John Baxter (political reformer)

[2] Before his involvement with the London Corresponding Society, he was thrown out of a vestry meeting in Shoreditch and assaulted for doubting "the existence of persons who were Levellers, or who wished to convert England into a Republic.

[6] In November 1793 he was responsible for drawing up addresses to 'the friends of peace and parliamentary reform' and to 'His Majesty' calling for an end to the war against France, together with Thomas Hardy, the Secretary.

One of the prosecution witnesses in the trial of Thomas Hardy claimed that Baxter had said 'there is not a man in the Society who believes that a Parliamentary Reform is all we want; and without having recourse to the sanguinary measures of the French Revolution, may be brought about in a few hours.

[11] Williams suggests that the new group was ‘probably more anarchist’ than the remainder of the London Corresponding Society, but Goodwin questions this arguing that Baxter took ‘a realistic rather than a revolutionary attitude.’[12] In November 1795, Baxter gave and later published a lecture entitled Resistance to oppression, the constitutional right of Britons asserted, where he ascribed much of the current distress among the poor to the ‘Pride and Luxury of the Great’, but made it clear that he was not advocating 'the opposition of Force to Force'.

[13] In February 1796 Baxter circulated proposals for A new and impartial history of England written by him and ‘assisted by several gentlemen, distinguished friends to liberty and a Parliamentary reform’.

'We are the more convinced of the propriety and absolute necessity of such an undertaking at this time, because we have seen persons in authority making considerable incroachments on the liberties of the people, and under false or frivolous accusations shutting men up in prison, and attempting their lives, because they had virtue enough to oppose their arbitrary measures.

The remaining 17 numbers, covering the periods of the Whig supremacy, the American and French Revolutions were Baxter's and his collaborators' own work and brought the story up to date.