John Reeves (activist)

John Reeves (20 November 1752 – 7 August 1829) was a legal historian, civil servant, British magistrate, conservative activist, and the first Chief Justice of Newfoundland.

In 1792 he founded the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, for the purpose suppressing the "seditious publications" authored by British supporters of the French Revolution—most famously, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man.

Reeves campaigned against Jacobinism by founding at the Crown and Anchor tavern on 20 November 1792 the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers.

[6] The leading opposition Whig Charles James Fox denounced the Association's publications and claimed that had they been printed earlier in the century they would have been prosecuted as treasonable Jacobite tracts due to their advocacy of the divine right of kings.

[10] William Cobbett claimed in 1830 that Reeves had told him that he hated the Pitt administration and its principles and that bitter experience had taught him that one must either kiss or kick the government's arse.

[10] In 1795 Reeves published anonymously the first of his Thoughts on the English Government, addressed to the quiet good sense of the People of England in a series of Letters.

The Kingly Government may go on, in all its functions, without Lords or Commons...[12]In 1795 a group of Whigs, Fox among them, persuaded the Attorney General to prosecute Reeves for "libel on the British Constitution" due to his tree metaphor.

However, he added that Reeves was still a person of "considerable Abilities" whose argument in the Thoughts, "with a commonly fair allowance, is perfectly true" and was "neither more nor less than the Law of the Land".