William Hamilton Reid
[1] He was introduced to the Esto Perpetua Whig political writers' club, founded in 1785, "almost certainly," according to Iain McCalman, by George Ellis.
[18][19] The Magazine was hostile to deists, Latitudinarians, Methodists and Unitarians, and its tone was set from the first issue in 1801 by the High Church views of William Stevens.
[17] In the September 1806 issue of the Repository, an article signed "W. H. R." commented favourably on the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire, and the prospects for universal toleration.
[30] The work played on fears that the debating societies were breeding grounds for subversion and plotting, and that the "clubbists" who frequented them were potential revolutionaries.
[34] Adopting Edmund Burke's doctrine of the negative effects of association, Reid attributed the irreligion and subversion expressed in debating clubs to the thought of William Godwin, Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.
[36][37] One consequence of Reid's work as an informer, at the Green Dragon in Cripplegate, was that he was able to link Bannister Truelock, a millenarian Methodist preacher in the LCS, to James Hadfield, who attempted in 1800 to assassinate the King.
[43][44] E. P. Thompson considered accurate at least Reid's description of this phase of the LCS, during which Francis Place was planning the publication of a cheap edition of The Age of Reason.
Robert Watson (c.1746–1838), a close associate of Lord George Gordon, had been excluded from membership, together with hatter Richard Hodgson for supporting the views of Paine.
[50] Reid associated Priestley's rational dissent with the opinions of David Williams, supporter of the Octagon Chapel liturgy and "unconditional philosophical liberty".
[51][52] He tended to blur distinctions between reformers, unbelievers, deists and millenarians, all of whom were accorded a hearing in the Unitarian tradition of unbounded debate.
3. c. 79), he noted that Middlesex magistrates had been cracking down on meetings of followers of Priestley, as deist-radical, and as so many attempts by the "infidel illuminati" to establish a "place of public instruction".
[58] Commentary in John Brewster's Secular Essay of 1802 clarifies that street preachers to whom Reid objected, of Spa Fields and Islington, included Calvinistic Methodists, many of them young men, associated with Lady Anne Agnes Erskine's connexion.
[64] On his own account, Reid belonged in the group of poets including Thomas Chatterton, Robert Burns, Charlotte Smith and Ann Yearsley.
It draws on arguments found in Isaac La Peyrère, Thomas Beverley (died 1702) and Francis Lee; but also in Priestley's Letters to the Jews (1794).
He went on to write controversially against Samuel Horsley, invoking older ideas of Gilbert Burnet, Pierre Jurieu and Joseph Mede, and the Jewish writers Isaac Abravanel and David Levi.
[77] Walks Through London (1817), published under the name David Hughson, which has been attributed to Reid, and to his wife, was by Edward Pugh (died 1813), according to Samuel Halkett and John Laing.
