Stewart Kyd

Abandoning a design of entering the church, he settled in London, and was called to the bar from the Middle Temple.

He became a friend of Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke, whose political opinions he admired.

On 4 June he was again summoned before the council, and three days later was committed to the Tower on a charge of high treason, with Hardy, Tooke, and ten others.

On 25 October all the prisoners were brought up for trial before a special commission at the Old Bailey, but after the acquittal of Hardy, Tooke and John Thelwall, the attorney-general declined offering any evidence against Kyd, and he was discharged.

In June 1797 he defended Thomas Williams, a bookseller, who was indicted for blasphemy in publishing Tom Paine's The Age of Reason.