Gilbert Wakefield
In a celebrated state trial, he was imprisoned for a pamphlet critical of government policy of the French Revolutionary Wars; and died shortly after his release.
[4] George Hardinge, son of Nicholas, after Gilbert's death pointed out that the living of Kingston passed to George Wakefield in 1769, under an Act of Parliament specifying presentations to chapels of the parish, only because he had used his personal influence with his uncle Charles Pratt, 1st Baron Camden the Lord Chancellor, and Jeremiah Dyson.
[9] He went to Jesus College, Cambridge on a scholarship founded by Robert Marsden: the Master Lynford Caryl was from Nottinghamshire, and a friend of his father.
[1] William Bennet, senior tutor of Emmanuel College, became a long-term friend from this time, as Wakefield put it in 1799, "amidst all the differences of opinion".
[13] The situation of Gilbert's younger brother Thomas, then still an undergraduate at Jesus College but also ordained priest and a curate to his father at Kingston, was anomalous, at least in the view of George Hardinge.
[17] In the first edition of his autobiography, Gilbert was critical of Hardinge's legal moves to dislodge Thomas from this Richmond chapel, to which the presentation had been with his father (under Act of Parliament).
[22] From 1778, Wakefield began to question the scriptural foundation of the orthodox teaching of the Church of England; and he expressed political views by modifying the language in prayers he read in Liverpool against the American revolutionaries.
Wakefield at Warrington still attended services of the Church of England; and he hoped "time will mellow his dispositions, and lessen the high opinion he has of himself".
[29] Residing at Bramcote outside Nottingham, and then in Richmond, Surrey where his brother Thomas was at St Mary Magdalene's chapel, Wakefield found no more students.
[36] Wakefield's application was strengthened by a character reference from George Walker, minister at the High Pavement Chapel in Nottingham and a friend.
The final issue, in 1798, of the Anti-Jacobin contained a satirical poem "New Morality", calling on opposition newspapers, poets and radicals including John Thelwall, Priestley and Wakefield to "praise Lepaux", i.e. Louis Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux, a leader of the French Directory.
[40] William Burdon replied to a remark of Thomas James Mathias: Whenever I think of the name of Gilbert Wakefield, and look at the list of his works, (for I would not undertake to read them all), I feel alternate sorrow and indignation.
[41] Burdon wrote: To the name and character of Gilbert Wakefield, I am desirous to shew every possible respect, as a zealous, though sometimes an imprudent defender of the rights of human nature.
[45]The controversial pamphlet A Reply to some Parts of the Bishop of Landaff's Address (1798) saw both Wakefield and his publisher, Joseph Johnson, taken to court for seditious libel.
A work alluding to the concentration of poverty in the area centred on Hackney,[66] it was written in response to An Address to the People of Great Britain (1798), by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff.
Later in the year, Wakefield appeared before Lord Kenyon in the Court of King's Bench, conducting his own defence, with Sir John Scott.
In his memoirs Wakefield records that the work was laborious, particularly in the comparison of the Oriental versions with the Received Text; but was "much more profitable to me than all my other publications put together".
[1][71] Their daughter Anne, in poor health, went to stay with Peter Crompton and his wife at Eton House, on the edge of Liverpool, shortly before Gilbert was imprisoned.
[84] George, the eldest son, went to Dorchester Grammar school, under Henry John Richman who was on good terms with Wakefield.
