Odd this day
(* Yes, a few days late. I didn’t write it in time…)
Critic, editor, essayist, journalist, and poet Leigh Hunt libels the Prince Regent by calling him ‘corpulent’ — or, at least, he and his brother publish an article which later sees them convicted of libel, despite the fact that, in order to be a libel, what is printed has to be untrue.
Leigh Hunt and his brother John had started their weekly Sunday newspaper The Examiner four years earlier, declaring that they would have no adverts in it “lest” (in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) “they should compromise the paper’s independence”. This was important to them, because — in the age of rotten boroughs — they wanted to campaign for parliamentary reform, and against corruption. They were also in favour of Irish independence and Catholic emancipation aroused hostility, so the first four years of the paper’s life had seen them prosecuted three times at the behest of the government.
In September 1810, for example, an article entitled ‘One thousand lashes!!’ about flogging in the military, landed them in court. Then, in March 1812, the Morning Post published a powerful emetic in the form of an encomium to the Prince Regent:
You are the glory of the People — You are the Protector of the Arts — You are the Maecenas [a Roman patron of the arts] of the Age — Wherever you appear, you conquer all hearts wipe away tears, excite desire and love, and win beauty towards you — You breathe eloquence — You inspire the Graces — You are an Adonis in Loveliness! [continues for some time]
Hunt understandably found this revolting, and wrote:
What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine …that this Maecenas of the Age patronized not a single deserving writer! … That this Conquerer of Hearts was the disappointer of hopes! That this Exciter of Desire — this Adonis in loveliness, was a corpulent man of fifty! — In short, this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true, and immortal PRINCE, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps [women of dubious reputation], a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity!
To be fair to the authorities, Hunt was (according to Edmund Blunden in 1930’s Leigh Hunt — A Biography) cheerfully telling people at a party before the thing had even been printed that
No one can accuse me of not writing a libel. Everything is a libel, as the law is now declared, and our security lies only in their shame.
…but people had been pointing out the Regent’s unloveliness for decades by this point. James Gillray’s A Voluptuary under the horrors of digestion was to celebrate its 20th birthday that July.
It was clearly an attempt to silence the Hunts. The wheels of legal process churned about as fast then as they do now, though, and the brothers were finally sentenced (to substantial fines and two years in prison each) on 3 February 1813. Leigh’s gaoler’s first words to him were, apparently
Mister, I’d ha’ given a matter of a hundred pounds that you had not come to this place — a hundred pounds!
…and he was soon established with his family in two rooms furnished with “a pianoforte, a lute, and busts of the great poets, with bookcases in which Chaucer, Spenser, Milton and Dryden were seldom left to rest”. He received visitors — including Charles and Mary Lamb, William Hazlitt, novelist Maria Edgeworth, philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and Lord Byron — and received “baskets of fruit and vegetables and new-laid eggs” from supporters.
Not only that, but he kept editing The Examiner from behind bars. In the words of Edmund Blunden again:
…it is astonishing that a political prisoner at such a time could edit his journal every week, but it is true … and at the year’s close the circulation … was as regular as ever.
All in all, Blunden wrote, “The shutting up of the two Hunts was a gift to Liberal opinion”, with poems published in support of him. By this time, too, one of the satires Hunt had printed — in which Charles Lamb had suggested that the Regent should be known as “the Prince of Whales” — had prompted a Cruickshank caricature.
The Hunts were both released on 2 February 1815. (John had enjoyed an “airy and well furnished room” at his prison, where the governor “was friendly, and enabled him to walk in his garden two hours a day.) They continued to print The Examiner, and Leigh, especially, went on to be a man of letters for several decades.
And he is still remembered, at least among those of a certain age. In 1838, he wrote a poem, Abou Ben Adhem, which gave rise in 1980 to one of the most gloriously idiotic sketches in British comedy history.
(I have read that this sketch appeared after Plaid Cymru said that a proportion of TV shows should be in Welsh, and that Rowan Atkinson is doing cod Welsh, rather than simple made-up nonsense, but I have not been able to verify this.)
