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and advertising taxes imposed on printers increased costs but did
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not necessarily curtail criticism.20 Attorney General Thurlow and Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn understood that an allegation of seditious libel against The Crisis or any other publication had to involve more than simple defamation of a public official. Prosecutors needed to prove malicious intent, with a further intention to incite public unrest. Convincing jurors that they had made their case would be their most difficult task, particularly since they were responding to a parliamentary directive rather than proceeding on the basis of a grand jury indictment. Moreover, there was increasing pressure for judges to allow jurors in libel trials to determine questions of law (whether a libel actually occurred) as well as matters of fact (whether the accused wrote or printed the text in question).21
Deciding not to risk overshooting the mark, Thurlow and Wedderburn made no mention of treason in their formal charge against The Crisis, despite the complaint by the Lords and the Commons that it had committed
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a “treasonable Libel.” And even though “Printed and published for the Authors, by T. W. Shaw” appeared on every issue of The Crisis, from the first through the last, Shaw was not prosecuted. Instead, another London printer, Samuel Axtell, was taken to court. It is indeed possible that more than one printer was involved and that the only witness the prosecution could muster agreed to testify against Axtell, with no mention of Shaw.22 The real reasons remain elusive. London printers had become adept at keeping their presses from prying eyes. Listing the place of publication could be a ruse or even an act of hiding in plain sight, with journeymen doing the actual work and master printers not in the shop. Experience taught prosecutors that going after any of them legally could prove to be more trouble than it was worth. Axtell, for his part, was tried in absentia in June 1775, Axtell apparently choosing not to attend his own trial. Found guilty of being a “wicked[,] seditious[,] malicious and ill-disposed person” who “unlawfully[,] wickedly[,]” and “maliciously” maligned both crown and Parliament, the Court of King’s Bench sentenced him to ninety days in jail.23
The Crisis continued to be published each week, trial regardless—as indeed had happened with other writers or printers charged with seditious libel over the past decade. Like them, the men funding The Crisis reaffirmed their commitment to a defense of English liberties. They repeated their warnings about how those liberties were in jeopardy, but they made no mention of Axtell’s trial in their weekly. Perhaps
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they foresaw that the days of book-burnings and prosecutions were ending, though English law did not formally abandon the charge of seditious libel until 2009. Interestingly enough, when Parliament that year finally discontinued seditious libel as the basis for a criminal prosecution, it tied itself to notions of press liberty and to deeper notions of freedom that The Crisis had relied on in its defense to the public over two centuries before.24
We now know slightly more than Attorney General Thurlow did about authorship of The Crisis, but only because three names appeared on essays published after Axtell’s prosecution: William Stewardson, Philip Thicknesse and, most intriguingly, Thomas Shaw, the printer who was identified at the end of every issue. Stewardson, apparently a Southwark sailmaker by trade, had his name attached to issue No. 67. The tone of this piece was not as harsh as many of the others that bracketed it. Stew-ardson, if he was indeed the author, condemned bad policies and foolish ministers, but he was not so caustic in his criticism of the king. This was most likely the same Stewardson who also took an excursion into pamphlet writing on his own.25
Philip Thicknesse, identified as the author of No. 30, was one of the more colorful characters of his age. Thicknesse comes down to us as
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a quarrelsome, eccentric gadfly who made friends and enemies with equal ease. As a youth he sought adventure abroad, first in Georgia, then in Jamaica. He bought a commission in the Royal Marines after returning to England, retired to Bath after a middling military career, and then moved to a cottage outside of town, still a contentious contrarian.26 An inheritance case that he lost on appeal to the House of Lords was the focus of issue No. 30, which stands as the great exception to an otherwise single-minded obsession with Britain, America, the empire, and a king failing to do his duty. Why, exactly, The Crisis took up Thicknesse’s cause remains a mystery, like so much else about the weekly and the people who started it and kept it going.27
Shaw signed his name as the author of one piece, and to part of a second, phrased as if he were responding to another author who had written for the weekly. Unlike Thicknesse, Shaw kept the focus on larger concerns—on the issues that The Crisis had made its raison d’être.28 That Shaw could affix his own name to the essay, roughly a month after Axtell’s conviction, suggests that he did not fear prosecution, even if his tone was as harsh and his condemnations as sweeping as anything printed in earlier numbers. In the second essay he reaffirmed his determination “to support FREEDOM of the Press” and defend the “CHARTERED
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RIGHTS and CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTIES of the BRAVE Americans” as well as the rights of Englishmen at home.29
Shaw’s first essay used the same literary tactics as others in the series, ranging through the past to find examples that could be used for the present. Having already printed numerous pieces that decried the corruption and fall of republican Rome, Shaw railed against “Neronian Cruelty,” knowing that previous issues had set the stage for his historical allusion. Likewise, he could warn that conspiracies were afoot to destroy English and American liberties, and simply mention the king and his ministers without having to explain which particular ministerial or parliamentary actions he had in mind; those points too had already been raised. He placed God and Magna Carta on the side of good, arrayed against pensioners and placemen who personified the bad; he juxtaposed liberty and progress against slavery and ruin. These were all familiar tropes, words evoking symbols, symbols incarnated in the political reality he constructed for his readers. Although Shaw reminded those readers of their duty to defend their rights, when he called for Englishmen to rise up and fight oppression he did not mean literally, as the colonists were doing. Rather, he expected them to be able to make subtle distinctions, to know what separated Britons from Americans as well as what joined them in common cause.
The Crisis is notable for the assumptions that Thomas Shaw and the other men behind it had about the intellectual world of their readers.30 They played off Britons’ deepest fears, capitalizing on a state of mind that they did not create but sought to reinforce. Conspiracy theory was as popular then as ever; not surprisingly, conspiracies loomed large in the Anglo-American political world described by The Crisis. Conspiracy against American rights marked imperial policy; conspiracy
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against the rights of Englishmen, in England itself, would come next, readers were warned. The weekly reserved its sharpest, harshest comments for those most responsible for these dark designs: Lord North, “engendered in the womb of hell,”31 who headed a depraved ministry; the Earl of Bute, long out of power but still active behind the scenes, corrupting others with his baneful influence;32 Lord Chancellor Apsley and Chief Justice Mansfield, who twisted the law to serve unjust ends; secretary of state for American affairs Lord George Germain and his predecessor, the Earl of Dartmouth, who endorsed and passed along the nefarious policies that brutalized Americans; General Thomas Gage, who in his dual role as army commander in North America and governor of Massachusetts, set loose the troops to murder and plunder; Samuel Johnson and John Wesley, mercenaries whose pens were for hire, defending the indefensible actions of “A Bloody Court, A Bloody Ministry, And A Bloody Parliament.”33
Unlike other newspaper essays and pamphlets that attacked George III obliquely