page_title: John Shebbeare
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: John Shebbeare / Life
context_page_description: John Shebbeare was a British Tory political satirist.
context_section_description: He was the eldest son of an attorney and corn-factor of Bideford, Devonshire. A hundred and a village in Devon, where the family had owned land, bear their name. Shebbeare was educated at the free school, Exeter, under Zachariah Mudge, and there, it is said, "gave evidence of his future eminence in misanthropy and literature." In his sixteenth year he was apprenticed to a surgeon, and afterwards set up for himself. Having, however, lampooned both his master and the members of the Exeter corporation, he in 1736 removed to Bristol, where in 1750 he was listed in land tax records as being at 10, Guinea Street, a house which is extant. He entered into partnership with a chemist in the city. In 1740 he published A new Analysis of the Bristol Waters; together with the Cause of Diabetes and Hectic, and their Cure, as it results from those Waters, which was reissued in 1760. The Shebbeare family had left Guinea Street by 1751.
  In 1752 he went to Paris, where he claimed to have obtained a medical degree, and to have been elected member of the Academy of Sciences. But he found his pen more remunerative than his practice. Settling in London, he began his career as a political writer in 1754, with The Marriage Act, a novel, dedicated to John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford, one of the chief opponents of Lord Hardwicke's
  reform. The author was imprisoned for his reflections on the legislature, but his book was reissued in 1755 as Matrimony, and reappeared in 1766. Shebbeare followed up his success in 1756 by an attack on the Duke of Newcastle in the form of Letters on the English Nation, by Batista Angeloni, a Jesuit resident in London, of which he professed to be the translator only. This political satire, modelled on Bolingbroke's writings against Robert Walpole, alone entitled Shebbeare (in the opinion of Boswell) to a respectable name in literature. Meanwhile, he attacked the ministry directly in the Monitor and the Con-test, as well as in a series of outspoken pamphlets entitled Letters to the People of England, having, it was said, determined to write himself into a post or into the pillory.
   At the close of 1757, after Pitt's dismissal, Shebbeare issued his sixth letter, "in which is shown that the present grandeur of France and calamities of this nation are owing to the influence of Hanover on the councils of England." On 12 January 1758 a general warrant was issued against the author, printer, and publisher. On 23 January all copies of a seventh Letter were seized and suppressed. On 17 June Shebbeare was tried for libel on an information laid against him by the attorney-general, Pratt, who on this occasion admitted the right of the jury to judge of the law. During the trial, as Walpole laments, Mansfield laid it down that satires on dead kings were punishable. In summing up he declared that the Letter nearly approached high treason. On 28 Nov. Shebbeare was sentenced to a £5 fine and three years' imprisonment in King's Bench Prison, as well as having to pay a bond of £500 and find two £250 sureties for good behaviour for seven years on his release. He was also to stand in the pillory at Charing Cross on 5 December. Owing to the friendship of Arthur Beardmore, the under-sheriff, he was allowed to stand upright between the upper and lower boards of the pillory, while an Irish chairman held an umbrella over his head. At the end of an hour he retired amidst the cheers of the crowd, who had been invited by printed bills to come and see 'the British champion.' Beardmore was afterwards punished for his conduct. An anonymous squib appeared under the title Memoirs of the Pillory; being a consolatory Epistle to Dr. Shebbeare. While in prison Shebbeare received subscriptions for a history of England, and actually composed one volume, which was not published. When attacked on the subject in a letter in the Public Advertiser of 10 Aug. 1774 he excused himself chiefly on the ground of debts incurred in consequence of a lawsuit against Francis Gwyn, who had been concerned with him in the publication of an edition of Clarendon's History of the
caption: The Polling, The Humours of an Election series, 1755
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