9th March 1763. Victory for Free Speech.

‘When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman’? asked John Ball a 14thc radical priest.

The 18th century was to spawn three men who by their championing of the common man and free speech were to incur the wrath of the authorities. It resulted in imprisonment, charges of Libel, Treason and numerous escapes to America and France.

Two of these were Thomas Paine and John Wilkes, the third was William Cobbett born in Farnham, Hampshire Today in 1763.(1)

John Wilkes founded the  weekly North Briton but was arrested for Libel in 1763 when he accused the government of lying in the King’s speech. Later released he was expelled from the House of Commons and outlawed whilst in Paris.

Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

In 1791-2 Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ supported the French Revolution against Burke’s ‘Reflections on the ‘Revolution in France’, resulted in a charge of Treason causing him to flee to France.

Cobbett in 1792 was also forced to flee returning in 1800. By 1802 his Political Register was the first to publish a regular record of the proceedings in the House of Commons.

His Register published for over thirty years at over a shilling was in 1816 to be reprinted weekly at 2d, nick- named the ‘2d Trash’.

An obstacle to the growth in independent newspapers was the ban on reporting of Parliament and the Stamp Duty.(2)

Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates ran for nine years until taken over in 1810 by Luke Hansard, Printer to the House of Commons.

Cobbett, no Republican, was primarily a political writer, often in trouble with the Libel Laws being found guilty of Treasonable Libel in 1810 after objecting to the flogging of the Ely Local Militia, resulting in two years in Newgate Prison.

Title page January 19th 1828. British Library.

In 1817 forced to flee to America again, returning in 1819, Cobbett (1763-1835) began his rural tours between 1822 and 1826 describing the dire conditions of the rural poor at a time when Britain was adjusting to new conditions after the Napoleonic War, threatened by revolution and struggling to adjust to industrialisation all of which was brought home to the doors of Westminster.

The result of his journeys was his Rural Rides in 1830, giving us a last look at England as a truly rural land.

In 1831 he was prosecuted for encouraging a riot of agricultural labourers, but escaped conviction. In March 1833 a year after the Great Reform Act, he was elected to Parliament for Oldham.

Cobbett became in the words of Hazlitt ‘a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country’ having become a champion of parliamentary reform.

Cobbett followed by John Gully and John Pease after being elected to Parliament. Sketch by John Doyle

(1) Excise officer Thomas Paine was to spend his early years in America supporting the cause of Independence.

(2) It was from the assumption that papers had a right to publish Parliamentary debates, that the Times came into being in 1785.

References:

wikipedia.org.john_cobbett/Pic.

wikipedia.org.political_register/Pic.

14th April 1840. Victory for Free Comment.

Today in 1840 the Royal Assent was granted to the Parliamentary Papers Act reversing the Act of the previous year.(1)

It resulted from the 1839 Stockdale v Hansard case where it was held that The House of Commons enjoyed no privilege as to publications under its authority beyond that held by MPs, and that this did not extend to papers issued outside to the general public.

The Parliament of the UK made an unusual challenge after the 1839 Act concerning the Law of Parliamentary Privilege when it was judged that: ‘Parliamentary privilege does not cloak parliamentary publication with any form of protection’. The next year the judgement was reversed.

The court cases stemmed back to the Prison Act 1835 which introduced the first National Prison System in the UK along with inspectors, one of whom was Whitworth Russell.

It was at Newgate Prison that Russell and William Crawford discovered a well-thumbed edition of John Roberton’s book on Diseases of the Generative System (1811), edited by Thomas Little, the pseudonym of pornographic publisher, John Joseph Stockwell, which had attracted distaste on its publication. for its explicit material.

Bill by Stockdale for the works of Roberton.

In 1836 the Parliamentary Reporter, Hansard, printed by order of the Commons, a report prepared by the Inspector of Prisons, which said the book on anatomy in Newgate Library was ‘indecent and obscene’.

The comments were widely reported which spurred Stockwell to action after the Aldermen of City of London, regarded the book as ‘scientific’, despite the Inspectors fulminations, and sued Hansard in 1837.(2)

However paradoxically Lord Denman dismissed the defence of Parliamentary Privilege, but the Jury found for Hansard [and its comments]. Stockdale was understandably miffed.

He decided to sue for libel again in 1839, this time Hansard was ordered to plead that they acted under Parliamentary Privilege. The Court however held that this Privilege only protected papers printed by order of the House for use of its own Members, but that this protection did not extend to papers made available to the public.(3)

The 1840 Act reversed this decision, as it was said that ‘parliamentary freedom of speech would be of little value if what is said by its Members, Ministers and witnesses, could not be freely commented outside. There is an important public interest in the public knowing what is being debated and done in parliament’.(4)

Result: Parliament and Hansard won 1-0 v Stockwell and Courts. A victory for Democracy and free speech.

(1) 1840 (3&4 vict) c9.

(2) Before Queen’s Bench. J.J Stockwell v Hansard (listed as 4 members of the Hansard Family).

(3) The affair was complicated by the fact that in 1835 John Hume MP had campaigned to make better use of Papers to improve freedom of information by publishing for the public.

(4) The Commons had always maintained that no court of law was superior to parliament. Each House [including the Lords], was the sole judge on its privileges, which couldn’t be questioned in any court.

Ref; Common Law (Lake v King 1667 1 Saunders 131.

Ref: wikipedia.org/stockwell _v_ hansard_ 1839.

Ref: Stockwell, E. 1990. Background to Parliamentary Privileges Act 1840.

Ref: McGrath,R. 2002 Manchester University Press Ch 2.

Ref: wikipedia.org/parliamentary_privilege_act_1840.

Ref: publications.parliament.uk.