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Radicals, Loyalists, and the Royal Jubilee of 1809

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2007

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References

1 For example, Leeds Mercury, 2 September 1809.

2 “(A Lady) The Wife of a Naval Officer,” An Account of the Celebration of the Jubilee, on the 25th October, 1809 (Birmingham, 1809), x, xiiGoogle Scholar. This work was attributed by the antiquary John Wodderspoon to a Solihull, Warwickshire, woman named Davis: Notes and Queries 11 (20 January 1855): 53. For other invocations of unanimity, see, e.g., European Magazine 56 (October 1809): 310; Courier, 25 October 1809; Mr. Redhead Yorke's Weekly Political Review, 28 October 1809, 311.

3 Dickinson, H. T., “Popular Conservatism and Militant Loyalism, 1789–1815,” in his Britain and the French Revolution (Basingstoke, 1989), 113Google Scholar.

4 On Biggs, see Colley, Linda, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty, and the British Nation, 1760–1820,” Past and Present, no. 102 (February 1984): 112Google Scholar, and Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992), 217–19Google Scholar. I am currently engaged in a longer study of Biggs's political career.

5 See Colley, “Apotheosis,” 119–20, 122–24. The subtler shadings of Colley's analysis are lost in Christopher Hibbert's account of the event. Apart from misdating the Jubilee (he confuses it with the minor celebrations that took place a year later at the completion of George's fiftieth year of rule), Hibbert describes the event in monochromatically loyalist terms in George III: A Personal History (Harmondsworth, 1998), 390–92. For examples of radical criticism of the Jubilee, see Ditchfield, G. M., George III: An Essay on Monarchy (Basingstoke, 2002), 164–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rogers, Nicholas, “Crowds and Political Festival in Georgian England,” in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1800, ed. Harris, Tim (Basingstoke, 2001), 233–64, esp. 256–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Colley, “Apotheosis,” 112.

7 Ibid.; the Jubilee is discussed on 111–13, 116–18, 122–24.

8 The rest of this paragraph refers to Colley, Britons, 218–20, 222–24.

9 William Thomas Fitzgerald, “Ode for the Royal Jubilee,” Morning Post, 26 October 1809.

10 For a contemporary claim of Jubilee celebrations in St. Vincent and Antigua—impossible, given how long it took for news to cross the Atlantic (unless the West Indian events were indeed spontaneous in their generation)—see “A Lady,” Account of the Celebration, 202.

11 On British radicalism in the sometimes neglected period between the mid-1790s and Waterloo, see, among others, Hone, J. Ann, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar; Spence, Peter, The Birth of Romantic Radicalism: War, Popular Politics, and English Radical Reformism, 1800–1815 (Aldershot, 1996)Google Scholar; Harling, Philip, “The Duke of York Affair (1809) and the Complexities of War-Time Patriotism,” Historical Journal 39, no. 4 (1996): 963–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Semmel, Stuart, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, CT, 2004)Google Scholar.

12 Drescher, Seymour (summarizing Colley), “Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade,” Past and Present, no. 143 (May 1994): 156Google Scholar.

13 See Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar, esp. David Cannadine's contribution, “The Context, Performance, and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition,’ ca. 1820–1977,” 101–64.

14 On the affair, see chap. 7 (“The Mary Clarke Affair and the System of Corruption”) of Clark, Anna, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 148–76Google Scholar; and Harling, “Duke of York Affair.”

15 R. C. Biggs to Nicholas Vansittart, British Library (hereafter BL), Add MS 31234, fol. 112 ([January 1816]).

16 She was the author of A Residence in France, During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795; Described in a Series of Letters from an English Lady, 2 vols. (London, 1797)Google Scholar, and A Maximum; or the Rise and Progress of Famine. Addressed to the British People (London, 1801)Google Scholar. Her letters to Windham, ca. 1800–1810, are scattered in BL, Add MSS 37889, 37915, and 37916. On Cobbett, see Biggs to Vansittart, 4 December 1812, BL, Add MS 31234, fols. 23–25.

17 Biggs to Vansittart, BL, Add MS 31234, fol. 1 (15 September [1812]), fol. 9 (25 September [1812]).

18 Biggs to Vansittart, BL, Add MS 31234, fol. 1 (15 September [1812]).

19 She may not have known this, but Biggs was behaving very much as Reeves himself had when he had launched the Association: he had not consulted in advance with Whitehall, so that “the Government might have the benefit of it, if it produced any, and none of the disgrace, if such was the fate of it” (quoted in Duffy, Michael, “William Pitt and the Origins of the Loyalist Association Movement of 1792,” Historical Journal 39 [December 1996]: 943–62, 944)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Reeves, see Beedell, A. V., “John Reeves's Prosecution for a Seditious Libel, 1795–1796: A Study in Political Cynicism,” Historical Journal 36, no. 4 (December 1993): 799824CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Polden, Patrick, “John Reeves as Superintendent of Aliens, 1803–1814,” Journal of Legal History 3 (1982): 3151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Biggs to Vansittart, BL, Add MS 31234, fols. 1–2, 5 (15 September [1812]), fols. 9–11 (25 September [1812]).

21 Morning Chronicle, 2 October 1809.

22 Cobbett's Weekly Political Register (CWPR), 23 September 1809, 393. For other criticisms of the Jubilee's timing, see, e.g., letter to the editor from “J. B.,” Examiner, 17 September 1809, 602; letter to the editor from “Common Sense,” Statesman, 6 October 1809.

23 See CWPR, 30 September 1809, 476.

24 For example, Examiner, 17 September 1809, 594; Examiner, 29 October 1809, 689; Robert Waithman's speech in the Court of Common Council, quoted in CWPR, 30 September 1809, 465–66.

25 Letter to the editor from “Z.,” CWPR, 14 October 1809, 534–36.

26 “Honestas” to Rev. Richard Lendon, The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) HO 42/98, fols. 193–94 (words at margin obscured by tight binding).

27 Lendon to Lord Liverpool, TNA: PRO HO 42/98, fol. 191.

28 Handbill (with marginalia) announcing Jubilee sermon at St. John’s, Clerkenwell, TNA: PRO HO 42/98, fol. 195.

29 Courier, 25 October 1809.

30 Descriptions of letters appeared in European Magazine 56 (July 1809): 71; Leeds Mercury, 29 July 1809; Morning Chronicle, 14 October 1809.

31 Biggs to Vansittart, 15 September [1812], BL, Add MS 31234, fol. 2; Morning Chronicle, 14 October 1809; Leeds Mercury, 4 November 1809.

32 See Morning Chronicle, 14 October 1809.

33 See CWPR, 28 October 1809, 638.

34 Waithman quotation from The Times, 6 October 1809. On Waithman, see Dinwiddy, J. R., “The Patriotic Linen Draper: Robert Waithman and the Revival of Radicalism in the City of London, 1795–1818,” in his Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1750–1850 (London, 1992), 6385Google Scholar.

35 Morning Chronicle, 14 October 1809. A similar accusation was made in the Leeds Mercury, 4 November 1809.

36 Statesman, 26 October 1809.

37 Examiner, 17 September 1809, 594; letter to the editor from “Quodlibet,” Independent Whig, 17 September 1809, 1157; letter to the editor from “A Firm Whig,” Independent Whig, 8 October 1809, 1181; letter to the editor from “Caius Gracchus,” Independent Whig, 15 October 1809, 1188.

38 See CWPR, 4 November 1809, 642. On Cobbett's pervasive anti-Semitism, see Herzog, Don, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 299303Google Scholar. As Herzog points out (302), financiers are often enough treated by Cobbett as “Christians who might as well be Jews, who automatically become Jews when they become moneylenders”; certainly in the case of the Jubilee, he did not dwell on their Jewishness in any substantive sense. Others also blamed Jews: see the Statesman of 9 October 1809; letter to the editor from “Z.,” CWPR, 14 October 1809, 535; letter to the editor from “D. I.,” CWPR, 11 November 1809, 715; and the satire “The Jubilee, Alias Jew Belly, of 1809,” in The Jubilee of 1809, Containing a Poetical Epistle (London, [1809]), 314Google Scholar.

39 Millar in the Common Council, quoted in CWPR, 30 September 1809, 476.

40 See CWPR, 23 September 1809, 393; Statesman, 25 October 1809. For similar analysis, see letter to the editor from “A Firm Whig,” Independent Whig, 8 October 1809, 1182.

41 See CWPR, 28 October 1809, 638.

42 Letter to the editor from “Quodlibet,” Independent Whig, 17 September 1809, 1157.

43 Letter to the editor from “Caroline,” Independent Whig, 15 October 1809, 1190.

44 Examiner, 17 September 1809, 594; letter to the editor from “A Firm Whig,” Independent Whig, 8 October 1809, 1182; “Honestas” to Rev. Richard Lendon, TNA: PRO HO 42/98, fol. 193.

45 Courier, 5 October 1809. The Times feared this banner was intended to stir up “disorders that might ultimately shake the whole frame of society” (The Times, 5 October 1809). Another “O. P.” placard, reported by Colley—“Be Britons on the 25th but riot on the 26th”—indicates that some protesters inclined to take a day of rest from their protests on the Jubilee day itself (“Apotheosis,” 126). For a variant (“rally” rather than “riot”) see British Press, 25 October 1809. On the “O. P.” riots, see Baer, Marc, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Letter to the editor from “Caius Gracchus,” Independent Whig, 15 October 1809, 1188. See also letter to the editor from “A Firm Whig,” Independent Whig, 8 October 1809, 1182; letter to the editor from “A Poor Widow,” Examiner, 8 October 1809, 650.

47 Examiner, 17 September 1809, 594.

48 Charles Callis Western to Thomas Creevey, 24 September 1809, in The Creevey Papers: A Selection from the Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Thomas Creevey, M.P., ed. Maxwell, Herbert (New York, 1904), 98Google Scholar.

49 On illumination in late Georgian political culture, see Jenks, Timothy, “‘Naval Engagements’: Patriotism, Cultural Politics, and the Royal Navy, 1793–1815” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2001), 4755, 157–59, 192–94Google Scholar.

50 Letter to the editor from “Observator,” Independent Whig, 24 September 1809, 1163 (and see Examiner, 17 September 1809, 601). The editor of a volume compiled for Victoria's Golden Jubilee claimed that in March 1809 “the tallow merchants and tallow chandlers began to accumulate large stores in anticipation of the expected great demand for candles in October,” but I have found no evidence of this in contemporary press accounts. If true, it might lessen Biggs's claims to have been the sole conceiver of a Jubilee, as her own efforts did not begin until the summer. Preston, Thomas, ed., Jubilee Jottings: The Jubilee of George the Third (London, 1887), xiGoogle Scholar.

51 Samuel James Arnold, Britain's Jubilee: A Musical After Piece in Two Acts (submitted to Lord Chamberlain's Office 21 October 1809), Huntington Library, John Larpent plays, fols. 1, 15–16. Key scenes are described in Examiner, 29 October 1809, 695–96.

52 Brewer, John, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), 186CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Semmel, Napoleon and the British, 27. On Cobbett's radicalization, see 140–45. Cobbett would appeal to the home secretary, Lord Pelham, for protection from “the lawless mob” in the spring of 1802, when news of the Treaty of Amiens prompted threats of a second attack on his house if he failed to illuminate (letter to Pelham, 28 April 1802, Gen. MS 437, Beinecke Library, Yale University).

54 See CWPR, 23 September 1809, 392, 397.

55 On the “paranoid style” in late Georgian radical thought, see, e.g., Barrell, John, Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000), esp. 412Google Scholar; Wood, Gordon S., “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (July 1982): 401–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Letter to the editor from “A Firm Whig,” Independent Whig, 8 October 1809, 1182.

57 Letter to the editor from “Caroline,” Independent Whig, 15 October 1809, 1190–91.

58 Her letter also warned that “the period seems fast approaching when the oppressors of mankind ‘shall be cut down as the grass, and be withered as the green herb’” (Independent Whig, 15 October 1809, 1190).

59 Spence, Birth of Romantic Radicalism, 16–17.

60 Barrell, John, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2006), 105Google Scholar, here summarizing Colley's “Apotheosis” argument. But see chap. 3 (“Weymouth Amusements”) of Barrell's book for a sophisticated discussion of how cracks could appear in this “myth of royal ordinariness” (106).

61 Examiner, 29 October 1809, 689.

62 For example, Robert Waithman; see Examiner, 17 September 1809, 604.

63 “An Account of the Grand Entertainment at Cabbage Merchant's Hall,” in The Jubilee of 1809, Containing a Poetical Epistle, 17.

64 Examiner, 22 October 1809, 678.

65 Leeds Mercury, 21 October 1809.

66 Letter to the editor from “Jubal,” The Times, 13 October 1809.

67 Harling, “Duke of York Affair.”

68 For “sensuality,” see the Common Councilors Waithman, quoted in The Times, 6 October 1809, and Box, quoted in Courier, 6 October 1809.

69 Letter to the editor from “Loyalty,” The Times, 18 September 1809. For other early recommendations of relief for debtors, see letter to the editor from “Quodlibet,” Independent Whig, 17 September 1809, 1157; letter to the editor from “Philanthropus,” Independent Whig, 24 September 1809, 1165.

70 Lev. 25:10–54. See, e.g., letter to the editor from “Loyalty,” The Times, 18 September 1809; letter to the editor from “Jubal,” The Times, 13 October 1809; Jacks in Common Council debate, Courier, 6 October 1809.

71 See CWPR, 30 September 1809, 484; letter to the editor from “J. B.,” Examiner, 17 September 1809, 602; letter to the editor from “Jubal,” The Times, 13 October 1809. See also, on Edward III, letter to the editor from “B.,” Gentleman's Magazine 79 (September 1809): 830–31. On Edward's two Jubilees as occasions for general pardons, see Ormrod, W. M., “‘Fifty Glorious Years’: Edward III and the First English Royal Jubilee,” Medieval History 1, no. 1 (2002): 1320Google Scholar.

72 Letter to the editor from “Homo Sum,” The Times, 22 September 1809.

73 Letter to the editor from “N. S.,” Morning Chronicle, 16 October 1809.

74 Address of congratulations from the Corporation of Nottingham (special meeting of 18 October 1809), TNA: PRO HO 42/99, fols. 844–45 (18 October 1809).

75 Including The Times, the Morning Post, the Examiner, the Courier, and Cobbett's Political Register.

76 Morning Chronicle, 4 August 1809; see also, e.g., Examiner, 17 September 1809, 600.

77 The Times, 16 September 1809.

78 For example, Examiner, 29 October 1809, 700; and the caricatures “Which is Right or Regular and Quack Opinions on the Flushing Fever” (C. Williams) and “Rhyms [sic] for Grown Babie in the Ministerial Nursery” (George Cruikshank), both of which specifically associated the term with Curtis (M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol. 8, nos. 11368, 11380 [London, 1870–1954]). The term “jollification” also turns up as a punch line in Arnold's play Britain's Jubilee (fol. 37), submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's Office on 21 October 1809. These would seem to be among the earliest British uses of the term (the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest example is American and also dates from 1809).

79 The Times, 16 September 1809.

80 The Times, 27 September 1809.

81 Councillors Griffiths and S. Dixon, respectively, quoted in CWPR, 30 September 1809, 463.

82 Ibid., 434, 478. Wood criticized Mawman's remark as a “libel” on the Court's members (The Times, 6 October 1809). Jokes about Mawman's name and greed were also made by “Jubilee, Alias Jew Belly,” 10; letter to the editor from “Z.,” CWPR, 14 October 1809, 535.

83 See CWPR, 30 September 1809, 472.

84 Marryot, quoted in The Times, 27 September 1809.

85 See, e.g., The Times, 29 September 1809; “Jubilee, Alias Jew Belly,” 10; Isaac Cruikshank's untitled engraving of the Jubilee dinner (misdated 1805), described in George, Catalogue, no. 10490.

86 See CWPR, 30 September 1809, 480; The Times, 27 September 1809.

87 The Times, 28 September 1809.

88 Examiner, 1 October 1809, 628.

89 Examiner, 8 October 1809, 644; Leeds Mercury, 30 September 1809.

90 The Times, 4 October 1809; Courier, 6 October 1809; Independent Whig, 8 October 1809, 1177.

91 The Times, 6 October 1809.

92 See CWPR, 14 October 1809, 515.

93 The Times, advertisement, 24 October 1809; also quoted in Statesman, 25 October 1809.

94 Leeds Mercury, 21 October 1809.

95 Courier, 16 October 1809.

96 British Press, 24 October 1809 (reporting a 19 October resolution). The overseers of St. James's parish, Westminster, sent out circular letters containing a similar appeal (British Press, 21 October 1809).

97 Courier, 16 October 1809. On Weymouth, see Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, 104–5.

98 Courier, 20 October 1809. On similar developments in the Yorkshire towns of Wakefield and Beverley, see Leeds Mercury, 21 and 28 October 1809. Similarly, see Waylen, James, A History, Military and Municipal, of the Town (Otherwise Called the City) of Marlborough (London, 1854), 437Google Scholar.

99 Leeds Mercury, 21 October 1809.

100 Ibid.

101 The Times, 24 October 1809.

102 The play's setting is ostensibly Barnstaple, but the play's audience would have recognized the description of the City's deliberations.

103 Arnold, Britain's Jubilee, fols. 1, 15–16, 25, cover letter.

104 Morning Chronicle, 22 September 1809.

105 Reported in Leeds Mercury, 21 October 1809. For a similar link between ruler and humble subject—made equals by age—see the Scottish broadside ballad “The Jubilee; or the Shepherd and the King,” Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads online database (http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/ballads.htm), Harding B 25(1010), also titled “Jubilee for Jubilee, or Fifty Years Shepherd for Fifty a King,” Harding B 11(1943).

106 The Times, 5 October 1809; letter to the editor from “Clara,” The Times, 24 October 1809. Also see the advertisement announcing a private subscription to bail out debtors in the Marshalsea Prison: The Times, 25 October 1809.

107 Morning Chronicle, 16 October 1809.

108 The Times, 25 October 1809; European Magazine 56 (October 1809): 309–10.

109 Earl of Liverpool to George III, 23 October 1809, in The Later Correspondence of George III, ed. Aspinall, A., 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1962–70), 5:416Google Scholar.

110 On the ministerial turmoil, see Gash, Norman, Lord Liverpool: The Life and Political Career of Robert Banks Jenkinson, Second Earl of Liverpool, 1770–1828 (Cambridge, 1984), 7379Google Scholar.

111 Spencer Perceval to George III, 20 October 1809; George to Perceval, 21 October 1809; Perceval to George, 21 October 1809; and Perceval to George, 26 October 1809, in Aspinall, Later Correspondence, 5:409–10, 424.

112 Rose, George, diary for 10 October 1809, in The Diaries and Correspondence of the Right Hon. George Rose, ed. Harcourt, Leveson Vernon, 2 vols. (London, 1860), 2:407Google Scholar.

113 Prochaska, Frank, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven, CT, 1995), 16Google Scholar.

114 Leeds Mercury, 21 October 1809.

115 Morning Chronicle, 4 and 10 October 1809. Clauses of the Chronicle's critique were plucked from the Independent Whig, 8 October 1809, 1181.

116 Letter to the editor from “Mark Anthony,” Morning Post, 19 October 1809; letter to the editor from “A Citizen,” Morning Post, 21 October 1809. See also letter to the editor from “John Bull,” Morning Post, 21 October 1809.

117 Letter to the editor from “A British Tar,” Morning Post, 17 October 1809.

118 The Times, 23 October 1809.

119 Gentleman's Magazine 79 (1809): 976Google Scholar.

120 For York's “partial” illumination, see Leeds Mercury, 28 October 1809; the British Press, 21 October 1809, made the latter comment about Liverpool and a similar observation about Edinburgh.

121 The Times, 27 October 1809; see also Gentleman's Magazine 79 (October 1809): 976.

122 Money, Walter, The History of the Ancient Town and Borough of Newbury (Oxford, 1887), 385Google Scholar. See also, e.g., Leeds Mercury, 28 October 1809; “A Lady,” Account of the Celebration, 144.

123 George Rose, diary for 25 October 1809, in Harcourt, Diaries and Correspondence, 2:419.

124 British Press, 26 October 1809.

125 The Examiner, 29 October 1809, 698; see also the many transparencies described in The Times and the British Press in the days following the Jubilee.

126 British Press, 26 October 1809.

127 Courier, 5 October 1809.

128 British Press, 31 October 1809. A great many such events are recorded in “A Lady,” Account of the Celebration.

129 Rogers, “Crowds and Political Festival,” 253.

130 British Press, 23 October 1809. Mighell received permission to use the Prince of Wales's Riding School for the occasion.

131 Rogers, “Crowds and Political Festival,” 247, 252–54.

132 The Times, 24 October 1809 (describing the resolution of 17 October).

133 British Press, 24 October 1809.

134 The Times, 27 October 1809.

135 Statesman, 25 October 1809.

136 Statesman, 26 October 1809.

137 Examiner, 29 October 1809, 701. Cobbett similarly opined that London's illumination was “not a quarter part so general, or so bright, as upon any common occasion of a naval victory” (CWPR, 4 November 1789, 652–53). The Morning Post, by contrast, claimed there had never been an illumination “so universal or so brilliant” as that of 25 October and that “every lane or alley in the capital, exhibited a general blaze of joy on the occasion” (Morning Post, 26 October 1809).

138 Examiner, 29 October 1809, 700.

139 See CWPR, 4 November 1809, 641–42; CWPR, 23 September 1809, 397; CWPR, 28 October 1809, 639.

140 See CWPR, 18 November 1809, 748.

141 See CWPR, 4 November 1809, 641.

142 See Semmel, Napoleon and the British, 27–28.

143 See CWPR, 4 November 1809, 643.

144 See CWPR, 18 November 1809, 747–48. Treating the poor in the public manner exercised on the Jubilee “marked [them] out for a degraded cast, as if they had badges put upon their clothes, or, as some of the American negroes have, a burnt mark in their cheek.” It would have the effect of “reconciling the minds of the labouring people to a state of dependance and beggary, and to efface the small remains of that spirit, which formerly withheld their names from the list of paupers” (CWPR, 21 October 1809, 578).

145 Common Council debate, The Times, 27 September 1809. See, similarly, letter to the editor from “A Firm Whig,” Independent Whig, 8 October 1809, 1182.

146 Letter to the editor from “A Supporter of the Banners of Loyalty,” Morning Post, 20 October 1809; letter to the editor from “I. B.,” Morning Post, 24 October 1809. Consider, too, Fitzgerald's “Ode for the Royal Jubilee”: “If there's a Traitor in the land, / Who will not raise for George his hand, / Whose heart malignant grieves to see / All England rise in Jubilee! / Let the detested Monster find / Some cavern blacker than his mind! / There let him waste his life away, / Nor with his presence blast this Day” (criticized in CWPR, 4 November 1809, 647–48).

147 The letter is from “D—— R——wl——d” of Gray's Inn Place. Daniel Rowland would later decamp to Sussex to live the life of an antiquary. On Rowland, see Norgate, G. Le G. (revised by G. Martin Murphy), “Daniel Rowland,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Matthew, H. C. G. and Harrison, Brian (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

148 Letter to the editor from “D—— R——wl——d,” CWPR, 4 November 1809, 654–56.

149 See, e.g., Colley, “Apotheosis,” 122; Harrison, Mark, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge, 1988), 235Google Scholar.

150 See CWPR, 28 October 1809, 640; CWPR, 14 October 1809, 515. The naval officer's wife who had hailed the Jubilee as the spontaneous “act of millions” denied that the day had been marked by “compulsory acclamations extorted from a joyless populace by the stern mandate of authority, solicitous to obtain the show of a popularity which it did not in reality possess”—if not a case of protesting too much, then certainly one of needlessly doing one's political antagonists’ spadework for them: “A Lady,” Account of the Celebration, xii.

151 See Herzog, Poisoning the Minds, 39.

152 See Colley, “Apotheosis,” 122–24; and Semmel, Napoleon and the British, 145–46.

153 See Cookson, J. E., The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

154 “A New Song on the Jubilee,” Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads online database, Harding B 16(169b).

155 Letter to the editor from “Publicola,” Morning Post, 17 October 1809; see also letter to the editor from “Another Layman,” The Times, 25 October 1809.

156 Mr. Redhead Yorke's Weekly Political Review, 14 October 1809, 241; letter to the editor from “Mentor,” Mr. Redhead Yorke's Weekly Political Review, 23 September 1809, 201.

157 Chase, Malcolm, “From Millennium to Anniversary: The Concept of Jubilee in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 129 (November 1990): 132–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

158 Quoted by Spence, Thomas, The Rights of Man Exhibited in a Lecture Read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle (London, 1793)Google Scholar; quoted, in turn, by Chase, “From Millennium,” 135.

159 The Times, 26 October 1809; Biggs to Vansittart, BL, Add MS 31234, fol. 11 (25 September [1812]).

160 See CWPR, 18 November 1809, 746.

161 Hogg, Cervantes [Eaton Stannard Barrett], The Setting Sun; or, Devil amongst the Placemen, 3 vols. (London, 1809), 3:136Google Scholar.

162 Gentleman's Magazine 79 (1809): 902Google Scholar.

163 See Prochaska, Royal Bounty, 133–34, 208–9, on later Jubilees.

164 Biggs to Vansittart, BL, Add MS 31234, fols. 2–3 (15 September [1812]).

165 European Magazine 56 (July 1809): 71. Nor is charity mentioned in the similar letters printed in the Leeds Mercury, 29 July 1809, or the Morning Chronicle, 14 October 1809. The letter in which Biggs introduced herself to Vansittart did claim to have recommended charities to certain (unspecified) “sober” places: BL, Add MS 31234, fol. 2 (15 September [1812]).