For the English naturalist, see John Reeves (naturalist)

John Reeves (naturalist)

John Reeves was an English naturalist. He developed a remarkable collection of Chinese drawings of animals and plants.Reeves was appointed Inspector of Tea for the British East India Company in 1808...

.

John Reeves (20 November 1752 – 7 August 1829), was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 judge, public official and conservative

Conservatism

Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...

 activist. In 1792 he founded the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers

Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers

The Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers was founded on 20 November 1792 by John Reeves at the Crown and Anchor tavern in the Strand, London....

 to campaign against the ideas of the French Revolution and their British supporters. Because of his counter-revolutionary actions he was regarded by many of his contemporaries as "the saviour of the British state".

Life

Reeves was educated at Eton College

Eton College

Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....

 and Merton College, Oxford

Merton College, Oxford

Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later to Edward I, first drew up statutes for an independent academic community and established endowments to...

, being elected in 1778 as a Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford

The Queen's College, Oxford

The Queen's College, founded 1341, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Queen's is centrally situated on the High Street, and is renowned for its 18th-century architecture...

. In 1779 he was called to the bar and held the public offices counsel to the Royal Mint

Royal Mint

The Royal Mint is the body permitted to manufacture, or mint, coins in the United Kingdom. The Mint originated over 1,100 years ago, but since 2009 it operates as Royal Mint Ltd, a company which has an exclusive contract with HM Treasury to supply all coinage for the UK...

; clerk and secretary to the Board of Trade

Board of Trade

The Board of Trade is a committee of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, originating as a committee of inquiry in the 17th century and evolving gradually into a government department with a diverse range of functions...

 and superintendent of Aliens. He was a Chief Justice of Newfoundland for a year until returning to England in 1792 to accept the post of paymaster of the metropolitan police

Metropolitan police

Metropolitan Police is a generic title for the municipal police force for a major metropolitan area, and it may be part of the official title of the force...

 (Receiver of Public Offices). He was also elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries

Society of Antiquaries of London

The Society of Antiquaries of London is a learned society "charged by its Royal Charter of 1751 with 'the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries'." It is based at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London , and is...

 in 1789 and the next year was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society

Royal Society

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...

. In 1793 he was appointed as high steward of the Manor and Liberty of Savoy and the King's Printer in 1800.

The Association

Reeves campaigned against Jacobinism

Jacobin (politics)

A Jacobin , in the context of the French Revolution, was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary far-left political movement. The Jacobin Club was the most famous political club of the French Revolution. So called from the Dominican convent where they originally met, in the Rue St. Jacques ,...

 by founding at the Crown and Anchor tavern on 20 November 1792 the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers

Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers

The Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers was founded on 20 November 1792 by John Reeves at the Crown and Anchor tavern in the Strand, London....

. The Association was "staggeringly successful, outstripping even the Constitutional societies", with more than 2,000 local branches established before long. They disrupted radical meetings, attacked printers of Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

Thomas "Tom" Paine was an English author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States...

's works, initiated prosecutions for sedition

Sedition

In law, sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent to lawful authority. Sedition may include any...

 and published loyalist pamphlets. The Crown and Anchor association met for the final time on 21 June 1793. These loyalist associations mostly disappeared within a year "after successfully suppressing the organizations of their opponents". The leading opposition Whig Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox PC , styled The Honourable from 1762, was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned thirty-eight years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and who was particularly noted for being the arch-rival of William Pitt the Younger...

 denounced the Association's publications and claimed that had they been printed earlier in the century they would be prosecuted as treasonable Jacobite tracts due to their advocacy of the divine right of kings

Divine Right of Kings

The divine right of kings or divine-right theory of kingship is a political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from the will of God...

. In a speech on 10 December 1795 Fox described the Association as a system designed to run the country through "the infamy of spies and intrigues".

Reeves was upset that he had received "not one single mark of civility" from William Pitt the Younger

William Pitt the Younger

William Pitt the Younger was a British politician of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He became the youngest Prime Minister in 1783 at the age of 24 . He left office in 1801, but was Prime Minister again from 1804 until his death in 1806...

's government for his loyalist activities. Thereafter Reeves held an animosity towards Pitt and was a supporter of the Addington administration in the early 19th century. William Cobbett

William Cobbett

William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly...

 claimed in 1830 that Reeves told him that he hated the Pitt administration and its principles and that bitter experience had taught him that one must either kiss or kick the government's arse.

Thoughts on the English government

In 1795 Reeves anonymously published the first of his Thoughts on the English Government, addressed to the quiet good sense of the People of England in a series of Letters. Reeves claimed that "I am not a Citizen of the World...I am an Englishman". In a controversial passage Reeves likened the monarchy to a tree:

...the Government of England is a Monarchy; the Monarch is the antient stock from which have sprung those goodly branches of the Legislature, the Lords and Commons, that at the same time give ornament to the Tree, and afford shelter to those who seek protection under it. But these are still only branches, and derive their origin and their nutriment from their common parent; they may be lopped off, and the Tree is a Tree still; shorn indeed of its honours, but not, like them, cast into the fire. The Kingly Government may go on, in all its functions, without Lords or Commons...

In 1795 a group of Whigs, Fox among them, persuaded the Attorney General to prosecute Reeves for "libel on the British Constitution" due to his tree metaphor and a parliamentary committee was set up to determine the authorship of the Thoughts. Former Whig MP Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....

 claimed that the prosecution of Reeves was a pretext for the spread of Foxite views. Burke claimed that the tree metaphor was "slovenly" and that he should not of criticised 18th century Whigs but that Reeves was still a person of "considerable Abilities" whose argument in the Thoughts, "with a commonly fair allowance, is perfectly true" and "neither more nor less than the Law of the Land". In November 1795 Burke wrote to William Windham

William Windham

William Windham PC, PC was a British Whig statesman.-Early life:Windham was a member of an ancient Norfolk family and a great-great-grandson of Sir John Wyndham. He was the son of William Windham, Sr. of Felbrigg Hall and his second wife, Sarah Lukin...

 that the Reeves case was ironic because he was being criticised by people whose views endangered all three parts of the British constitution:

Heraldry of the constitution! Whether the Lords and Commons or the King should walk first in the procession! Which is the Root, which the Branches! In good faith, they cut up the Root and the Branches! A fine Business of Law Grammar, which is the Substantive, which the adjective. – When an author lays down the whole as to be revered and adhered to, – at any former time would any one have made it a cause of quarrel, that he had given the priority to any part? especially to that part which was attacked and exposed? My opinion is, that, if you do not kick this business out with Scorn, Reeves ought to Petition and to desire to be heard by himself and his Council.

Reeves was acquitted of libel although the jury censured him for writing a "very improper publication". Reeves published anonymously the Second Letter in 1799 and in 1800 the Third and Fourth Letters of his Thoughts.

In 1801 Reeves published Considerations on the coronation oath where he supported the King's opinion that the coronation oath prohibited Roman Catholics from Parliament and his dismissal of the Pitt government in 1801. Reeves also claimed that presbyterianism rather than popery was the greatest threat to Church and state.

Publications

• An Enquiry into the Nature of Property and Estates as defined by the Laws of England (1779).
• History of English Law (five volumes, 1783 to 1829).
• A Chart of Penal Laws, exhibiting by lines and colours an historical view of crimes and punishments, according to the law of England (1792).
• History of the Government of the Island of Newfoundland (1793).
• Thoughts on the English Government (1795).
• A Collection of the Hebrew and Greek Texts of the Psalms (1800).
• Considerations on the Coronation Oath to maintain the Protestant Reformed Religion, and the Settlement of the Church of England (1801).

Further reading

• E. C. Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organisation, 1769-1793 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
• H. T. Dickinson
  H. T. Dickinson
  Harry Thomas Dickinson FRSE is an English historian specialising in British eighteenth century politics. He got his BA and MA from the University of Durham and his PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He was Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh and Richard Lodge Professor of...
  
  , 'Popular Loyalism in Britain in the 1790s', in Eckhart Hellmuth (ed.), The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1990).
• H. T. Dickinson, 'Popular Conservatism and Militant Loyalism, 1789-1815', in Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution, 1789-1815 (London, 1988).
• R. R. Dozier, For King, Country, and Constitution: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington, Kentucky, 1983).
• David Eastwood, 'Patriotism and the English State in the 1790s', in Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge, 1991).
• D. E. Ginter, 'Loyalist Association movement of 1792–3 and British public opinion', Historical Journal, ix (1966).
• Austin Mitchell, 'The Association movement of 1792–3', Historical Journal, iv (1961).
• Mark Philp, 'Vulgar Conservatism, 1792-3', English Historical Review, 110 (February 1995).

External links

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online