By Terry Liddle
Jeremiah Joyce, Radical, Dissenter and Writer; John lssitt. Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2006. 202pp. Hardback. ISBN 0 7546 3800 9. £55.00
Frightened by revolutionary events in France, the Hanoverian state moved to counter any threat from British Radicals. An obvious target was Thomas Paine. But having been elected as a deputy to the French National Convention he departed for France before the authorities could catch up with him. It was rumoured that he had been warned by the poet and artist William Blake. One who they did catch up with was Jeremiah Joyce who was arrested in May, 1794, detained in the Tower of London and charged with “treasonable practices”. At best he faced transportation to Botany Bay, at worst the gallows.
Like Paine, Joyce came from the artisan class, his father being a master wool comber. He was born in Cheshunt, a centre of religious dissent . He was apprenticed to the highly skilled trade of glass painting and moved to London. Joyce’s radical politics were fuelled during his time as an apprentice, which on completing at the age of twenty-one he became a freeman of the City of London. In his spare time he was an apprentice minister. In 1783 he became a Unitarian. That year Joseph Priestley had published History of Early Opinions concerning Jesus Christ which advocated Unitarianism as the true theology. Unitarianism had some support amongst tradesmen. and shopkeepers but was too cold and too polite to appeal to the urban or rural poor.
In 1786 Joyce went to Hackney College, Priestley being a tutor there and William Godwin and William Hazlitt were students. Despite a bursary and money received on his father’s death, Joyce had to work at cataloguing books in the College library. The College offered a better quality of education than that offered by the universities. The course for students of divinity lasted five years but Joyce left after three and a lie and did not become a minister but became instead the tutor to the son of Lord Stanhope, a radical aristocrat and brother-in-law of the Prime Minister William Pitt. It was 1789, the year of the French Revolution.
Stanhope, who called himself “citizen”, acted as a conduit for communications between the French revolutionaries such as Paine’s friend de Condorcet; they shared a fondness for mathematics, and English Radicals. Joyce joined three Radical societies.
The Revolution Society was formed to celebrate the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 when James II was replaced by William of Orange. They met on November 4, William’s birthday. Joyce and his elder brother Joshua were proposed as members in 1790. In 1788 it declared that “all civil and political authority is derived from the people” and “the abuse of power justifies resistance”.
The Unitarian Society was a theological body which advocated freedom of religion and kept its political agenda largely concealed. A leading Unitarian was Joseph Priestly, a philosopher and scientist nicknamed Old Phostogen. In 1791 Birmingham, where he lived and worked, was wracked by three days of rioting by a drunken, reactionary Church and King mob. Priestley’s library and laboratory were destroyed and a Unitarian meeting house burned down. Like Paine, Priestley was elected to the French National Convention but declined as he was emigrating to the United States.
In February 1794 Joyce preached a sermon at the Essex Street Unitarian Chapel. He described the Scottish Radicals who had been convicted and transported to Australia as “some who are already suffering for their attachment to principles which they believed would tend to the happiness of the world”. It became his first published work, issued when he was behind bars.
In 1792 he had joined the Society for Constitutional Information, becoming heavily involved in the distribution of Radical literature and with his brother distributed 500 copies of Paine’s Letter to Mr Secretary Dundas. The Society distributed 200,000 copies of Rights of Man. The literate population at the time was 4 million. Joyce became the secretary of a joint committee between the Society for Constitutional Information and the London Corresponding Society. He wrote a letter to the Society of the Friends of the People seeking their aid in organising a convention “for the purpose of obtaining… a full and equal representation”. Joyce was a steward at a dinner of the Corresponding Society when the band struck up the French revolutionary songs Ca Ira and The Marseillaise.
On May 12, 1794 the secretaries of the Society for Constitutional Information and the Corresponding Society were arrested. Joyce was arrested on May 14 at Lord Stanhope’s home. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Among those who came to see the prisoners exercise was a young Robert Aspland who would later edit the Monthly Repository to which Joyce would contribute. In the 19th century, Aspland’s son Robert Aspland Cooper became a leading secularist and republican in Norwich. He stood as a Republican candidate in local elections.
Joyce was removed from the Tower to Newgate. From there he was taken to the Old Bailey. When asked “How will you be tried?”, he answered “By God and my country”, that is, he opted for a jury trial. While held in Newgate, Joyce published An Account of the Author’s Arrest for Treasonable Practices. The print run of 1,000 copies sold out in a few days.
The lawyer Thomas Erskine conducted a defence campaign for the defendants. The government’s case, exposed as contrived and badly directed, collapsed. Joyce was brought to the bar on December 1. The Attorney General announced that he did not propose to proceed and Joyce was acquitted. He returned to Stanhope’s home in Chevening, near Sevenoaks in Kent for a celebration to which 400 people had been invited. The event went on all night. A public celebratory dinner of 1300 was held in the Crown and Anchor tavern in The Strand.
Shaken by his experience Joyce decided to present a lower political profile and devoted himself to writing on such scientific matters as the microscope and the telescope. However, he continued to support the Scottish Radicals who had been transported to Australia. They had organised a convention of reform societies at which delegates from the United Irishmen were present and recommended Paine’s writings. Three of them were accused of plotting to murder the captain of their transport ship the Surprize. Joyce organised, edited and introduced a pamphlet The Narrative of the Sufferings of T.F. Palmer and W. Skirving during a Voyage to New South Wales, 1794, on board the Surprize Transport. Palmer was minister to a Unitarian congregation in Dundee, the evidence against being a pamphlet he had produced on Paine’s ideas for the Dundee Friends of Liberty. Joyce added Stanhope’s protest against the convictions in the House of Lords in an address to those awaiting transportation from the Society for Constitutional Information. Also including an extract from Skirving’s log recording the flogging of two girls to force them to confess taking part in the conspiracy. To publish such material in England at war with France and where Pitt’s government was taking repressive action against Radicals was a dangerous occupation. The French sent a warship to rescue the prisoner but the transport managed to escape. Palmer served his seven years and died on the way home. Skirving became a farmer and died on his farm.
Joyce married Elizabeth Harding. They had six children. He left Stanhope’s employment in 1799 and moved to Camden becoming a friend of William Godwin the author of Political Justice. Godwin had abandoned Christianity and become an avowed atheist. From 1814 to 1815 he taught mathematics at Aspland’s Unitarian Academy and secured a ministry at the Rosslyn Hill Chapel. He died in 1816 and was buried in Cheshunt churchyard. Robert Aspland wrote a substantial memoir in the Monthly Repository that Joyce “displayed his earnestness chiefly when exposing the misrepresentations of sophists and the calumnies of bigots. He was tolerant of all but baseness and hypocrisy.”
John lssitt is to be praised for rescuing from undeserved obscurity one of Britain’s lesser Radicals. But one cannot but wonder how many more rest uneasily in its dark shadows.