prosecution succeeded in having the caseremoved to the Shrewsbury Assizes, where it was finally tried before FrancisBuller of the Court of King’s Bench on 6 August 1784.

The prosecution case argued that Shipley had decided to ‘vie with hisReverend Brother (Mr. Wyvill) which should make himself the mostconspicuous for propagating sedition and making the People dissatisfied withthe state and government of this country’.28 The eloquent up-and-comingtrial lawyer Thomas Erskine (who was to play a central role in the 1790ssedition trials) lent Shipley his services and turned in one of his bestperformances. Buller summed up strongly against Shipley, declaring that thetract was a libel and they must simply determine the fact of publication byShipley. The jury, however, having been won over by Erskine, brought in averdict of ‘guilty of publishing only’. In November 1784 Erskine argued for anew trial, based on misdirection of the jury. Lord Mansfield rejected theappeal, upholding Buller’s decision as conforming to judicial practice sincethe Revolution. With popular support for the Dean growing, however,Mansfield was clearly keen to close the case without making a martyr to‘English liberties’, and so the court granted a ‘arrest of judgement’, rulingthat the indictment was defective, and that as the pamphlet was of an‘abstract’ nature no part of it was really criminal. Three months later the bookseller John Stockdale published An Authentic Copy of the Judgement Deliveredby the Right Hon. Earl Mansfield, November 16, 1784, in the case of the Kingagainst William Davies Shipley, Dean of St. Asaph, advertising that as ‘manyGentlemen’ had expressed an interest in Mansfield’s judgement, he had ‘withdifficulty obtained the following Note of the Opinion delivered’.

The Shipley Case dragged on for two years and absorbed much of theSociety for Constitutional Information’s energy and funds. Despite this, andin contrast to legal historians, political historians have tended to dismiss itssignificance. Ian Christie does not even mention the trial or William Jones inhis important Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform 1760-1785 (1962). Eugene Black hasdepicted Society for Constitutional Information involvement in the trial as asymptom of the waning of the Association movement. With Charles JamesFox, the ‘man of the people’ in 1780, having ‘sold out’ and entered acoalition government with the hated Lord North in April 1783, Black seesthe Shipley Case as having offered a welcome distraction from the politicalconfusion rife in London – but one that drained its funds and saw it do‘considerably less agitating for parliamentary reform in 1783 than it hadplanned’.29

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But we can view the Society for Constitutional Information’s efforts in theShipley trial in a more positive light. First, as the original publishers of thepamphlet the Society for Constitutional Information could not leave Shipleyto fight alone. Freedom of the press had to be defended, and important lawreform could be promoted (as it eventually was). Trial by jury was wellestablished as a key pillar of ‘English liberties’, and it was a happy core issueupon which radical ideological conviction and popular appeal converged.Second, the Dean of St Asaph’s trial provided an opportunity to publiclyengage defenders of established authority, and fuel debate over fundamentalrights. It provided a platform for popularising reform ideas. John Cannon hasargued that, beyond London and Yorkshire, support for reform in the early1780s was ‘feeble and spasmodic’. Major cities such as Birmingham andManchester expressed little interest, and of those who did support reform,many were primarily interested in protesting against the tax burden and theconduct of the war. While concluding that ‘the mass of the labouring peopleplayed no part at all, despite occasional attempts by the Society forConstitutional Information to kindle their interest’, Cannon does point toJones’s Dialogue as being one of their best attempts at connecting with themasses.30 And in light of research that has revealed the strength of ProtestantDissenting support for reform, along with broad sympathy for theirarguments among artisans, Cannon arguably underplays the degree towhich reform was popular.31 In this context, the Shipley trial provided ameans to promote reform politics through drawing attention to a keypublication, providing opportunities to engage in ‘counter-theatre’, anddiscussion in newspapers and journals.

The Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant was one of the society’s mostsuccessful publications, in some ways anticipating Hannah More’s extremelyeffective 1790s loyalist tract Village Politics. Recently Jenny Graham has calledJones’s ‘celebrated’ Dialogue the ‘most vivid expression’ of the society’s effortsat populism.32 Born and raised in London where he established a literaryreputation, Jones sought economic independence through a legal career,and was a man who confessed to needing several lives to fulfil his ‘manyprojects’.33 From 1775 to 1783 he worked as a lawyer in Wales, where he oftensided with poor ‘Welsh peasants’ against their British lords and participated inthe fashionable revival of ancient Welsh culture – helping to establish the‘Druids of Cardigan’. At the same time his reputation as an authority inEastern languages grew while he angled to gain an appointment as a judge inIndia. As a man on the make, Jones became well connected with the Britishestablishment – but he resented the dominance of aristocratic patricians.Jones wrote in 1780 that ‘I am fully convinced, that an Englishman’s realimportance in his country will always be in a compound ratio of his virtue,his knowledge, and his eloquence’.34

Jones’s pamphlet was an example of the Society for ConstitutionalInformation’s tendency to combine traditional ‘country’ ideology thatstressed the importance of ‘civic virtue’ and an armed citizenry, with the



Enlightenment vogue for natural rights and free-market principles. Duringthe Gordon Riots, Jones led a volunteer company of barristers and students indefending the Middle Temple – an experience that convinced him civilianmilitias were essential for social and political stability. In a private letter to theleading reformer John Cartwright, he declared that England would neverconstitute ‘a people in the majestic sense of the word unless two hundredthousand of the civil state be ready, before the first of next November, to takethe field, without rashness or disorder, at twenty-four hours notice’.35 Jones’spolitical pamphlets had a strong Lockean tone, and in the Dialogue he arguedfor voting rights for all men ‘who were not upon the parish’.36 In the mid-1790s a Welsh loyalist pamphlet declared that ‘the origin of the evils welabour under may be traced to a time a few years remote from the former. Imean the Dialogue between the farmer & the Gentleman, that prototype ofthe Rights of Man’.37

The Shipley trial also provided much scope for promotion of reformist ideasthrough counter-theatre, especially in the courtroom.38 The text of the Dia-logue was read out during the trial, with Thomas Erskine making a great showof defending ‘English liberties’. Radicals in North Wales spread the Dialoguefurther by incorporating its contents, along with an account of the trial, in aWelsh-language ‘interlude’ that was performed at fairs.39 When Shipley wasset free in London he made a procession back to North Wales. Bonfires andhouses lit up as Shipley travelled home via Twyford (near Winchester),Shrewsbury, Wrexham and Ruthin. With the first hot-air balloon havingascended in Paris in 1783 and the novelty having spread to Britain, a balloonwas sent up at Wrexham in the Dean’s honour.40 One of the self-professed‘temperate friends of the prosecution’ informed the Chester Chronicle that theDean should be embarrassed that ‘not one of the real and independentGentlemen of [Denbigh] County either approved of or in any waycountenanced such indecent proceedings as the Dean and his Hirelings andDependants have lately carried on’.41 Thomas Pennant, a neighbour of theDean and keen supporter of the prosecution, reported to Kenyon that

the Dean was met some distance from Wrexham and brought in with allpatriotic honours, his carriage divested of the horses and drawn by much moreirrational animals. Numbers of the mob escorted him to Ruthin (a place far outof his way to his own home): There he gave a great Dinner. All the lower part ofthe Vale met him there or beyond Denbigh, at which place the two-legged brutesseized the carriage and drew it to Llanerch, where they were received withbonfires, &c., and cockades were liberally bestowed in a manner which showedthe most imprudent profligacy.42

Pennant asked ‘Mr. Sayer’ to produce a satire on the Dean’s procession. TheTriumph of Turbulence, or Mother Cambria Possessed depicted Shipley with abroken ankle chain, in a carriage drawn by six out-of-control goats, while fourclergy stand outside a church watching a fifth ascend to heaven upside down.The common people of the Welsh diocese are represented by a female fool

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with cap and bells, standing on a crown while kicking a bucket labelled‘liberty’ upside down, under which is written ‘Liperty is her footpall now’ and‘Tamm Kings and Crowns’.43 Such reactions reflect a deep fear among thegentry of the growth of popular political consciousness among the lowerorders in the wake of the American Revolution, and prefigure loyalistcaricatures of the ‘swinish multitude’ in the 1790s.

The trial provided many opportunities to disseminate Society forConstitutional Information publications and ideas via a topical issue. Thelevel of public interest in the trial is indicated by the fact that two differ-ent accounts of the trial proceedings based on different shorthand note ac-counts were published.44 In addition, Erskine’s speech and two versions ofMansfield’s judgement were published.45 Manassah Dawes, who wasmoderately sympathetic to the aims of the Society for ConstitutionalInformation, published an open letter to Mansfield under the title England’sAlarm!46 The society made much of the opportunity pre-trial publicityafforded to advance its programme of political education by circulating itstracts.47 Lord Mansfield led judges in being dissatisfied by the growth ofpre-trial publicity that accompanied the growth of print culture and theimportance of public opinion in the late eighteenth century. In a libel actionundertaken by an actor in 1776, the Morning Post reported that ‘the ChiefJustice spoke against the licentiousness of the press, which he declared was inno particular so reprehensible as in an attempt to prejudge a cause, and toprejudice the public against the party accused, previous to the trial’.48 Andhis verdict on the Dean of St Asaph’s case Mansfield declared that ‘theLicentiousness of the Press is Pandora’s Box, the source of every evil’.49 Incontrast, it was said that John Jebb, a leader of the Society for ConstitutionalInformation, ‘did not blush to own, that he often wrote in the public papers,which he respected as the centinels of liberty’.50 In this spirit the Society andits individual members inserted many letters in newspapers such as TheGeneral Advertiser and Lloyd’s Evening Post. In her recent Newspapers, Politicsand Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-century England (1998), Hannah Barkerhas highlighted the Society for Constitutional Information’s pioneering rolein using the growing newspaper market as a means to promote ‘politicaleducation’ in an expanding ‘public sphere’. After the trial, some members ofthe Society for Constitutional Information published tracts on the law of libeland the rights of juries.

The trial of the Dean of St Asaph also sheds light on the emergence ofmodern conservatism. Seventeen eighty-four was an important year inBritish politics. George III worked hard to bring down the CoalitionGovernment in late 1783, and had chosen Pitt the Younger to head a newministry that lacked a majority in the House of Commons. With debate ragingover the constitutional powers of the monarch and many predicting a shortlife for the ‘mince pie’ administration, the king felt ‘on the edge of aprecipice’.51 With Pitt playing for time in the Commons, petitions came infrom the counties with thousands of signatures expressing support for the



king’s actions, giving monarch and Prime Minister the confidence to call ageneral election in early 1784. More than ever before, public opinion wascourted in this election.52 With Britain grappling with an identity crisis owingto the loss of the American colonies, a link was effectively promoted betweenpatriotism and support for the king and his ministers. Modern conservatismdid not spring into existence in the pages of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on theRevolution in France (1790). The divide between radical reformers and modernconservatives, which became stark during the debate over the FrenchRevolution, was already forming in the 1780s as a ‘new right’ came into beingin response to the American conflict.53 The Shipley trial further illustratesthis evolving political divide. The reforming Society for ConstitutionalInformation clearly felt confident at the start of the trial that they were on aneasy wicket – they had a popular cause and friends in high places. In early1783, while Fitzmaurice was attacking Shipley and Jones’s Dialogue in Wales,his brother Lord Shelburne was at Windsor securing William Jones’sappointment as a judge in Bengal. As Jones departed on ship for India in April1783, the new coalition government declined to prosecute Shipley in part onthe advice of the liberal-minded Solicitor General, John Lee, a friend andsupporter of the first Rational Dissenting Unitarian Chapel in London. Joneswas also able to write and put his version of the case to his friend LloydKenyon, Attorney General under Shelburne, and later a judge involved in thetrial.54 A conservative-minded Whig with substantial property in NorthWales, however, Kenyon was also a friend of Thomas Pennant and shared hisconcern about the growth of popular politics. In the course of the trialKenyon sought to uphold the right of judges to determine the question ofsedition, and as a result was roundly criticised and mocked by Shipleysupporters, with Jones writing from Bengal that he thought Kenyon had gone‘perfectly mad’.55 From 1784 Kenyon was Attorney General and in 1788 hesucceeded Lord Mansfield as Chief Justice, in which role he presided overmany trials for sedition and trenchantly opposed Fox’s Libel Bill in 1791,arguing that ‘the Judge should determine law, and the Jury the fact; and ifthey ever come to be confounded, it will prove the confusion and destructionof the Law of England’.56

The Dean of St Asaph’s trial reveals two evolving pillars of modernconservatism: extra-parliamentary loyalist activism and an increasinglyconservative Church of England. By the time the case came to trial inShrewsbury in late 1784, William Pitt was comfortably in power and his earlycommitment to reform starting to cool. The prosecution of Shipley was,however, clearly an embarrassment to the governments in place throughoutits progress – something Erskine played upon in his trial speech. Prosecutionof Shipley was pushed by outraged loyalists who feared a Welsh edition of theDialogue – a ‘set of country squires’, in the words in the Rational DissentingNew Annual Register.57 This sort of conservative activism would be morewelcomed by Pitt’s government during the 1790s. Indeed, during the warwith Revolutionary France Sir Francis Buller, who had presided as judge over

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the trial of the Dean of St Asaph at Shrewsbury, himself entered public debateas the anonymous author of an answer to Godwin’s Cursory Strictures on the1794 treason trials.58 In Wales loyalists mobilised as the French Revolutionturned republican, and in the words of Hywel Davies ‘towns and boroughsthroughout Wales in the winter of 1792-93 declared themselves loyal tothe British constitution against the threats of republicans, levellers andJacobins and were “true Britons” in the loyalist sense’.59 Thomas Pennant,an important supporter of the prosecution of the Dean of St Asaph in theprevious decade, was even initially reluctant to translate loyalist tracts intoWelsh as they would only stoke ‘a political furor ... which can do no good’.60

Such concerns were overridden by paranoia about the potential spread ofPaineite republicanism, and Pennant joined other loyalists in translatingnumerous loyalist tracts into Welsh. Combined with government repression,this helped ensure that the radical London Corresponding Society had limitedconnections with Wales and overt radicals such as ‘the rural Voltaire’ WilliamJones, Llangadfan remained a fragmented minority.61

Nigel Aston has used Shipley’s career to illustrate the ‘waning of whiggery’within the Anglican Church. The Shipleys were orthodox in theology whilebeing strongly reformist in politics – and thus stand as evidence againstJonathan Clark’s argument that political radicalism stemmed from religiousheterodoxy.62 Many such clergy had advanced up the clerical hierarchy priorto the American War of Independence. Indeed, the Shipleys were a clericalfamily on the make. William’s father Jonathan obtained the bishopric of StAsaph in North Wales, and then proceeded to load his son with preferments.William Davies Shipley’s marriage into a prominent Welsh family withinvestment in West India slavery greatly enhanced his wealth and socialstanding. His career advancement, however, was brought to a halt by theprosecution for seditious libel. Given the increasingly conservative drift of theChurch, which saw the marginalisation of talented liberal clergy such asWilliam Paley, Aston thinks this would have been Shipley’s fate even withoutthe trial for seditious libel. For the remainder of his long life William Shipleyhad to watch others come and go as Bishops of St Asaph, including SamuelHallifax, a keen hammer of the reformers. Confined to his position as Dean ofSt Asaph, Shipley settled down to a life of tending to his clerical duties andsupervising his properties in Wales, England and the West Indies. A cautioussympathiser with the early stages of the French Revolution, he proceeded tosupport local initiatives to bolster national defence once war broke out in1793. Gaining a degree of local respect, he neither changed his politicalprinciples nor lived to see their triumph in 1832.63

With respect to the evolution of British political culture, the trial of theDean of St Asaph is further evidence against the traditional depiction of 1789

as making a sharp divide between old regime and modern politics. While thenumber of trials for sedition, and the number of those engaging in extra-parliamentary politics increased in the early 1790s, there are continuities inthe ideas, programmes, practices and personalities of popular politics in the



last two decades of the eighteenth century. The ‘crisis of empire’ occasionedby the struggle in North America fuelled many developments in Britishpolitics and culture, such as increased anxiety about gender boundaries anda campaign to abolish the slave trade.64 It also saw agitation for parliamentaryreform that produced lasting programmes and practices, and the formation ofa ‘new right’ that gained momentum after the bitter struggle that brought Pittto power in the winter of 1783/4. During the Shipley trial we see the Societyfor Constitutional Information employing a range of traditional andinnovative means to influence public opinion in favour of reform. The wealthyShipley and his reform-minded friends confidently believed that nationalunity, prosperity and social order would be enhanced by spreading politicalknowledge among ‘the people’, and expanding their voice in politics and theapplication of law. Others saw this as naïve and dangerous, especially in thewake of the Gordon Riots. Throughout the eighteenth century the gentry inWales had become increasingly Anglicised and culturally distanced from theWelsh-speaking masses, making them prone to anxiety about thepopularisation of political ideas.65 But if Thomas Pennant’s fear that chaoswould reign if the mass of ‘two-legged brutes’ started to think politically inpart reflects his Welsh context, it also reflects a conservative attitudehardening among those in the broader British elite concerned at theincreasing talk of liberty and rights in the wake of the American Revolution.

NOTES1. See, for example, James Epstein, ‘“Our Real Constitution”: Trial Defence and Radical

Memory in the Age of Revolution’, in In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of PopularPolitics in Modern Britain (Stanford, CA, 2003), p.59-82; Michael T. Davis, ‘Prosecution andRadical Discourse during the 1790s: The Case of the Scottish Sedition Trials’, InternationalJournal of the Sociology of Law 33 (2005), p.148-58. Many thanks to Michael T. Davis and WilfridPrest for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

2. Thomas Andrew Green, Verdict According to Conscience (Chicago, IL, 1985), p.328.3. Monthly Review, October 1784, cited in Emyr Wyn Jones, Diocesan Discord: a Family Affair,

St. Asaph 1779-1786 (Aberystwyth, 1988), p.44.4. William Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London, 1938), xi.672-96.5. John Brewer, ‘The Wilkites and the Law, 1763-74: A Study of Radical Notions of Govern-

ance’, in An Ungovernable People, eds J. Brewer and J. Styles (New York, 1980), p.128-71.6. James Oldham, The Mansfield Manuscripts, 2 vols (Chapel Hill, NC, and London 1992),

ii.807.7. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions: The American

and French Cases in British Perspective’, Government and Opposition 24 (1989), p.81-105.8. An Authentic Copy of the Judgement Delivered by the Right Hon. Earl Mansfield, November 16,

1784, in the case of the King against William Davies Shipley, Dean of St. Asaph (John Stockdale,1785), p.24-5.

9. Oldham, The Mansfield Manuscripts, p.807.10. See, for example, An Authentic Copy of the Judgement, p.12-13, 20, 26.11. Kathleen Wilson, ‘Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics’,

Journal of British Studies 28 (1989), p.349-86, and The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture andImperialism, 1715-1688 (Cambridge, 1995).

12. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), p.135.13. Michael Lobban, ‘From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing

Face of Political Crime c. 1770-1820’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 10:3 (1990), p.321n.

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14. For which see Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary ReformMovement in British Politics, 1760-1785 (London, 1962); E. C. Black, The Association: BritishExtraparliamentary Political Organization, 1769-1793 (Cambridge, MA, 1963); Anthony Page, JohnJebb and the Enlightenment Origins of British Radicalism (Westport, CT, 2003).

15. Iain McCalman, ‘Gordon Riots’, in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. IainMcCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.526.

16. See for example, Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Ageof the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000).

17. Rational Dissenters were prominent in the ranks of political reformers. For their close tiesto the British elite, see John Seed, ‘Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings ofRational Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s’, Historical Journal 28 (1985), p.299-325.

18. Parliamentary History, xxxii.534, cited in John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640-1832(Cambridge, 1973), p.534.

19. J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery (Manchester, 1998); SeymourDrescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New Yorkand Oxford, 1986).

20. Kenneth Pearl, ‘The Society for Constitutional Information and the Publication of aRadical Agenda’, Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750-1850: Selected Papers (Tallahassee, FL,1995), p.77-85.

21. [William Jones], The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Scholar and aPeasant, written by a member of the Society for Constitutional Information (1783 edition), p.5-7,14.

22. [Jones], The Principles of Government, p.iii-iv.23. Kathleen Wilson, ‘Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics’,

Journal of British Studies 28 (1989), p.349-86.24. Page, John Jebb and the Enlightenment Origins of British Radicalism, p.203.25. Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Beginnings of Radicalism’, in The Remaking of Wales in the Eighteenth

Century, eds Trevor Herbert and Gareth Elwyn Jones (Cardiff, 1988), p.111-47.26. Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘“A Rank Republican [and] a Leveller”: William Jones, Llangadfan’,

Welsh History Review 17:3 (1995), p.373.27. Kew, National Archives, TS II/961, ‘Society for Constitutional Information Minutes’,

p.7-8.28. Cited in Peter Brown, The Chathamites (London, 1967), p.379.29. Black, The Association, p.200.30. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, p.95.31. James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Non-Conformity in Eighteenth-

Century Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1990).32. Jenny Graham, The Nation, the Law and the King, 2 vols (Lanham, MD, 2000), i.44.33. Michael J. Franklin, ‘Sir William Jones’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2004); Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones (Oxford,1990).

34. Cited in Robert A. Ferguson, ‘The Emulation of Sir William Jones in the Early Republic’,The New England Quarterly 52:1 (1979), p.25.

35. William Jones to John Cartwright, in The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed. G. Cannon, 2 vols(Oxford, 1970), ii.547.

36. [Jones], The Principles of Government (1783 edition), p.10.37. Cited in Nigel Aston, ‘“Achitophel Firebrand” at St. Asaph: Dean Shipley and the

Withering of Whiggism in the Church of England ‘, in Religious Identities in Britain, 1660-1832,eds William Gibson and Robert G. Ingram (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p.312n.

38. The courtroom was used with great effect by Wilkite radicals from the 1760s on to winconcessions, place restrictions on government, or at least score rhetorical points. 1790s trials forsedition and treason provided important sites of radical counter theatre and rhetorical combat.See, for example, John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide,1793-1796 (Oxford, 2000).

39. The Dialogue was re-published in English after the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, and anotherWelsh edition in the 1840s Chartist agitation. Franklin, ‘William Jones’, Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography.

40. Aston, ‘“Achitophel Firebrand” at St. Asaph’, p.308.41. ‘Veritas’, 7 January 1785, Chester Chronicle, cited in Jones, Diocesan Discord, p.64.



42. Thomas Pennant to Lloyd Kenyon, Master of the Rolls, 29 December 1784, cited in Jones,Diocesan Discord, p.63.

43. The Triumph of Turbulence, or Mother Cambria Possessed, 23 and 24 December 1784, sold atNo. 227 Strand, London, is reproduced in Jones, Diocesan Discord, front page.

44. Joseph Gurney, The Whole Proceedings on the Trial of the Indictment, the King, on theprosecution of William Jones, gentleman, against the Rev. William Davies Shipley, ... for a libel, at theassize at Shrewsbury, on Friday the 6th of August, 1784 (1784); William Blanchard, The Whole ofthe Proceedings at the Assizes at Shrewsbury, on Friday August the sixth, 1784, in the cause of theKing on the prosecution of William Jones, ... against the Rev. William Davies Shipley, Dean of St.Asaph. For a libel ... Taken in short hand by William Blanchard (1784), of which there was also a1784 Dublin edition.

45. William Blanchard, The Rights of Juries Vindicated; in the Arguments of ... Thomas Erskine,and W. Welch, ... in the case of the King against the Dean of St. Asaph, on Wednesday, November 15,1784: in support of the motion for a new trial. ... Taken in short hand by William Blanchard (2nd edn,1785); An Authentic Copy of the Judgement; House of Lords, An Authentic Copy of the Judgementdelivered by the Right Hon. Earl Mansfield, November 16, 1784, in the case of the King against WilliamDavies Shipley, Dean of St. Asaph (Parliament, London, 1785).

46. Manassah Dawes, England’s alarm! On the prevailing doctrine of libels, as laid down by the Earlof Mansfield. In a letter to His Lordship. By a country gentleman. To which is added by way ofappendix, the celebrated dialogue between a gentleman and a farmer, written by Sir William Jones, withremarks thereon, and on the case of the Dean of St. Asaph (1785). For Dawes’ view of the society seethe preface to his in The Nature and Extent of Supreme Power, in a Letter to the Rev. David Williams(London, 1783), p.i-iv.

47. For example, Tracts Published and Distributed gratis by the Society for ConstitutionalInformation (1783); Joseph Towers, Observations on the Rights and Duty of Juries in trials for libels(1784).

48. Cited in Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, p.797n.49. An Authentic Copy of the Judgement, p. 24.50. ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Dr. John Jebb’, The Berwick Museum, or Monthly

Literary Intelligencer 3 (1785-1787), p.318.51. Cited in Jeremy Black, Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1688-1783 (Basingstoke, 2001), p.254.52. Paul Kelly, ‘Radicalism and Public Opinion in the General Election of 1784’, Bulletin of the

Institute for Historical Research 45 (1972), p.73-88; Dorothy George, ‘Fox’s Martyrs: the GeneralElection of 1784’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4:21 (1939), p.133-68.

53. James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative (Cambridge, 1993).54. William Jones to Lloyd Kenyon, 28 March 1783, in Cannon (ed.), Letters of Sir William

Jones, ii.607-9.55. William Jones to the second Earl Spencer, 11 April 1784, in Cannon (ed.), The Letters of Sir

William Jones, ii.635.56. George Kenyon, The Life of Lloyd, First Lord Kenyon (1873), p.230.57. New Annual Register (1783), p.235.58. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, p.304n.59. Hywel Davies, ‘Loyalism in Wales, 1792-1793’, Welsh History Review 20:4 (2001), p.687-8.60. Cited in Davies, ‘Loyalism in Wales’, p.699. Others within the British elite shared this

concern about the consequences of promoting political thought among the populace via loyalistpamphlets. Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792-1793’, English Historical Review 110 (1995),p.42-69.

61. David A. Wager, ‘Welsh Politics and Parliamentary Reform, 1780-1832’, Welsh HistoryReview 14:2 (1988), p.431; Jenkins, ‘A Rank Republican [and] a Leveller’, p.365.

62. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660-1832 (Cambridge, 2000). Aston, ‘“Achitophel Fire-brand” at St. Asaph’.

63. For an outstanding discussion of the character, maintenance and significance of theWhig tradition in the revolutionary era, see L. G. Mitchell, ‘The Whigs, the People and Reform’,Proceedings of the British Academy 100 (1999), p.25-41.

64. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-CenturyEngland (New Haven, CT, 2004); Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of BritishAbolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006).

65. Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640-1790 (Cambridge,1983).

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Anthony Page is lecturer in European History at the University of Tasmania, Launceston, andis author of John Jebb and the Enlightenment Origins of British Radicalism (2003). Reviews editorfor the journal Enlightenment and Dissent, he is currently researching various aspects ofUnitarianism and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Britain.



The Dean of St Asaph's Trial: Libel and Politics in the 1780s

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